Registered Charity No: 92

Registered Charity No: 92

Is Christianity good news?

When speaking about Christianity and what it means it is important to clearly say at the outset that Christianity is good news.  This is important because all that we have to say about Christianity hinges on this fact.  Any form of Christianity that is not presented as good news is simply not Christianity. 

The Christian Church is a community of people who have heard this good news and are now echoing what they have heard.  This good news is that God loves the world.  Of course, such a statement does not even begin to describe what Christianity is, but it is foundational to Christianity that we begin with this message: that God is for us and not against us.

In which way does God love the world?  This is really what differentiates Christianity from other philosophies or religions and what makes it really radical.  The statement which the Christian church makes is that God has become a man.  This is the way in which God demonstrates His solidarity with us and how he reveals Himself to us.  In other words, when the Christian speaks about God he does not involve himself in abstract formulae but can point to Jesus Christ and say: this is my God.  We can know Him not because we have submitted to some rigorous discipline or some form of ritual or rite in order to reach Him, but we can know Him because He has come to us.

This of course is not all.  At the centre of the question: ‘How does God love the world?’ is the cross of Calvary.  The cross is the place where God made my cause His cause.  It is the place in which we can most clearly see that ‘God is with us’.  At the cross God bore the judgement for our rebellions.  The cross can only be understood as a place of judgement, indeed, as the place where God judged the world.  The wonder is that at the cross the Judge of the world is the one judged, the guiltless one is treated as guilty.  There at the cross God made my enemies His enemies and crushed them.

But all this happened two thousand years ago, you may ask.  What relevance has it got for me today?  How can this apply to my daily circumstances, my family, my work, the community I live in?  Again, the answer to this is that God is with us.  The good news of Christianity is that God became a man and that he dwells here and now with us through the presence of his Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus Christ to us as the One who has finally dealt with the sin of the world.  He also draws us together into a community of people called the church so that our restored relationships are with God and also with one another. 

The church is a community of believers, or more accurately the Community of the Holy Spirit.  It is a people who are in meaningful relationships with one another and who are indwelt by the Spirit of God.  As such, the church is not an inward-looking community but, like God, outward-looking, praying and seeking to see God’s will be done in the society in which we live.

For all these reasons Christianity is wonderful, good news.  It is wonderful to know that ultimately the world is not ‘Godless’, but that God is involved in all of our affairs, even and especially when we would prefer it otherwise.  This is the Christian message: that God has not left us to ourselves and that even ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’.

New Life Church Gibraltar

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