The Gospel of the Ungrateful

This is the Gospel.

All humanity is born into sin. The simple act of our birth earns us damnation. We are ungrateful creatures, scorning our Holy Father for the fleeting pleasures of earth. Bent on doing evil and lovers of sin, we wander through the darkness drunk on depravity, too blind to even understand our wretched state. We are born into our death, wallowing in our own filth, unable to pickourselves up or clean ourselves off.

And God saw us in this offensive state, yet He did not abandon us. We were his enemies, doing the very things he hates as we sinned. We were vessels of wrath, spitting on our creator, assuming we did not need our Heavenly Father.

Yet He did not abandon us.

He saw us, and though He hated the sin we reveled in, He loved us. He wanted us to have the opportunity to be with Him, but in our dirty and depraved state we could not come near His Holy nature. As a good and perfect judge, He had to punish our sin and pour out His wrath on that sin. Man had to pay for their iniquity.

Yet even still, He loved us.

He had to punish our sin; yet he loved us so much that paradox became reality as God became man to atone for our sin. Man had to pay, so Jesus became man, taking on flesh, that he might be a sacrificial offering in our place. He came, and as He died on the cross He absorbed all the wrath that the history of humanity, past, present and future, had earned. The Father poured out every bit of wrath on Jesus until His wrath was completely satisfied. Jesus paid it all. He drank the cup of wrath to the bottom till not a drop was left.

He saved us from our sin.

There is now no condemnation for those who repent and put their faith in Christ. For those who trust in Jesus, not only is the Father’s wrath towards them satisfied, but they are also wrapped in the righteousness of Christ. So now, the gracious Father on high looks at the believer and sees him as clean and righteous. There is no impending wrath for those who accept Christ, and the Father does not see us as filthy sinners, but instead as righteous sons because Christ was righteous. This is the gift of grace that God offers us, and all we must do is leave our sinful past behind, put our faith and trust in Christ alone, and live to love God. We trade our awful, depraved lives for ones of purpose and joy, and trade our eternal damnation for eternal life.

This is the Gospel.

It is radical. It is mind-numbing, earth shattering and life-altering. It is totally undeserved, utterly transformative and completely insane. Seriously, it is absurd that God loves us and saves us. But He really truly does. However, too often the Gospel does not amaze us. For many of us who have grown up in the church, like myself, the Gospel has become very normal. We think of it and are unimpressed, and thus ungrateful. It become an obvious reality to us and we think to ourselves, “of course God died for us, what else would he do”. We hear that "in Christ you have been saved from eternal damnation", and we do not get excited. That is wrong. In our minds it becomes the status-quo and the way things “should be”, and thus we even go so far as to believe we deserve the grace of the Gospel. But we do not, and we must fight this complacent idea that the Gospel is normal and unimpressive.

We do not deserve grace, and we should wake up every morning utterly in awe of the fact that God has saved us by grace and adopted us as His sons. Think about it. Really think about the Gospel. Ponder it, wonder at it, revel in it, marvel your way through it. It is insane what God did for us, so lets begin to find more joy in that incredible gift.

This is the Gospel. It is absurd, but it is true. It is amazing.