Paul said to the Corinthians, ‘Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.’ (1 Cor 15:1-2) In our Bible studies on Acts, we have seen the stunning turnaround in Paul’s life when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. (Acts 9) Paul was someone who, as he reminds the Corinthians, persecuted the church of God. (1 Cor 15:9) But on the road to Damascus, when he was on his way to arrest more Christians, Jesus met with him in a supernatural way that totally transformed his life. From this point onward, he received the good news. He understood the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection, that Jesus really was the promised Messiah, the Son of God.
One of the things we must remember is we can only pass on what we ourselves have received. At the moment, we are being urged to distance ourselves from others to stop us passing on the coronavirus, the difficulty being we often don’t know if we have the virus or not. If we are going to stand firm in life, we need to be sure of the gospel as the power of God for salvation. We can’t pass on the baton to the next generation or to anyone else unless we are sure we’ve got hold of this gospel for ourselves.
Once we have, however – once the truth of these fundamental gospel basics that Jesus died, was buried, rose again and is coming again soon grips our hearts – then we will long to pass it on to others. Like Paul, we’ve got good news and we want everyone to know it!
