Saturday, August 20th, 2022.
Have you ever heard someone communicate salvation and do a wonderful job right up until the end? Right when it’s time to pull out the hammer and nail home the gospel, you get hit in the face with a wet noodle!
Here are some popular wet noodle gospel verses:
John 1:12 – Receive Jesus!
John 3:3 – You must be born again!
John 3:16 – God loved the world!
John 14:6 – Jesus is the way, truth, and life!
Acts 2:38 – Repent and be baptized!
Acts 4:12 – Believe on the name of Jesus!
Romans 6:23 – Eternal life is a free gift!
Romans 10:9-10 – Confess with your mouth and believe!
Revelation 3:20 – Open your heart door and invite him in!
Did you notice a pattern in each of these popular “gospel” verses? None of them include the gospel that saves today, namely, Christ’s death for your sins and his resurrection to give you life.
The way God saves, the very preaching of the cross is absent… whoops.
Most of these popular verses include an appeal to believe, but without telling men what to believe, faith is in vain and men cannot be saved. Blind faith is no faith at all.
In half of the gospel verses above, Christ had not died yet! The preaching of the cross was not yet known. This means the faith being preached was not faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ by the cross.
In 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 Paul writes “I declare unto you the gospel… by which also ye are saved… how that Christ died for our sins… he was buried, and that he rose again the third day…”
The gospel is explained in detail in Romans 3-4 where Paul concludes that “[Jesus] was delivered for our offences and was raised again for our justification.”
Noodles are delicious, and I love to eat them, but they are the wrong tool to hammer a nail.
Not knowing where to find clear gospel verses in the Bible means you are wet behind the ears.
For His Glory,
Justin “hit it on the head” Johnson