The Gospel is not ‘Behave’, it is ‘Behold!’.
When men want to know about your life, there are certain questions they will always want to ask. These are the sorts of questions you will find on an application for a mortgage, or at a job interview: What age are you? Have you a criminal record? Have you attained a qualification? But God’s Word tells us that to truly understand someone’s life, we need only look to the root of that life; what they are believing about life itself? “for it is out of the heart spring the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). It seems we were created to believe, for as G K Chesterton famously observed: “When men stop believing in God, they don’t start believing in nothing. They start believing in anything.”
Because we were created to believe, our lives can ultimately only reveal who we believe God to be, what we think He is really like. Let me say that a different way. Our lives reveal what we believe God believes. This is the question that sits at the root of our lives; What does God believe? Ephesians 4:5 affirms that there is only one faith and so for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, there needs to be the same faith on earth as there is in heaven; His faith.
This is the reason we proclaim the Gospel, that men and women would behold in Jesus Christ the heart of God; what God believes! For what we see in Christ and Him crucified, is the way God loves the world. He so loves us in this way, as to not withhold His own life from us (John 3:16). To behold Christ, is to behold what God believes; that we have a Father who never left us to save ourselves!
To behold Him giving Himself to us, causes in us what the New Testament calls a ‘metanoia’. We find ourselves empowered to rest in Him, to be saved, for we find our hearts persuaded that we are indeed the children of God, and He is a saving God! This is not a work of our intellect, but of His Spirit (Romans 8:16). To behold Him in spirit and in truth, is to find ourselves delivered from the Kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of His Son and all we can say to the glory of God is “I was blind, but now I see.”
This is why the Gospel message is not ‘Behave!’, it is ‘Behold!’ Behold Christ. Behold what God believes about you and in that beholding receive His faith, that your life would be rooted in His and bear the fruit of His, a life in communion with the Father. To behold Christ in spirit and in truth, is to behold God with us, standing in our midst. (John 14:8 & 9). To behold Him is to see that He has not come to us because of our love, but His (1 John 4:10). To behold Him, is to see that He Has not come in response to our efforts, but because He is love and love must come in person (John 3:16). To behold Him, is to see that He comes to us not on our best day, but on our worst (Luke 15:20 & 28). To behold Him, is to see that the gospel has never been about what might be, if I, but always the declaration of what is, because He!
We have got so used to preaching an earthly gospel (if you will give to God, then He will give to you) that we have settled for an earthly power; the power to motivate. Just because we place a beautiful worship session before a motivational talk, does not mean that the gospel has been preached! The power of the gospel is not the eloquence of the speaker, but the revelation of the presence of God through the speaker; their words carrying His authority and unction to open eyes and hearts to the reality of the presence of the Kingdom and the King (Mark 1:15).
Any earthly orator can preach up a storm that stirs the flesh to action, but only the gospel of heaven still causes men to wonder, that even the wind and waves in their own heart obey and are still. All of creation must bow before the God who stands in the midst of our storms, for it is not the promise of the dawn that dispels the darkness, but the presence of the dawn. So let our gospel be more than ‘Behave!’ Let it be, Behold! Behold Christ and find God in your midst, His Spirit sent as the dawn into your heart, that you may cry “Abba Father”.
The Father we never knew. 