This is really excellent. I think from time to time that I’m making progress in a move from a man-centered gospel to a Christ-centered gospel. The truth is that what I discover more and more is how insidiously entrenched pride is in my own life. The temptation to make it all about me is ever present. Matt Chandler gives a great example of this in the video above. May we make it always and only about the triumph of Jesus. For more info on The Gospel Project, click here.

Don’t Be More Gospel-Centered Than Jesus from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

Messenger 2011 – Defend and Confirm the Gospel
Messenger 2011 – Defend and Confirm the Gospel

“There is little doubt that we have all experienced the following circumstance and reaction. Someone comes to let you know about something that you have said or done that is wrong. Whether it was ignorant or blatant, the bottom line is the consequence. The other individual is offended, hurt, or aware of something that you did that needs to be addressed.Sadly, it our reaction that really gets us in hot water. It is our sinful reaction that shows our betrayal of the gospel just as much as the first sin itself. These sinful reactions show themselves in a variety of ways. One of the chief methods of my own sinful heart is to back up the dump-truck of personal merit.”

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The noblest liberty is that which is the property of the true Christian. Those only are perfectly free people whom the Son of God ‘makes free.’ All else will sooner or later be found slaves. Wherein does the liberty of true Christians consist? Of what is their freedom made up? – They are freed from the guilt and consequences of sin by the blood of Christ. Justified, pardoned, forgiven, they can look forward boldly to the day of judgment, and cry ‘Who shall lay anything to our charge? Who is he that condemneth?’ – They are freed from the power of sin by the grace of Christ’s Spirit. Sin has no longer dominion over them. Renewed, converted, sanctified, they mortify and tread down sin, and are no longer led captive by it.

Liberty, like this, is the portion of all true Christians in the day that they flee to Christ by faith, and commit their souls to Him. That day they become free men. Liberty, like this, is their portion for evermore, Death cannot stop it, The grave cannot even hold their bodies for more than a little season, those whom Christ makes free are free to all eternity. Let us never rest till we have some personal experience of this freedom ourselves. Without it all other freedom is a worthless privilege. Free speech, free laws, political freedom, commercial freedom, national freedom, – all these cannot smooth down a dying pillow, or disarm death of his sting, or fill our consciences with peace. Nothing can do that but the freedom which Christ alone bestows. He gives it freely to all who seek it humbly, Then let us never rest till it is our own.”

J.C. Ryle

“The cross, says Martin Hengel in his classic little book Crucifixion, ‘was not just any kind of death. It was an utterly offensive affair, ‘obscene’ in the original sense of the word.’ So obscene was it in fact, that the sophisticated, cultured people in Greek and Roman societies would not even utter the word cross in polite company. It was a reviled word, and it conjured disgusting and nauseating images.

Crucifixion was never a private event. It was always raw, and searingly public, because its purpose was to terrify the masses into submission to the authorities. Crosses often lined the main roads into cities, holding the broken writhing bodies of the condemned, or displaying the rotting corpses of the dead. The Romans even scheduled public crucifixions to coincide with religious festivals, insuring the maximum number of people present to witness the horror.

I think we underestimate just how serious Paul was when he said that the cross was an ‘offense’ to the people around him. We chalk it up to good rhetoric when he says that the message of the cross was a ‘stumbling block’ to some people and ‘madness’ to the rest. But that wasn’t just cheap overstatement. It was Paul’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment, born of twenty years of first-hand experience, that the message he was preaching—that salvation was to be had through a crucified God—was considered by everyone to be either deeply obscene or totally, completely, tin-foil-hat ridiculous.

Surely Paul could have made the gospel more palatable—and less dangerous—by saying it was about something else. Something cleaner and less ridiculous than the cross. Something more glorious. Less disgusting

He didn’t do that, though. ‘I decided,’ Paul said, ‘to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2). In the face of the worst cultural prejudice imaginable, he fixed the entire gospel squarely and immovably on the fact that Jesus was tacked to a stauros (Greek – Cross) and left to die. If he had been trying to find a surefire way to turn first-century people off from his ‘good news,’ he couldn’t have done better than that! So why did he do it? It’s simple. He did it because he knew that leaving the cross out, or running past it with a glance, or making it peripheral to the gospel, or allowing anything else to displace it at the center of the gospel would make it, finally, no gospel at all.”

- Greg Gilbert in Don’t Call It a Comeback