While formulas are comfortable, our pursuit of simple, efficient, and portable gospel explanations have led to an anemic church. Is the gospel the message about how to get saved? Maybe not completely.

Our fixation on certain doctrines can undermine gospel presentations. In the Cambridge Declaration, which attempts to summarize the gospel, renowned Christian leaders and theologians, such as Al Mohler and RC Sproul, overlook the resurrection entirely and focused only on justification by faith.

We compromise the gospel when we settle for truth. Even the word “gospel” can bring a litany of definitions from Christians around the world.  Today, we dig into these sticky topics in Jackson’s book One Gospel for all Nations.

Creation, Covenant, and Kingdom. For most of this episode, we land on these 3 framework themes. They are found whenever the Bible expressly speak about the gospel. In addition, other themes called explanation themes highlight the significance of the gospel. The give our gospel presentations a contour and context.

We take a look at these themes as laid out in various passages, including Acts, helping to answer questions such as: What does the gospel announce?

Galatians 3:8 directly equates the gospel with the Abrahamic covenant. But most people have no category for this being the gospel from our incomplete gospel perspective.

John Dickson explains that “gospel” in ancient world was a political term. See Chapter 8 in his The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission: Promoting the Gospel with More Than Our Lips. For a more academic treatment, see his “Gospel as News —from Aristophanes to the Apostle Paul,” New Testament Studies 51, no. 2 (2005): 212–30.

We mention Scot McKnight’s Kingdom Conspiracy.

Is it ok to talk about Jesus being a Chairman to a Chinese listener? Ultimately, we are talking about allegiance and loyalty when expressing the gospel to every listener in every nation.

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