What believing the gospel means

Good news

If you have just come to faith, or just started going to church, the gathering of people who belong to Jesus, you will often hear the word gospel. It means ‘good news’: not a list of things to do, but news of what God has done. The apostle Paul, one of the witnesses Jesus sent out, sums it up:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

‘Christ’ is not a surname. It means the Anointed One, the Saviour and King whom God had promised. ‘Sin’ is more than a few bad deeds; it is our turning away from God to run our own lives.

It is good news because God loved first: "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16). The gospel "is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16). Salvation means being rescued from sin and death and brought into life with God, now and for ever.

Jesus' own first preaching was this news: "Repent and believe in the gospel!" (Mark 1:15). To repent is to turn around, from sin and towards God. Repentance and faith are two sides of one step.

What believing is

So what does it mean to believe the gospel? Faith is not a warm feeling. Feelings come and go, but what the gospel announces does not change. Nor is faith a work we do to earn salvation:

For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9

Grace is God's kindness to people who have not deserved it. Salvation is his gift from first to last, and even the faith that receives it is not something we produce. No one can boast, not even of having believed.

The Reformed churches grew from the sixteenth-century Reformation, a movement to renew the church by Scripture, in the line of teachers such as John Calvin. Presbyterians are the best known; the Reformed churches of continental Europe are another branch, and among Baptists the Reformed Baptists confess the same faith. This course starts from the faith all churches share and lets the Reformed confessions, the written statements of what a church believes, shed light on it. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), a catechism that teaches by questions and answers, says:

Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 86

To believe is to receive Christ with empty hands and rest your whole weight on him. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) calls true faith both a ‘certain knowledge’ of what God has told us in his Word and a ‘hearty trust’ that forgiveness and salvation are given freely, for Christ's sake, to me Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 21. This trust is worked in us through the gospel by the Holy Spirit, who is God, one with the Father and the Son.

Faith receives Christ, and with him all that is his. "Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God" (Romans 5:1). The Reformed confess justification as God forgiving the guilty sinner and declaring them right with him, for Christ's sake. Joined to Christ, the believer can say, "Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20), and "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Reformed course teaches justification at length in Grace alone, faith alone.

Soon after believing, your faith may feel very weak. A father who brought his suffering son to Jesus cried, "I do believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24), and Jesus healed the boy. What saves us is not the strength of our faith but the Christ it holds on to; a gift taken with a trembling hand is still the whole gift. See also What is the gospel?, What is faith? and How can I begin to believe?

The faith the church confesses

The Apostles' Creed, said by many churches around the world, begins ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty’. This short summary of the apostles' teaching grew from the confession made in the ancient church of Rome at baptism, the washing with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit that marks a person as Christ's. Christians have been baptised into this faith from the beginning, each confessing it in the first person: ‘I believe’.

Justification by faith alone is not the Reformed churches' confession only. The Lutheran churches, who follow Martin Luther, teach in the Augsburg Confession (1530) that we are justified not by our own powers or works but freely, for Christ's sake, through faith art. 4; and the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican churches, the family of the Church of England, call it a teaching ‘very full of comfort’ art. 11.

The Catholic Church, too, confesses that salvation is by God's grace. Reading Paul's "faith expressing itself through love" (Galatians 5:6), it teaches that faith is made complete by love, and that grace received in faith and in the sacraments, holy rites Christ gave such as baptism, makes the believer righteous within Council of Trent, session 6, Decree on Justification. The Orthodox churches of the East speak of salvation above all as union with God, in which by grace we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Faith and justification, in the doctrine course, sets these views side by side.

The Heidelberg Catechism's first question asks for our only comfort in life and in death, and answers:

That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 1

The comfort of faith is not how tightly I hold on to Christ, but that I belong to him and he keeps me. Augustine, a North African church leader around the year 400, began his Confessions with this prayer, here in E. B. Pusey's translation of 1838 (‘repose’ means rest): "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1. To believe the gospel is to find that rest in Christ.

This week

Read Mark's Gospel through. Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels, the books that tell of Jesus' life, death and rising. Read two or three chapters a day, noticing who Jesus is and what he does.

Tell a Christian at your church that you have come to believe. One sentence is enough: I have come to trust in Jesus. You can ask them to pray with you.

Ask about a class for newcomers. Many churches have one, under many names. Ask the pastor, or whoever welcomes newcomers, and bring your questions from this lesson. The next lesson asks how you can know that you are saved.

Practice