At Santa Fe Baptist, everything we say, do, or preach has the Gospel as the center of it.
The Gospel is the core of our faith and it determines not only the past of the believer, but also its present and future. The Gospel is not something wejust believe; but it is something that as we believe, it changes every aspect of our lives. Therefore our service, purpose and emphasis in life is changed too. That is why the Gospel also shapes what we do and preach at our church.
If you want to know what we mean with "the Gospel," please keep reading below!
What is the Gospel?
The Gospel is the core belief of the Bible. The Gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and arose out of the grave.
He died for us for several important reasons. These are some of them.
1. Sin has consequences (and everybody knows it.)
You do not need to have a particular faith to know that sin has consequences. This has been revealed by God to all mankind. In fact, the Bible says that not only has God revealed his wrath "against all ungodliness" (Romans 1:18), but that also God has revealed himself (Romans 1:19-20.) Because of that, sin, or ungodliness, is "without excuse."
2. All have sinned (and it is a big deal.)
Not only sin has consequences and they are a big deal (Romans 3:23); but also the Bible declares that "All have sinned" (Romans 6:23.) This should not come as a great surprise to anybody. In the book of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon observes "For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not" (Ecclesiastes 7:20.) This is corroborated in the Bible where we repeatedly read "There is none righteous, no not one" (Romans 3:10; Psalm 14:3; Isaiah 53:6, 64:4, 59:13-15; Ephesians 2:3; 2 Corinthians 6:5, 7:1, and many more.) God does not condemn us, our sins have condemned us already (John 3:17-19.)
3. Good works, cannot save us (and there is no work or action that can do it either.) Some think that good works are the solutions to our sin problem. That one can go to heaven by being "good" or "obeying" the commandments. The idea behind good works is that one does what he can, and that is what really matters to God (like playing soccer in a pee wee or kindergarten league where no score is kept.) That is not Biblical and therefore not true at all.
Contrary to this idea, the Bible declares that you cannot pick and choose what you can do or want to do, but that you have to do all good works in order to be counted for any (Deuteronomy 6:25; Galatians 5:3; James 2:10.) We already know that there is no one who can do all of the "good works," So how can we be saved?
Jesus Christ put it like this, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3b.) That does not seem to answer anything, because now the question is, How can I be born again?; but this new question directs us to the fundamental problem we have. What we are needs to be changed, and we cannot do it ourselves.This ultimately points to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.
4. He needed to be lifted up (because nothing else can help us.)