Imagine you are a captive on an island and narrowly escape as your enemy pursues you. Now you are frantically trying to swim to safety. But it is night, there is a raging storm with surging waves, and you can hardly keep your head above water. Land is nowhere in sight. Suddenly, you hear a loud voice. The enemy spots you and quickly advances on your position. Hope slips away as you are swept beneath the surface for the last time, exhausted from the struggle. You let out an inaudible cry for help as darkness overwhelms you.
Then, as you are about to lose consciousness, you feel a strong arm grab you and pull you out of the water. Gasping for breath and worried to face your enemy’s retaliation, you are alarmed at first. The strange man in front of you is not your enemy. You feel a sense of peace. The storm has cleared. Dawn is breaking. He assures you with a voice that arrests your attention and comforts your heart. You are safe. You are headed home.
This is the gospel: we are the captives, and Jesus is the man who saves us. But why do we need rescuing? And how does he save us?
Sin Has Broken Our Relationships
We all struggle with the weight of regret, broken relationships, and unfulfilled desires. Something is clearly wrong, but maybe that’s just the way it is and the way it has always been. No. This was not God’s plan.
God created all things good. We were to live with him, and with each other, in perfect harmony. We were freely and joyfully created out of God’s desire to share his very own life with us. He did not need us, but he loves us and wants us to share in his love.
But the devil tempted Adam and Eve, our first parents, to question God’s love. They fell for the lie and rejected God. Sin entered the world and all were exposed to eternal separation from God in hell.
We all experience the effects of sin. Instead of experiencing fulfilling relationships and having full control over our emotions and our decisions, we struggle to trust and believe in God and often choose things that harm ourselves and others. We turn inwardly and selfishly pursue every gratification, and those we love the most constantly disappoint us. Finally, at the end of our short and frustrated lives, we die.
God knew our plight. He heard our cries for help. In his love, he sent his only Son into the world to save us.
Jesus’s Death Takes Away Our Sins
“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). Jesus is the eternal Son of God, through whom all things were created. But, for our sake, he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:6-7). The Creator took on the nature of his own creation!
Jesus, both fully man and fully God, lived a perfect human life doing the Father’s will without sin. He did this for our salvation. For at the end of his life, he willingly “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). Jesus offered himself to the Father as a perfect sacrifice to take away our sin. Our sin was great. His grace is far greater, as evidenced by God raising Jesus from the dead, proving that his death was not in vain and that he truly is the Son of God. Death and sin have been destroyed. Jesus, the God-Man, lives and reigns in heaven now and forever.
But he is not simply watching the world from a distance. He is reaching out to us each individually. Jesus says to you, at this very moment, “Follow me” (Mark 1:17). How will you respond?
Surrendering Our Entire Lives to Jesus
The gospel means “good news.” The good news is that Jesus rescues us from our sins and gives us new life. There is no sin so evil, no lifestyle so corrupt, no person so far gone that God will give up on us and withhold a final chance for redemption. God does not require a certain degree of goodness in order to be loved by him. In fact, there is nothing we can do to earn his love, to be worthy to receive his grace. Our salvation is a gift from God. The cost, though, is our entire lives. But this is part of the good news, because it’s entirely worth it. By surrendering ourselves wholly to God in return he, the God of infinite love and mercy, gives himself to us and grants us the hope of eternal life.
Christianity is not centered on a list of rules or doctrines we must believe. These are important but that’s not the heart of Christianity. The heart of Christianity is a person, Jesus Christ. He doesn’t want us just to know facts about him. He wants so much more. Our hopes, our desires, our struggles, our doubts, even our sin. He wants it all. Above all, he wants our hearts. Jesus says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt 6:21).
Surrendering our lives to God means we trust in Jesus completely seeking to do only God’s will, not our own. Jesus isn’t just one thing to add into the mix of your life. Jesus is the life. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). It's all or nothing. So how do we begin? How do we become followers of Jesus?
Peter tells us in his first preaching appearance after being filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost: “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). In this initial conversion we ask Jesus to forgive us of our sins, accept Jesus as our Savior by faith, and commit to follow him with our whole lives and with all our heart. We are baptized into Jesus’s death and resurrection, are cleansed of our sin, both Original Sin and all personal sin, and receive the Holy Spirit into our souls. We become a new creation, but more than that, we become sons and daughters of God.
This is the central gospel message. We are saved by believing in Jesus and surrendering our lives to him. But it doesn’t end there. As children, we need to grow as we mature in our faith and walk with Jesus. And all the baptized have the privilege to share this good news with others!
The Church & Ongoing Conversion
In the scene at the beginning Jesus is the man who pulls us out of the water and rescues us from drowning. But he doesn’t send us straight to heaven. Instead, he pulls us onboard the Ark of Salvation, the Church. Why do we need a church? Well, Jesus could have saved us any way he wanted. He didn’t have to die, but he did. He loves us that much. He didn’t have to establish a church, a community of imperfect saints in the making that gets to receive the supernatural graces of the sacraments, but he did. He loves us that much. Jesus established the Catholic Church to be the instrument of dispensing his grace into our souls because the truth is we are ever in need of a deeper conversion. We continue to sin and always need more grace. Conversion isn’t a one-time event. We need to grow in faith, surrender more fully, and be transformed by the powerful graces made available in the sacraments.
Baptism is the passage of entry to the Church and life with Jesus. In baptism, our sins are washed away and we receive the Holy Spirit. Faith, hope, and love are infused into our soul. But aboard the Ark, we continue to stumble and fail to love God and each other well. Thankfully, no matter how many times we fall away and sin, Jesus welcomes us back with open arms and offers words of healing and forgiveness through the sacrament of Confession. Speaking through the priest, Jesus absolves us of our sins and restores our relationship.
The climax of our life with Christ is receiving Jesus himself in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us his own body and blood to consume, uniting himself to us in the most intimate way here on earth. He says, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:54-55). This supernatural meal available at every Mass gives us new life now, uniting us with each member of the body of Christ, and is a foretaste of the perfect union we will experience with God in heaven.
Jesus established the Catholic Church to share his life to us, especially through the sacraments. He also established the Church as the instrument by which the world would come to know him and his teachings. By passing on his teachings to the Apostles, who in turn passed on his teachings to their successors, the bishops, Jesus uses the Church as the conduit to share the joy of the gospel. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to guide the Church so that we could have confidence in the truths necessary for salvation and know how to live good and upright lives. The Church, by God’s design, leads us on a path to true freedom and happiness. By following the Church’s teachings, frequenting the sacraments, growing in prayer and fellowship with other believers, we grow into the fullness of who we are called to be.
The gospel is the greatest love story known to man. Jesus loves us so much that he became man, suffered a humiliating death on the cross, and rose from the dead, all to create the path of reconciliation between God on mankind. By giving our hearts to Jesus, he promises to grant us the fulfillment of all our desires, leading us to eternal life with the Father. In the end, “[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more … for the former things have passed away. Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev 21:4-5).
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