The Miracle Of The Gospel Series

We tend to take Christmas for granted. Those of us who have grown up in the church, we know the Christmas story from the Bible almost by heart. We can cite the passages from Luke about Jesus being born and laid in a manger. We know how the angels appeared to the shepherds while they were “keeping watch over their flock by night and made the announcement of the birth of Christ.

We know about the wise men seeking Him who was born King of the Jews from the book of Matthew. We know these stories and they have become romanticized. We quickly forget the whys and wherefores of all this happening. This sermon series will look at various aspects of the miracles associated with Christmas and today we will consider the biggest miracle of all, the gospel, the good news about salvation, the good news about Jesus Christ.

Our focal passage is a very familiar set of verses from the Gospel of John. I have preached from these verses before and most certainly, I will preach from these verse again.

John 3:14–18

Today, as we consider the Good News, the Gospel, we must remember there is no good news about salvation unless we have an understanding about the bad news. The bad news is quite simply, we all stand guilty before God. That is our nature:

Romans 3:10–12 as it is written, “THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; 11 THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD; 12 ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.”

(Paul quotes from Psalms 14 and 53) Paul concludes by saying that:

Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

We all have sinned, we have missed the mark, we all have offended an holy God. But right from the beginning, human kind has rebelled against a Holy God. Let’s go back to creation for a moment. Of everything God created, man and woman were the only creation that was made in His image:

Genesis 1:27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

And God blessed them and gave them dominion over all the earth. And God called this his last and final creation, on his final day of creation, "very good."

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good.

But what happen? Did God create a flaw in us? No He did not. God gave us the ability to choose. He gave us a free will. And we know the story, we know what happened. The fall of man. Man did not use his free will, his choices wisely. God had only one command in the Garden and both Adam and Eve disobeyed. The penalty for disobeying the command of God was death. And so it is to this day.

And that sin nature has been part of us ever since.

There was a point that God was sorry He made man:

Genesis 6:5–6 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.

Then God sent the flood, destroyed the entire earth but Noah and his family, 8 people. But the world-wide cataclysmic event of the flood failed to change man. At the end of the flood we see the same old man:

Genesis 8:21 The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.

As we have read through the Bible this year, I started growing weary of page after page in Kings and Chronicles, through Jeremiah and Ezekiel, all that doom and gloom warnings from God to His people. Many people see God of the OT as a God of wrath. What I see is a God of unbelievable patience. But many will say that people are basically good, but that is not what the Scripture tells us.

Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?

When we look at all the bad in the world and we see man in continued rebellion against God, we wonder at the audacity of people to say to God I can get to heaven on my own terms.

There are those who criticize Christianity for saying there is only one way to heaven. But when we consider the inherited sin nature of man, quoting the late R.C. Sproul we can say: