The Gospel
Text: 1 Corinthians 15:1–11
He is risen! He is risen indeed!
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour who has been raised from the dead, Jesus Christ. Today is the day we set aside to celebrate the fullness of the Gospel—that Christ died, was buried, and was raised for the sins of the world.
Today, we remember that we have received the Gospel, we stand in the Gospel, and we are being saved by the Gospel.
We received the Gospel
You are here today because, for whatever reason, you know that it is good to hear the message the Church proclaims on this day all around the world. You have already received the Gospel, the good news, in some way. The news that God forgives sin because of his Son’s death and resurrection is too good to only hear once. Christians gather every Sunday, but particularly on Easter Day, to hear that news again.
Paul writes to a church that he has already preached at before. These people have already heard the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection for the forgiveness of their sin. He says he wants to remind them of the gospel he preached to them, which they received (v. 1).
It’s one thing to hear the Gospel preached, but it’s another to receive it. To receive the Gospel means to first recognise your need for it, to know that you’d be nothing without it, and then to welcome it with gladness in your heart.
Paul delivers this reminder of the Gospel “as of first importance”, he says (v. 3). It’s a priority package. But the thing about priority packages is that they can’t just be left on your doorstep—you need to sign for it to be sure it’s been delivered. That’s how Australia Post know that you’ve actually received it.
Likewise with the Gospel: it hasn’t been received if its been preached but not listened to, understood, or engaged with. Receiving the Gospel requires your participation and attention. You know you’ve received the Gospel when you’ve signed off on it—when you can confidently say, “Yes, I believe. Yes, I have received it.”
Have you received the Gospel? Have you heard it preached and really understood it? Have you had it explained to you by a family member or friend? Have you been shown what life in the Gospel looked like and wanted it for yourself? If you can say, “Yes,” with confidence, thanks be to God! If you’re not so sure, maybe you are here today for that reason.
The Gospel is not something we find or discover—it is received, which means it is given. Paul himself received the Gospel because Jesus went out to meet him directly. He records six different occasions when Jesus appeared to people after his resurrection, and that’s not even including the women we heard about in John’s gospel. The Gospel, the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, came to them.
In the same way, Jesus has come to each of us one way or another—through the words of Scripture themselves, through Baptism, through the Lord’s Supper, through the words of forgiveness in the liturgy, or even through a conversation with someone.
Ultimately, for anyone that receives the Gospel, the certainty and seal of approval comes in Baptism. At that moment, Paul says that our sinful self is drowned and a new person is resurrected. At the font, the Gospel is done to us and we become people of the resurrection.
However you have received the Gospel, it is because Christ came to you.
We stand in the Gospel
Now that we have received the Gospel, we stand in it. The Gospel is not a one hit wonder, but a consistent presence in our lives. It forms the foundation for the way we live our lives. To stand in the Gospel is to live with the assurance of sins forgiven and the certainty of eternal life.
Without the Gospel to stand on, without that assurance of forgiveness or knowledge of the life to come, what happens?
If you weren’t brought up in a Christian household, didn’t attend a Christian school, or weren’t part of a church as a child, but only received the Gospel a bit later in life, you know what happens when you don’t have the Gospel to stand on. There is a reason Jesus is described as the cornerstone (Ps. 118:22), our rock and fortress (Ps. 62:2, 6), the anchor for the soul (Hb. 6:19). Remove Christ, remove the Gospel from your life, and you jeopardise the structural integrity of the building and leave yourself subject to the wind and the waves.
There are other things that can seem fairly steady and dependable that we can try to stand in instead. The world tells us to stand in our own understanding of the world and who we are in it. We can stand in important values like family, community, patriotism, democracy, whatever you like.
The thing is, in the end, any of those things or anything else we might think of to ground our life in, is man-made. To stand in anything we can think of ourselves is to stand in our own self which is broken, lost, and hopelessly sinful.
The good news is that this is precisely what Christ came to save us from. He came to save us from sin, death, and ourselves, so that we could instead stand in him and in the good news of his salvation.
We have received the Gospel and now we stand in it.
We are being saved by the Gospel
Paul doesn’t say that we were saved by the Gospel, or that we will be saved one day. Salvation is a continual process that the Holy Spirit is constantly working in us. We need constant saving from sin because we are constantly falling into it.
Jesus’ death and resurrection has given us access to forgiveness, life, and salvation. In that sense, the Gospel is a once-off. It’s also true that you received the Gospel for the first time at a particular point in your life—you now stand in the Gospel in a way that you couldn’t before that point of reception.
However, there is a problem. Just because we have received the forgiveness of sins and now stand in that forgiveness day-to-day, it doesn’t mean we stop needing it. We keep sinning, we keep coming up short, we keep falling away from the perfect life we are called to.
Jesus does not need to go through the events of Easter all over again every time we sin and need his forgiveness. That sacrifice was a once-off. But, we need to access that forgiveness again and again.
Likewise, your Baptism was a once-off—you don’t need to be re-baptised when you stuff up. But you do need to return to the promises made to you in your Baptism, ideally on a daily basis.
As God’s people who live after the events of Easter, we can’t claim to have it all together. We proclaim the message of forgiveness, but we still have work to do in living by it. We teach about the grace and mercy of God, but we could still be better at reflecting that. We have certainly received the Gospel, particularly as the baptised children of God, but we need help in standing in and living by that Gospel.
Today is the day we mark Jesus’ resurrection, but we gather in celebration of the resurrection of Jesus every Sunday, week in and week out. We receive the forgiveness earned for us on the cross and celebrate the new life we have through Jesus’ resurrection. We gather on a weekly basis to be saved by the Gospel.
It is because of God’s grace that we are what we are: his beloved children, forgiven and saved through the Gospel. Even Paul who, before he received the Gospel, was an active enemy of the church, could say the same.
“Yet not I,” we can say with Paul, “but the grace of God that was with me.”
In the name of the risen Christ. Amen.