The Gospel in Eleven Words

I could hardly believe my ears. 

My grandson Roman was six years old. Like most children his age, he was full of questions. But he asked me a question one day that astonished me and provided a fabulous opportunity.

I had told him that my job is to help people understand the Bible. That’s a rough summary of what a pastor does, I know, and there are so many other aspects to pastoral ministry. But that was the abbreviated version that I gave my grandson that day.

He must have been in just the right mood because he looked at me and said, “Explain the Bible to me!”

How do you explain the Bible to a six year old with the attention span of a gnat? I knew I had to make it simple, accessible, and most of all brief. 

I opened my mouth to begin, but he interrupted me again. 

He wanted to write it all down.

Now the challenge is even greater. I not only have to make it simple enough to understand, I have to put it into a few simple words that he can write down.

I grabbed a nearby Post-It note and gave him a pen.

And I gave him three sentences, which he wrote down painstakingly, copying one letter at a time.

Here was the three-sentence summary of the Bible I provided for Roman that day: one question, one command, and one statement.

1. Do I trust God?

The first sentence is the most important, life-defining question any of us will ever answer. Adam and Eve answered it wrong, and all hell broke loose.

And even though his obedience was often spotty and inconsistent, Abraham answered it right, and God “credited it to him for righteousness” (Gen 15:6).

In fact, every time we disobey God, it’s because we don’t trust Him. We don’t trust His wisdom and/or His goodness and/or His power, and we give Him the stiff-arm and go our own way. 

This is one of those questions we can never just answer with our mouths, and it certainly isn’t a question we can answer once and for all. It’s a question we answer with our lives over and over again, day after day after day, especially as we respond to temptation and discouragement.

And we’ve got to admit that we often – far too often – answer it wrong. We don’t trust God, and we go our own way. “Like sheep,” said the prophet, “we have gone our own way” (Isa 53:6).

So our honest answer to the question has to be, no, we don’t really trust God, at least not enough to obey Him consistently.

Which brings us to the second sentence, a command:

2. Ask God to forgive.

Since it is a given that we actually don’t trust God and we do rebel and go our own way, we’ve got to find some way of dealing with our rebellion. And going to God for forgiveness is the only way. 

When we ask God to forgive us, we’re acknowledging that we have actually sinned against Him. We’ve given up making excuses and rationalizing and comparing ourselves with others. We come to Him with nothing in our hands but the hot mess of our sin.

And we ask Him to forgive us.

But how can a holy God overlook our rebellion? We wouldn’t even want such a God. We inwardly crave a God who is just, one who doesn’t play favorites, a God who doesn’t nod and wink at sin, even our sin.

So when we think about what our sin means and what the holiness of God means, we realize that our situation is hopeless.

But we ask nonetheless.

We ask God to forgive our rebellion.

And what will a holy God say to us rebels and prodigals when we want to come home?

This is why the story of Jesus is called the “gospel,” the Good News.

The last sentence is a three-word statement:

3. Yes in Jesus. 

God has told us in advance what He’s going to say when we come to Him with our rebellion and ask Him to forgive us.

He’s already answered that question: He sent us His Son. 

In Jesus, God has said yes to us rebels and prodigals.

In Jesus, God has shown that He is ready, even eager to forgive us for our sins when we ask.

In Jesus, God has entered into our world of sin and declared Himself to be on the side of sinners like me.

From three sentences to two trajectories

That’s it. 

That’s the super-simplified summary of the Bible that I gave to my grandson that day. There’s a lot more in the Bible, of course, but all the rest is details.

You can see where our pride and shame can short-circuit this simple message.

In our vanity we can refuse to acknowledge that we have in fact rebelled; we can stubbornly determine to manage our sin and guilt our own way and never get past the initial question. 

When we answer that question with “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t trust God. I’ve pretty well got this sorted,” it is our own pride that cuts us off from God’s mercy.

But when we finally do get to the place where we ask for forgiveness, shame can make us doubt that God could forgive our particular type and depth of sin. When we are asking ourselves how we could fail so miserably, we might also be asking how God could forgive so completely.

And in our shame we can cut ourselves off from His mercy.

But this is His offer: we can accept the grace that God has shown us in Christ or we can continue to live with the consequences of our rebellion.

Every one of us is on one of those two trajectories. 

We are all spending our lives responding to that offer in one way or the other, either surrendering our lives in gratitude for the grace God has shown us in Christ or continuing to reject His generous offer.