The word “gospel” gets used in a lot of different conversations:

— Someone told me this week that one of their family members was in a “gospel music” group.

— You could say of a minister: “he’s a gospel preacher.”

— Or you might hear somebody swear: “That’s the ‘gospel truth!’”

So the word “gospel” can get thrown around a lot. But what really IS “the gospel”?

As many of you know, the word “gospel” literally means “good news.” 

Over the last months my mom & her husband have moved to a care center, and have been getting their previous house ready to sell. She called me the other day and said, “My house sold in 24 hours!” That was good news! You may have had some “good news” recently too.

But in the Bible we find the BEST “good news”: the gospel of salvation; that we don’t have to earn our way to heaven, but that Jesus paid for it, by dying for our sins on the cross. This morning I want us to look at I Corinthians 15:1-6, where the Apostle Paul tells us some important things about THE “good news,” the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

“Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you …”

I. The Gospel Proclaimed

“Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you”

As Paul shares about the gospel here in I Corinthians 15, the first thing he does is give a summary of what the gospel is, which he gives in verses 3 and following. He writes: “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the 3rd day according to the scriptures …”.

That is just a very basic summary of the gospel that saves us:
— it tells us WHAT happened: Jesus died on the cross; He was buried, and on the 3rd day, He rose again (then the next verses go on to relate how He appeared to Peter, and then to the 12 apostles, and even to 500 people at one time — as Paul said in another place, this didn’t happen in a corner! Jesus was seen alive by a LOT of people, who went to their graves testifying that they had seen Jesus alive).
— and it tells us WHY it happened: “Christ died for our sins.” Jesus didn’t do what He did as an “example” or as an exercise in morality; He did it because of “our sins.” He paid for our sins through His death on the cross.

God made us to know Him and be with Him in glory forever, but we separated ourselves from Him by our sin. Romans 3 tells us in detail how “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Had God not done something for us, we would all have been lost forever, separated from the glory of God. But the gospel says: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus died on the cross, just as I Corinthians 15:3 here tells us, “FOR OUR SINS.” The Greek word “for” (“huper”) here means, “because of”, “in the place of” our sins. Jesus died to pay for our sins, so that we could be made right before God.

And it says He did it “according to the scriptures” — in other words, what Jesus did had been prophesied in the Old Testament, like in the Book of Isaiah, chapter 53, where it predicts that the Messiah would die bearing the penalty for our sins: “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried … But He was pierced through for our transgressions, and crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging, we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall upon Him” (:4-6) The end of that chapter says “He Himself bore the sin of many.” (:12) So the Book of Isaiah, written 700 years before Jesus was ever born, makes it clear that the Messiah would pay for our sins, by dying in our place. 

Several years ago, a British tourist was visiting Florida on vacation, and while he was there, he decided to take skydiving lessons. When it came time for his first jump, he did it “in tandem” with his instructor, which is a pretty common procedure. A tandem jump is one in which you are linked together with another jumper. After they had gone through all the training,  they jumped — but their parachute did not open. They pulled the backup — but it did not open either! The instructor knew just what he had to do; it was all written in the manual. At the last minute, just before they hit the ground, the instructor rolled himself underneath that student, and he took the brunt of the force of the landing on his own body. The instructor was instantly killed — but the British tourist was saved, because the instructor took the force of the fall on himself.

What that instructor did that day in Florida is a great picture of what Jesus did for us. We deserved the punishment of God to come upon us for our sins, but just as it had been written long ago in the “manual” that God gave us: “the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall upon Him.” That’s just what Paul says the gospel is: “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” He bore “our sins in His body on the cross” (I Peter 2:24).

And to prove that He did indeed bear our sins in His body, after Jesus was buried, on the 3rd day He came alive again, proving that He really was the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead, just as Romans 1:4 says. That, the Apostle Paul says, is the Gospel: “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again on the 3rd day, according to the scriptures.”

II. The Gospel Received

“Which also you received”

Here we find a vital truth about the gospel: the gospel is not merely a “set of facts” to understand, but something which you must personally “receive.” The Greek Bible word here (“paralambano”) means “to take/alongside.” It is picture of receiving something or someone personally to your side. The word is used twice in Matthew 1, of how Joseph “took” Mary as his own wife. When Joseph took Mary as his wife, he didn’t just believe a number of certain facts about her; he personally brought her into his home, into his arms, into his heart. That’s what this word means; it means a personal, meaningful reception.

And that’s just what we have to do with the Gospel. We must RECEIVE it personally into our own hearts. To “receive” the gospel means more than just “believing a set of doctrines” or “saying some words”. So many people mistakenly think that they’re right with God because they subscribe to the “right” set of beliefs, or because they have “prayed the prayer” of salvation. I’ve heard people say, “I’ve prayed the prayer” — as if just mumbling the “correct” words of some prayer saves you. 

Last year I read a very interesting book by Bernard Ollivier about how he walked the old Silk Road travel route from Turkey to China. One day on his travels, a Muslim man came to him and said: “Do you want to go to Paradise? Of course you do, everyone wants to go there. Several times a day, you have to say, ‘Allah ho ma saleh Allah Mohammad wa aleh Allah Mohammad.’ If you repeat this, your problems will vanish, you’ll feel fine, you’ll never be sick, and your dreams will come true.” Ollivier told him thank you, but he had his own prayers. But sadly, some people think that becoming a Christian is like that: “just say the words of this prayer and you will be saved.” That not true, unless you personally mean it, and receive Jesus into your life. Just repeating some words, won’t save you.

Truly being saved is more than just “believing” or “saying” the right things. Remember what James 2:19 says: “You believe that God is one; you do well, the demons also believe and shudder”! That makes it clear that merely believing facts about Jesus does not save you. Satan himself knows all the right “facts” of the gospel, better than any of us does! But he’s never personally received it. And you need to know that you can be just as lost as he is, and go to the same hell that he is, knowing the same facts that he does, if you do not make it personal and RECEIVE the gospel of Jesus personally. John 1:12 says, “As many as RECEIVED Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God.” You’ve got to receive Jesus personally. 

J.I. Packer, one of the greatest Christian theologians of the last 100 years, once wrote: “Martin Luther is held to have said that Christianity is a matter of personal pronouns, in the sense that everything depends on knowing that Jesus died for ME, to be MY Savior.”

That’s a great way to put it: you’ve got to use “personal pronouns”! You have to make it personal. The most important question for some of us here today is not “do you KNOW the facts of the gospel,” but have you made it PERSONAL? Have YOU personally received it? Do you trust that Jesus died for YOUR sins, and that He is YOUR Lord & Savior? And if you haven’t, you need to make sure that you do it today! 

III. The Gospel Saves

“by which you are also saved …”

The word “saved” here is such a familiar word to many of us. We often hear church people used that term, “saved”, and it carries certain connotations for us. But what does it really mean?

The Greek Bible word for “saved” is “sozo”, which means “to rescue from danger or destruction.” (Thayers) The word was used in Ancient Greek stories of of people being “saved” from a shipwreck when they could have lost their lives, or being “saved” from famine or illness, or “saved” from being killed in a battle.

It is used in the New Testament in that way upon occasion as well. For example, in Matthew 8:25, when the disciples think they are about to die in the storm on the sea, they cry out: “Save us, Lord, we are perishing.” They didn’t mean “save my soul from eternal hell”; they meant “rescue us, we are about to drown!”

People have used the word “saved” in that sense all through history. Louis Zamperini was the American solider whose life story is portrayed in the book & the movie, Unbroken, which tells the story of how his B-24 aircraft crashed over the Pacific, and he drifted on the water for 47 days until he was finally picked up by the Japanese, only to be taken to torture camps, where he was mercilessly beaten and starved. God had given him incredible gifts of physical strength and stamina, but by the late summer of 1945, Zamperini was sick. His fever stayed at over 103 every day; he’d lost weight from what was already a very emaciated body. His face had been beaten beyond recognition by his captors. His time was running out, and he was about to die almost any day. But suddenly the American soldiers in the prison camp saw planes with the U.S. star on their wings flying overhead, and soon the Japanese captors fled from the camp, and the war was over. Louis Zamperini and the others were SAVED from the death and destruction that faced them. When he saw that they had been delivered, he exclaimed: “I am free! I am free! I am free!” He had been SAVED! He had been “rescued from danger and destruction”! 

In the same way, because of our sin, we all faced eternal death and destruction in hell. We were just like Jonathan Edwards put it in his famous sermon: hanging over an eternity in hell by a spider’s thread, that could snap at any moment. How can you live, knowing that your life is so frail, and that the time of your death is totally out of your hands, not knowing whether you might die any minute, and spend eternity in hell? It’s a horrific way to live!

But when you receive the gospel, God transfers you out of the kingdom of darkness, and into the Kingdom of His Son (Colossians 1:13) and you no longer fear hell; you know you aren’t going there. You no longer need to fear death; death is not the “feared gate” to hell now, it is now the door to heaven! You aren’t dangling by a spider’s thread over hell any more, now you are being held safely in the hand of God — where no one can snatch you out of His hand! (John 10). You have been rescued from danger; you’ve been rescued from harm; you’ve been rescued from sin; you’ve been rescued from hell! You can shout like Louis Zamperini, and with the old hymn, “I’m SAVED, SAVED, SAVED!” That’s the blessing of the gospel for everyone who truly receives it: you are “saved”!

IV. The Gospel Test

“If you hold fast the word which I preached to you …”

It is significant that when Paul says “by which you are saved” here in :2, that’s not yet the end of the message! He adds something important to it. He says: “By which you are saved — IF you hold fast the word which I preached to you …” That word “if” is a little word, but it has big implications, doesn’t it?! It implies a condition. You can have “x”, IF you do “y.” If you want “x”, then you’d better make sure you do “y.” For example, if someone said, “You can have a million dollars IF ….”, I think you’d want to know what the “if” was! Well, we’re dealing with something more important than a million dollars here; we’re dealing with your eternal SOUL! So when Paul says you can know for sure you have this great salvation “IF …” then we’d better make sure we have that “if,” right?!

In this case the “if” refers to persevering in the faith. He says, “IF you hold fast the word which I preached to you.” “Hold fast” here means keep on believing, keep on following, if you keep holding on to this gospel He just proclaimed.

Now this is where a lot of traditional Baptists miss it. We’ve heard and been taught that famous Baptist doctrine so many times over the years: “Once saved, always saved.” And let me tell you clearly: that IS true. Once you are genuinely saved, you will always be saved. Nothing can take it away. “Once saved, always saved” is indeed Biblical. Ephesians 1:13 says when we genuinely believe, we are “sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise.” No one can break that seal! Jesus said in John 10:28, “No one can snatch (My sheep) out of My hand.” Once you are really saved, you will indeed always be saved: kept in the hand of Jesus, sealed with the Holy Spirit.

But many have taken that genuine doctrine and applied it to people that it was never meant to apply to. We should add an addendum to that old saying: It’s not just “Once saved, always saved,” but also “IF saved, always saved” — “IF saved, always saved.” IF someone genuinely repented of their sins, and trusted Jesus as their Lord & Savior, and He sent His Holy Spirit into their heart, THEN there is nothing in all creation that can separate them again from the love of God. But the “IF” there is very important. IF THEY REALLY DID. 

And this is where some of us need to examine ourselves. Just because you can say “I walked down an aisle,” or “I filled out a card,” or “I got baptized,” does NOT mean that you were genuinely saved.  I shared last week Cheryl’s testimony of “walking down the aisle” when she was 6 years old, and getting baptized, but she was not really saved then. Patty Coleman told me after that service: “That was my story too” so she wanted to be baptized today. That happens a lot. Just because you walk an aisle or get baptized does not mean you were genuinely saved. There is such a thing as “believing in vain” as Paul mentions here. There are people who make emotional decisions, but who don’t really understand what they are doing. There are those who want to please their parents, or friends, or whatever, but who have not made genuine commitments to Christ. Just because someone walks down an aisle does not mean they are saved. That is why we call it making a “profession of faith.” They are PROFESSING that they have faith. We can’t know if they really have faith or not. Only God can know that. “Professing” the faith is not the same as genuinely “possessing” the faith!

So how do you tell? For one, let me just say: WE can’t always know. Only God knows what’s in a heart. But also Jesus said: “you will know them by their fruit.” The best indicator of someone’s salvation is their life.  And one of the best “fruits” of real salvation is what Paul talks about here: perseverance — continuing in the faith. In The Parable of the Soils Jesus said there is a kind of person whose faith is like a seed that sprouts up quickly, but fades in the summer heat. He said there is also a kind of person whose faith is like a seed that grows up and matures and bears fruit. That is the person who is genuinely saved. They persevere in their faith. This is what theologians call the doctrine of “The Perseverance of the Saints”: that genuine Christians continue in the faith. You don’t walk away from it; you will continue to follow Jesus.

This is just what Paul says here. He says you are saved — “IF you hold fast to the word which I preached to you.” In other words, you are saved IF you persevere in your faith. If you do not persevere in your faith, it demonstrates that you were not really saved. So often people question “once saved always saved” by saying: “What about the person who ‘made a decision’ for the Lord at youth camp or VBS or a revival but then dropped out of church for years and hasn’t been heard from since?” Well, what does this passage say about that? It indicates that person is most likely not saved, right? He says you are saved “IF you hold fast to the word which I preached to you.” This is one of the best tests of salvation. If you continue in the faith, then you can have every confidence that you were really saved. But if you do not persevere in the faith, it is a good indication that you were not genuinely saved.

Now, someone may say, “But isn’t that like ‘works salvation’: If you keep on going to church and doing certain things, then you are saved, but if you don’t, you aren’t?”  NO. That is NOT what this is teaching. Do NOT go away from this place thinking that. It does not say “If you do these things, then you will be saved.” It says if you do these things, it is because you already ARE saved! Persevering in the faith doesn’t “make” you saved; it demonstrates that you really WERE saved.

One of the best illustrations of this that I have seen happened when we were painting a little storage shed at our parsonage at the First Baptist Church in Moss Bluff, Louisiana about 20 years ago. Cheryl & I loved this paint that we picked out for that shed; it was “Mark Twain Gray” and we thought it would look so nice on that shed with white trim. But winter came before we could paint it, and the paint had been out in the shed all winter, and it had gotten pretty cold. If it had frozen, the paint wouldn’t be good, and it would all soon peel off. So we debated about it for a while: should we use the paint, or not? I finally said, “Let’s put it on. If it is good, it will stay on, and if it’s NOT good — we’ll soon find out!” So we painted it, and it looked great — all that year, and the next winter, and the next year, and the next. Over time, I finally looked at that shed and said, “Well, I guess that paint was good after all!” 

So here’s the lesson: staying on the building did not “make” that paint good; the paint was good when I put it on. But staying on the building DEMONSTRATED that the paint was, in fact, good the whole time.

And the same thing is true of our salvation. If you persevere in your faith, keep on following Christ; your persevering does not “make” you a genuine believer; your perseverance just demonstrates that you really were a genuine believer the whole time. THAT is the doctrine of “The Perseverance of the Saints.” It’s not salvation by works; your perseverance does not MAKE you a Christian; your perseverance just shows that you really ARE one.

Someone said: the best test of whether you are really a Christian is not by looking back at a “decision” you may or may not have made years ago, but by whether you are truly following Jesus NOW!  So many people get all tied up in this: “Did I really make a decision 35 years ago or did I not? Did I say it right; did I do it right?” Or this person I know; are they really saved? I think they really “made a decision,” but they don’t seem to be following Jesus right now. Listen: the best test of whether someone is genuinely a Christian is not by looking back at some “decision” they may or may not have made years ago, but how they are living right now! Like Paul wrote here, are you holding fast to the word which was proclaimed to you?

So what does this doctrine say about you, or about someone you know?
— If you have been having doubts about whether someone you know is saved, this one of the best ways to tell. Have they continued in their faith, or have they given it up? If they are not continuing in their faith, there is a very good chance that they were never really saved, and you need to be praying for their salvation.
— And what does it say about you? Do you think you’re saved today because of some decision you made years ago? But what does the life you have lived since that time, say about whether that decision was real? If you test your life, what does your LIFE say? The way you are living your life right now is the best test of whether you have ever really been saved. Do you pass that test, or do you fail it? 

Listen, some of us have taken some pretty important tests in our life: a test for school, or for college, or for a promotion on the job; maybe a medical test. But there is no more important test than this: does the test of your life, show that you are really saved?

God’s word says: “Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved — IF you hold fast the word which I preached to you.”

INVITATION:

— I Corinthians 15 says, this the gospel. But you have to personally receive it. Have you ever made the gospel personal? Has it ever become more than just a bunch of “words” and “beliefs” to you? Have you really received it into your own heart and life? If not, you need to do it today.

— Some of you might say “I have been trusting in a so-called ‘decision’ I made years ago to save me, but my life has not changed since then, and I have not been following Jesus.” And God is showing you through this message today, that you have never been saved — and you need to be, today! 

If you need to be saved today, call out to the Lord to save you, right now …

— Some of us here have been saved, but you need to be baptized, like some of these were today.

— Some of us need to pray for loved ones this morning, whose life does not look like they have ever been saved.