The gospel of Jesus Christ is incredibly good news. It brings life, liberty, freedom, and blessing. Yet somehow, we can take the very Word God gave to bring people life and use it in ways that rob them of life.
We turn relationship into rules. We turn transformation into appearances. We tell people how they ought to behave without helping them encounter the One who can make them new.
The gospel is not merely a promise that something wonderful will happen after we die. It is the announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord and His kingdom has broken into our world. That changes how we understand salvation, how we treat one another, how we read Scripture, and what we expect God to do in the nations.
This is what I mean by making the gospel good news again. We do not need to improve Jesus’ message. We need to recover its fullness and remove the things we have added that do not belong to His kingdom.
Key Takeaways
- The gospel announces Christ’s present reign, not merely a promise of heaven after death.
- Lasting good fruit comes from new birth and inward transformation, not outward pressure.
- God’s mercy grounds surrender, while renewed minds change how we understand Him and treat others.
- Love, unity, and freedom reflect God’s kingdom; manipulation and domination contradict its character.
Table of Contents
- When Religion Teaches People to Wear a Mask
- The Gospel Changes More Than Individual Lives
- Jesus Is King, but His Kingdom Is Not Like the World’s
- Good Fruit Requires More Than Better Behavior
- Romans 12 Begins with Family and Mercy
- A Living Sacrifice Is a Response of Trust
- Renewing the Mind Is Part of True Worship
- From Believing Facts About Jesus to Knowing Him
- God’s People Must Be Free to Ask Questions
- Recognizing Manipulation and Control in the Church
- Authority Should Help People Discover Truth
- The Cross Reaches the Root of the Problem
When Religion Teaches People to Wear a Mask
I was talking about this in a restaurant recently. Those who know me know I do not exactly talk quietly! The conversation was about what happens when people enter a church and feel that belonging depends on looking, dressing, speaking, and acting a particular way.
What do people do when they believe their real selves will not be accepted? They put on a mask.
Then the world accuses the church of hypocrisy, and we reach for our familiar responses. But we need to be honest enough to ask whether we have helped create the very thing we are defending ourselves against.
A culture of disapproval can teach people to pretend. It can produce outward conformity while leaving the heart untouched. That is not the kingdom of God. That is the wisdom of the world operating inside a religious institution.
The gospel works differently. People who genuinely encounter Jesus describe moving from darkness into light, from bondage into freedom, and from death into life. Often, their response is surprise: God is not distant in the way they expected. His goodness is more real and more wonderful than they imagined.
We should be creating a community where that encounter can happen, not a community where everyone is busy managing an appearance.
The Gospel Changes More Than Individual Lives
I love studying history because it helps us recognize things we now take for granted. Many assumptions about human worth feel obvious to us. They have not always been obvious.
Consider an ancient letter in which a man away from home writes affectionately to his pregnant wife, then instructs her not to keep the child if it is a girl. The casualness is what shocks us. How could something so terrible sit alongside ordinary family affection?
It reflects a world in which a child’s survival could depend on sex, health, or usefulness to the household. Human value was not consistently understood as something every person possessed simply by being human.
Against that stands the biblical declaration that people are created in the image of God. Every person has worth and dignity. Their value does not depend on how useful they are to a family or a state.
The gospel carried that conviction into communities and cultures. The history of Christian mission includes accounts of communities abandoning destructive practices, pursuing education, developing leaders, and eventually sending missionaries themselves. The point is not merely that individuals acquired new religious beliefs. Their way of life changed.
That is exciting! Jesus died, rose again, ascended, and reigns. His lordship has consequences for the world He loves.
When we reduce the church’s mission to getting people into heaven, we risk treating the present world as though darkness has the final claim on it. We lose hope for healing relationships, restoring communities, and transforming the conditions in which people live.
The early church’s proclamation was not that Jesus mattered only after death. His living power was visible in changed people and changed communities. We should not settle for a gospel with no expectation of fruit here and now.
Jesus Is King, but His Kingdom Is Not Like the World’s
To say that Jesus is Lord is to say that Jesus is King. But we must be careful about the picture that word creates in our minds.
The wisdom of this world often treats power as the right to control. Humility looks weak. Mercy looks foolish. The strong impose their will, and everyone else adjusts.
The kingdom of God is completely different.
- The world prizes domination. God’s kingdom brings freedom.
- The world dismisses mercy. God’s kingdom reveals compassion.
- The world equates status with worth. God’s kingdom recognizes God’s image in people.
- The world relies on outward pressure. God’s kingdom transforms people from within.
Freedom and human flourishing are a helpful way to describe the character of this kingdom. Tyranny and bondage belong to a different order.
Even biblical kingship challenges arbitrary power. The king was accountable to God’s covenant and law. He did not become the source of right and wrong merely because he occupied a throne.
When I speak about the rule of law in relation to God, I do not mean that some outside authority governs Him. I mean that God is never arbitrary. His law reflects His character. He cannot act contrary to love or become evil simply because He is powerful.
That matters enormously. We can trust the King because His reign expresses His goodness, not a changing appetite for control.
A Present Kingdom with Present Fruit
Later in my own journey, I began noticing how frequently the Gospels describe Jesus proclaiming the kingdom of God. I had been taught to summarize the gospel almost entirely as forgiveness of sins and going to heaven. Yet Jesus was announcing a kingdom.
If there is a kingdom, there is a King. The church’s proclamation was that Jesus Christ is Lord, not Caesar.
This does not make the cross or forgiveness unimportant. It places them within the fuller announcement of Christ’s reign. The Messiah has come, and His kingdom is a present reality.
Its qualities are meant to be experienced: righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit, mercy, compassion, and abundant life. A Christian can profess allegiance to Jesus while living in ways that contradict those qualities. Someone outside the church can also benefit when Christians bring mercy, peace, and reconciliation into a community.
Religious labels alone do not tell us whether the fruit of the kingdom is present.
The Old Testament’s pictures of restoration are wonderfully concrete. Children can play safely in the streets. People can live without constant fear. These are not merely abstract religious ideas. They describe a healed world.
I understand the promised messianic kingdom and the work of Jesus as one unfolding story. The church is not an interruption while God waits to return to His real purpose. The Messiah has come, and His reign is at work through His people.
Good Fruit Requires More Than Better Behavior
Jesus’ teaching about trees and fruit brings us to two important questions.
- What kind of tree produces this fruit?
- Can we recognize whether the fruit is good or bad?
The first question exposes the limits of behavior management. A tree needs more than someone rearranging what hangs from its branches. If the problem reaches into the tree itself, the answer must reach that deeply too.
We need the new birth. We need to become a new creation.
Jesus is not merely offering techniques for appearing more moral. He is making possible a life we did not possess before.
The second question concerns discernment. We need to learn the difference between the fruit of God’s kingdom and the works of the flesh. Otherwise, we can sincerely intend to do good while using methods that produce fear, bitterness, division, and bondage.
Recognizing fruit helps us ask a better question than whether something sounds religious: Does it bring life? Does it reflect the character of Jesus? Does it heal relationships, or does it destroy them?
Romans 12 Begins with Family and Mercy
Romans 12:1-2 gives us a beautiful foundation for understanding Christian transformation. Before Paul calls people to offer their lives to God, he addresses them as brothers and sisters and grounds his appeal in God’s mercy.
Those opening ideas are not decorative. They tell us what kind of life this is.
We Belong to a Household, Not Just an Institution
We hear the language of brothers and sisters so often in church that we can miss its force. Paul is addressing a family. In Christ, we have been born into the household of God.
Genesis begins with God creating humanity in His image. Then, after the fall, we encounter a brother killing his brother. Sin breaks the relationships that should express our shared dignity.
Redemption brings reconciliation. God’s people are called to participate in healing those broken relationships and carrying that healing into the world.
But we cannot do that while allowing anger, hatred, resentment, fear, and bitterness to rule us. We cannot proclaim reconciliation while continually cultivating division.
The Spirit’s Work Should Be Visible in Love
This is why I find the interracial and cross-class fellowship associated with early Pentecostal renewal so powerful. People gathered around Jesus as brothers and sisters, crossing boundaries that the surrounding culture insisted should divide them.
We often discuss Pentecostalism primarily in terms of tongues and spiritual gifts. I believe those gifts are wonderful. But love across deep social divisions is also extraordinary evidence of the Spirit’s work.
When people stop evaluating one another according to race, class, usefulness, or similarity, something beautiful has happened. They are recognizing one another as family.
The later reappearance of segregation in parts of the movement illustrates the danger of allowing the world’s divisions back into the church. We can become preoccupied with a religious sign while neglecting the relationships that should display God’s love.
The Spirit brings unity. The impulse to divide, disconnect, and control comes from somewhere else.
Mercy Comes Before the Appeal
Paul’s appeal is relational at its foundation. He does not begin by telling us to become good enough for God. He reminds us how merciful God has been.
We are a people gathered around the goodness we have received. Our response grows out of that relationship.
That is very different from moral instruction detached from the Father’s compassion.
A Living Sacrifice Is a Response of Trust
The thought of offering myself to Jesus as a living sacrifice excites me. The temple imagery is powerful, but so is that word living.
Living faithfully can be hard. Relationships expose things in us that isolation never would. It is easy to imagine ourselves wonderfully patient and loving until another person gives us a reason to discover otherwise!
Everyday life requires faith and grace. It requires forgiveness, vulnerability, and the willingness to trust.
That last part is a serious challenge for people who have been hurt. Many of us build walls because surrender feels dangerous. We think that if we stop controlling everything, we will be wounded again.
How could we give ourselves wholeheartedly to someone we do not trust?
This is why revelation of God’s mercy matters. As we discover His goodness, kindness, and love, surrender begins to look different. Giving ourselves to Him is no longer merely a frightening demand. It becomes a beautiful response to a trustworthy Father.
We can turn even the language of sacrifice into another burden if we detach it from mercy. We can make it sound as though God is simply adding one more obligation to an already exhausted life.
But Romans 12 moves from mercy to surrender and then to inward transformation. Those ideas belong together.
Renewing the Mind Is Part of True Worship
Paul calls us not to conform to the patterns of this world, but to be transformed through the renewing of our minds. Through that transformation, we learn to discern what is good and pleasing to God.
I read this as integral to the worship Paul describes. Worship is not merely performing a duty. It includes allowing God to change the way we perceive reality.
This is one reason we place such emphasis on Scripture in our preaching at Life Springs. We believe that truth changes the way we think, and that renewed thinking changes the way we live.
Repentance involves a change of mind, but not a superficial adjustment of opinions. I begin to see differently. I begin to recognize what God is like. I begin to understand people and circumstances in the light of His Word.
That brings freedom.
What Renewal Looks Like in Relationships
If all I can see in someone is their faults, I am not seeing clearly. Once that becomes my settled perspective, almost nothing they do can appear good to me.
Then frustration grows. Bitterness takes hold. A relationship begins to fall apart.
This happens among Christians too. We are all works in progress. The answer is not to pretend that it never happens or shame someone for admitting it. The answer is to bring it honestly into the light so God can transform us.
We need a church culture where people can acknowledge failure without hiding behind a spiritual mask.
Humility Keeps Us from Making Everyone Else the Problem
The Sermon on the Mount begins with the poor in spirit. These are people who know they do not have everything together. They recognize their need.
That starting point matters when we reach Jesus’ warning about judging others and overlooking the obstruction in our own eyes. We cannot begin in humility and end by imagining ourselves the righteous people standing above a wicked world.
Knowing that God loves us in our imperfection makes room for genuine grief over the world’s brokenness. It should also make us compassionate rather than self-righteous.
Ask who is destroying America, and it is easy to identify some other group as the enemy. But the deeper answer is sin, including our own.
A Christian should be able to acknowledge being part of the problem while also knowing the Savior who rescues us from it. We are growing in humility, kindness, grace, and the character of Christ. As we come to know Him more clearly, we become more like Him.
From Believing Facts About Jesus to Knowing Him
When I was young, I believed what I had been taught: Jesus died for my sins, and believing in Him meant I would go to heaven when I died.
That was true as far as it went, but in my understanding it had almost no connection to the life I was living.
During high school, I worked at a hardware store with a man who was ninety years old. I loved him. He lived in Michigan but dreamed about Texas, especially El Paso, as though it were the promised land. After work, he would read Bible tracts to me.
I agreed with what he read. Then I went on living as before. In my mind, these truths mattered when I died, not now.
One rainy night, I was driving far too fast and my car left the road. As it headed toward the woods, I thought I was about to die and reassured myself that I would go to heaven. Instead of striking the trees, the car landed on a narrow track through them.
I believed in Jesus, but I did not really know Him. There is an enormous difference.
At nineteen, I had an encounter with God that changed everything. I fell to my knees and asked Him to let me live for Him. I did not physically see Jesus, but I perceived His reality and goodness in a way I never had before.
He was not far away. He was present. He was real. He was wonderful.
My whole perspective changed. The best way I can describe it is moving from death into life and from darkness into light. Faith was no longer an idea waiting to become relevant someday.
Scripture Became the Voice of My Father
Within roughly six weeks, I had read the whole Bible. I was hungry for it.
Reading Scripture was no longer simply reading a religious book. I was discovering God. It felt as though my Father was speaking to me through His Word, and my world was being reshaped.
The testimony in Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus resonates with this same longing to know God personally. The important distinction is between approaching Scripture merely as a duty and approaching it with hunger for the Lord.
People can study the Bible extensively and still miss Jesus. Religious knowledge and a living encounter are not identical.
We can come to Scripture asking God to reveal Himself, to help us understand Him, and to change what we have misunderstood. He feeds the hungry.
This has not been a one-time experience for me. I return to passages where I have encountered God and am moved again by His goodness. Then I discover something new and wonder how there could possibly be more. The next year, there is more.
That is renewal. That is transformation. And it is beautiful.
Prayer and Bible reading can become boxes we check to feel like good Christians. But completing a religious assignment is not the same as knowing the Father. The goal is relationship, not merely compliance.
God’s People Must Be Free to Ask Questions
One of the lessons I have drawn from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ discussion of Abraham is that walking with God includes the freedom to ask questions.
In Genesis 18, God speaks about Abraham teaching his household to walk in His way. Then comes the conversation about Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham wrestles with what justice requires and brings his questions to God.
That is a remarkable picture of relationship. Abraham is not treated as a machine whose only function is silent compliance.
Religious authority can become unhealthy when people are afraid to think, question, or examine what they have been taught. A community meant to cultivate liberty can instead cultivate bondage.
This does not mean that everyone caught in those traditions is insincere. People can genuinely love God while having inherited practices that keep them from experiencing the fullness of life in Christ.
We need freedom to examine those practices without immediately accusing one another of not being Christians.
Recognizing Manipulation and Control in the Church
Another important stage in my own renewal involved learning to recognize what I describe as the controlling spirit of witchcraft and Baalism.
I use that language here to identify intimidation, emotional manipulation, and domination. I also include the use of disapproval to coerce someone’s behavior.
The issue is not ordinary technical uses of the word manipulation. It is the relational pressure of a guilt trip, a threat, or the calculated withdrawal of approval to make someone do what we want.
Sincere Christians can participate in these patterns without recognizing them. Again, we are works in progress. But recognizing them gives us the opportunity to let God heal and change us.
We can begin by asking:
- Am I helping this person understand truth, or pressuring them to satisfy me?
- Am I using fear to produce compliance?
- Am I withholding approval as a way of controlling behavior?
- Does my way of speaking reflect the freedom and love of Jesus?
Underneath the urge to control is often a sense of powerlessness. The world feels out of control, so we try to seize control of circumstances and other people.
That impulse can grow from personal relationships into larger systems of domination. My concern is that Christians who do not distinguish the principles of God’s kingdom from those of the world can unintentionally support patterns that lead toward tyranny.
I see freedom as significant not only spiritually, but socially and economically as well. Freedom has helped make possible forms of exchange and enterprise that contribute to prosperity. The broader point is that our understanding of people and power affects the kind of society we build.
Galatians 5:1 places freedom at the center of Christ’s work and warns against returning to slavery. We should take that seriously in our churches, homes, and public life.
Authority Should Help People Discover Truth
I remember one of my daughters struggling with fear about a health issue. For months, I tried to explain truths that I believed would help settle her fear. Nothing seemed to change.
Then, during a visit with a doctor, I brought the issue into the conversation. The doctor gave essentially the same explanation I had been giving. Suddenly, the matter was settled.
When I asked why she accepted it from the doctor and not from me, the answer was simply that the other person was a doctor.
That experience made me think about how much weight we attach to authority and how our learning environments shape that habit. The concern was not the doctor’s explanation. It was the tendency to let a person’s position settle a question without personally understanding it.
And that raises an uncomfortable question for church leaders: Are we helping people discover truth, or training them to repeat what the person at the front says?
Study Scripture for yourself. Examine what is being taught. You are free to disagree.
I cannot do another person’s knowing for them. I can share what I have found, but they need to wrestle with it, understand it, and become convinced for themselves.
I have also been struck by a description of education I recall from C. S. Lewis: students discussing assigned topics with peers, writing, critiquing, and working through ideas together. That kind of learning is very different from treating the teacher as the possessor of all knowledge and the students as people who merely reproduce it.
The method matters, not just the subject being taught. A system organized around unquestioning compliance can train people for control. A learning community that encourages discovery and honest discussion can cultivate freedom.
The image of God belongs to humanity, not just to kings or leaders. Pharaoh, Caesar, and Nebuchadnezzar do not monopolize human dignity. Every person bears God’s image.
Healthy relationships reflect that shared dignity. We meet one another eye to eye, rather than dividing the world into superior people who look down and inferior people who must look up.
The Cross Reaches the Root of the Problem
The world often assumes that people cannot be trusted to do what is right, so order must ultimately be imposed. The Roman idea of peace backed by the sword illustrates that reliance on force.
But the gospel announces something that outward control cannot produce: a new creation.
I believe the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead can dwell in us. I believe in the new birth. I believe in the Holy Spirit’s power. I believe in the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
The root of the problem is our sin, and God has addressed that root in Jesus Christ.
That is why the gospel is more than a promise of heaven after death and more than a program for improving appearances. It is the good news of a King who forgives, makes us new, renews our minds, restores relationships, and brings His life into the world.
We do not have to choose between caring about eternity and caring about life now. The reign of Jesus gives us hope for both.
People can be free because people can be made new in Jesus Christ. That is the fruit of the gospel. That is good news.
