What does the Gospel story mean for us every single day? Jason K. Allen explains more in an excerpt from his new book Being a Christian below…

The gospel is not just a message; it is a man—Jesus Christ. The message is only as powerful as the Man of whom it speaks. Thus, our response is not so much a response to a message about Christ; it is a response to Christ. We come to know Jesus and we experience his life through repentance and faith. These are gifts from God, and when we repent—turn from our sins—and place our faith in Christ, we are made right with him.

Through the power of Christ, the gospel saves us from our sins—in every dimension.

We most often think of salvation as freeing us from the penalty of sin, and that it does. Despite conventional wisdom, there is a hell to shun and a heaven to gain. Hell is a real place, populated with real people, experiencing real, eternal punishment. And those who die apart from Christ spend eternity there. As the above passage teaches us, those who die in Christ are “saved through him from wrath.” The gospel saves us from the penalty of sin.

The gospel also saves us from the practice of sin.

Christians don’t become perfect, but we do make progress along the way. Before our conversion, we lived, in the words of Ephesians 2:3, according to “our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath.” After conversion, the Holy Spirit resides within us, enabling us to live the Christian life. Our desires change as we mature in him, and we find ourselves able to increasingly honor him with our lives.

Finally, the gospel saves us from the pain of sin.

Many of us, perhaps you personally, live with a sense of guilt hanging over us. Filled with regret over past actions, words, or events, we wonder if God can even forgive us. The gospel makes all things new—including our past.

Remember, the gospel is for all, and the gospel is for you. There is no one beyond the reach of the gospel. There is no one too bad to be saved; there is no one too good to need to be saved.

Read more about how the gospel impacts all of us in Being a Christian today!