The Gospel is the shocking, provocative, revolutionary, subversive, counterintuitive good news that in your moments of greatest

despair, failure, sin,

weakness, losing,failing,

frustration, inability, helplessness, wandering, and falling short.

 

God meets you there— right there— right exactly there­in that place, and announces, I am onyour side. Gospel insists that God doesn’t wait for us to get ourselves polished, shined, proper, and without blemish— God comes to us and meets us and blesses us while we are still in the middle of the mess we created. Gospel isn’t us getting it together so that we can have God’s favour; gospel is us finding God exactly in the moment of our greatest not-togetherness. Gospel is grace, and grace is a gift. You don’t earn a gift; you simply receive it. You don’t make it happen; you wake up to what has already happened. Gospel isn’t doing enough good to be worthy; it’s your eyes being opened to your unworthiness and to Jesus’s insistence that that was never the way it worked in the first place.