The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited

Precisely because (so Christians believe) God wants every single Christian to grow up in understanding as well as trust, the Christian faith has never been something that one generation can sort out in such a way as to leave their successors with no work to do.

gospels that do not naturally produce disciples, but only consumers of religious goods and services.

nearly all of my Christian students tell me that the gospel they heard as they grew up primarily had to do with their sin, Jesus’ death, and going to heaven.

What has happened is that we have created a “salvation culture” and mistakenly assumed it is a “gospel culture.”

EVANGELICALISM IS A GIFT to the church and the world. One of evangelicalism’s most precious convictions, one that I hold dear, is that each person must be born again or be saved. This conviction is established on nearly every page of the Gospels, it can be found in each of the sermons in the book of Acts, and it resonates under and on the pages of

I heard John Stott say that some people had been talking about “the irreducible minimum gospel.” He dismissed such an idea. “Who wants an irreducible minimum gospel?” he asked. “I want the full, biblical gospel.”

IT WAS 1971. I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior fresh into a brand new experience of faith. I was also full of zeal for evangelism but clueless about how to evangelize other than just telling my friends about what I was so passionate about — God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, and the rapture.

What is the gospel?

Precisely because (so Christians believe) God wants every single Christian to grow up in understanding as well as trust, the Christian faith has never been something that one generation can sort out in such a way as to leave their successors with no work to do.