The Apostolic Gospel: Introduction

A few months ago I viewed a television broadcast of a popular American religious speaker who has at times been criticized for a lack of faithfulness to the Christian message. So I was excited when a member of his organization introduced a video of the speaker by saying that he had recently preached the gospel to an enormously large crowd in a sports stadium. He repeatedly emphasized the point that the gospel had been preached. As I listened to the message, however, I was deeply saddened and troubled by its overall thrust, which essentially boiled down to the following themes: God wants you to be happy, successful, and fulfilled, and He wants you to do good things to other people. Perhaps I wasn't paying adequate attention, but I never heard the core elements of the historic gospel as presented to us in the record of the New Testament.

Not long afterwards I decided to do a thorough study of the apostolic preaching of the gospel as recorded in Acts. I chose Acts because the epistles are primarily written to existing first century believers and the Gospels present Jesus as the protagonist doing the speaking and acting. Acts on the other hand presents his followers proclaiming the good news about him to Jewish and Gentile audiences in various locations throughout the Roman empire. The results of my study were personally invigorating and in some cases surprising.

Several questions drove my inquiry: (1) What message did the apostles publicly proclaim? (2) Or again, what message did God anoint so as to produce conviction in the recipients' hearts and to confirm by way of signs and wonders? (3) What was its emphasis, and what are its elements? The presupposition behind this inquiry is that the gospel we preach today should be evaluated in light of the scriptural witness, which is to have authority over our beliefs and conduct.

This then leads to several more questions: (1) Are we preaching the apostolic gospel in its entirety, or are we leaving important elements out of our communication? (2) Are we including elements in our gospel presentation that had no place in the apostolic gospel, and consequently at best are distracting our recipients from the core message and at worst are undermining core elements of the historic faith? (3) Are we misplacing the emphasis of the apostles' message by focusing on things that may be biblically true, but were not considered central by the apostles to their public preaching?

In what follows I will attempt to answer the first set of questions, but anyone reading my material will have to answer the second set for themselves based on their evaluation of my study, the scriptural evidence, and their own gospel proclamation or that of others (although I'll make a few comments myself).

For those that may be interested, a brief summary of my findings were presented in a sermon entitled, "The Apostolic Gospel, the Original Good News." (The churches where I spoke were Every Nation Church Seattle, and Bethel World Outreach Center. The better of the two presentations can be heard here or downloaded here as an mp3 file. The sermon notes can be accessed here.)