THIS IS THE GOSPEL

Dr.  W.  A.  Criswell

1 Corinthians 15:1-5

1-15-56    7:30 p.m.

 

Tonight we begin in what is possibly the greatest chapter in the New Testament.  That is, there are many theologians who so look upon it.  The fifteenth chapter of the first Corinthian letter is certainly one of the great, great chapters in all the Word of God.

Not that I follow their theology, though it is a lot better than some of the theology of these modern generations, but a theologian like Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, those eschatological theologians, those apocalyptic theologians, those Christological theologians, those men who are the greatest theologians of our living day, those men say that all revelation and all theology reaches its climax here in the fifteenth chapter of the first Corinthian letter.  Well, certainly there is not a greater chapter in the Bible, no one more positively, gloriously, victoriously triumphant than this one.  This is all heaven and all victory and all glory to God.  So tonight I am going to preach on the first verse of this chapter, and then as the Sundays proceed there may be several sermons.  I do not know, but there will be a few sermons on the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians.

Now this is the way it begins:

 

Moreover, brethren, I make known unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye received, and wherein ye stand;

By which also ye are saved…

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures;

That He was buried, that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures;

That He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve;

Then of five hundred…

Then of James, then of all of the apostles.

And last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.

 

A Jew that saw the Lord Jesus and was miraculously, gloriously saved.  The first one, the harbinger, the earnest of the whole nation that one day will be born again, like Paul, out of due time—an abortion before the time.  Oh, this chapter!  So we go back, “I make known unto you the gospel.”  And the title of my sermon tonight is This Is the Gospel, The Good News, the glad tidings.

And there are, there are three things—I do not follow them tonight, but just to give you a preview of the chapter—there are three things that he says comprised the gospel.  First, the atoning death of our Savior; He “died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”  Second, the glorious resurrection of our redeeming, living Lord, “And the third day He arose again according to the Scriptures.”  And then the third thing: His incomparable, blessed return, which is over in the rest of the chapter, “I show you a mystery; We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound.”

And as Paul says elsewhere, “the Lord shall descend…and we will all be changed.”  My soul, who would not say that a chapter like that was the glory of God Himself?  Now this thing, “Brethren, I declare, I make known unto you the gospel.”  That is what you see in the ordinance of baptism, and that is what the ordinance of baptism signifies; that is what it means.  Any other thing than that is an invention, somebody thought it up.  And you can give it any meaning that somebody might want to give it meaning to.  You can change it, but that is the real thing.  That is the ordinance of God and it has a meaning.

Both of these ordinances have a tremendous meaning.  The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper has a meaning, a significance.  This is bread broken that represents His body.  This is the fruit of the vine, the fruit of the cup that represents His blood.  And we are to do that until He comes.  This also has a tremendous significance, for in baptism we are buried with the Lord in the likeness of His death and we are raised from the watery grave in the likeness of His resurrection.  And that is the gospel.  Well, that is what Paul said it is: He was buried for us—He was—He died for our sins.  He was buried, and He rose again for our justification.  And He says that is the gospel.

When a man stands up in a pulpit and he preaches, and you say, “That man preaches the gospel,” what do you mean?  Why, we mean that man preaches Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification.  That is what you say in the baptistery.  That is the symbol of baptism.

When you send out a missionary to China and send him over there to preach the gospel, what does he preach?  That is what he preaches: that Christ died for our sins and He was raised for our justification.  And that is the thing you see in the baptistery.  That is the meaning of baptism.  The significance of baptism lies in its mode.  If you change the mode, it has no meaning.  Baptism is a burial with Christ and a resurrection with Christ, which Paul says is the gospel.  So that initial ordinance is a picture of the saving grace of God in Christ Jesus.

Now Paul says, “I never invented that.”  He says, “For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received.”  Paul is not an originator.  He is not an inventor.  He is a deliverer.  He is like John the Baptist.  He was a voice crying the message of God.

That is what any true preacher is.  He is not up there in the pulpit telling ingenious things that he has devised.  A true preacher of Christ is a fellow that holds that Book in his hand and he tells the people what God has to say in the Book.  That is all, that is it.  And what he has to say does not matter.  And what Rabbi Smalfungus has to say, that does not matter.  And what old Dryas Dust is teaching there in the school, that does not matter either.  And what old Dr. Soundingbrass says, that does not matter either.  The only thing that matters is, “What does God say?” A man is to be a deliverer of a message and not an originator or an inventor.  Well, that is what the Book says.

I heard a fellow very dramatically one time give an illustration of that.  Oh, there was a king of England over there, King George or King Edward or King James, or there was somebody!  There was a king of England over there, and he was broadcasting a message to the entire world, oh, to the colonial empires, and the commonwealths, and the dominions, and I do not know what all.  And it was being delivered over here in America.  And the whole world was going to listen to the King of England.

And just as the king stood up to speak, the cable broke.  And I do not know where the cable broke or how that is set up, but anyway, the cable broke somewhere in the control room, and it was an awful thing—and oh, this fellow described it so dramatically.  And what that fellow up there who operates the apparatus, what he did was—and this is so dramatically told—he grabbed hold of one end of that broken cable and he caught the other end of that broken cable, and while those electric currents went through his body just like that, why, why, the king’s message was delivered, because it was sent through his quivering flesh.  Well, that made an impression on me.  At least I remembered the story.

Well, that is a good illustration of this thing here, whether it is melodramatic or not.  That is what a man of God is, and that is what Paul said he was.  He just delivered the message.  It went through his heart, through his voice, his brain, his soul.  He delivered what God had told him: and that is the gospel.

Now that word gospel; “Brethren, I make known unto you the gospel.”  What does that word mean, the gospel?  Well, look it up in your Webster’s Dictionary and this is what you will find.  Webster says the word gospel is an old Anglo-Saxon word and it means godspell or good spell.  Now they, they differ then from there.  Some of those learned men who write that dictionary, some of those learned men say that comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word “God,” God, God, God, and “spell,” which means story or tale.  So the word gospel means “the God story, the God tale, the God tidings.”

Then there are others who say that word “god” comes from the Anglo-Saxon “good”—and I cannot umlaut out those vowels very well—but good, you know, like goody, good-spell, and that the word means good, our good, good news, good tidings.  That is what they say.

Now the Greek word is that latter one, that Greek euaggelion.  “Evangelistic” comes from it.  Euaggelion, the Greek word here, “gospel,” means “the good news, the glad tidings.”  And that is what the angel called it and described it when they came down from glory and appeared to the shepherds.  “And they were afraid and trembled.  And the angel spoke and said, ‘Fear not ye, fear not.  Do not be afraid; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.’”  That is the gospel: good tidings, glad tidings, hallelujah news.

When you see a fellow, and he gets a message, look at his face, look at his face.  Why, you can tell just like that whether it is good news or not.  If he is sour and morose and funereal, it is bad news.  But if his face lights up and he has got a smile and he is glad, that is good news.  You can see it on his face.

Now the Bible says the gospel is the glad tidings, it is the good news.  But believe me, you would not, you would not think it to look at a lot of people, would you?  My soul, my soul, when they come to church and when you get around them, they give you the creeps.  They got religion, they say.  Brrrrr! They are, they are long-faced, and their funereal expressions and their morose demeanor and their unhappy, despairing, miasmic outlook.  Brrrrr! Religion, religion! That is not religion.  Religion is good news.  Religion is “Hallelujah!” Religion is “Glory to God!”

And then there are other people, when they think of religion, they think of it in terms of some dull, dry, stupid sermon.  That is not religion either.  Real religion has got the light of God in it.  It has got glory in it.  It has got happiness in it.  It has got gladness in it.  It is the good news and it makes you, makes you live, it quickens you.  It makes you alive, makes you glad, makes you happy, makes you want to shout, “You got religion, Brother! Good news, good news!”

I one time heard of a fellow whose heart overflowed in church, and while the preacher was preaching he said, “Amen!” And in a little while, why, the preacher said something else good, and he got religion and he said, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” And oh, and the preacher got to weaving away, and that guy felt happier than ever and he said, “Glory to God!”  And an usher went over there and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Listen here, Brother, shut up.  Shut up, cannot you see, cannot you see you are bothering our preacher?”

And the fellow replied, “But I cannot shut up.  I got religion.”

And the usher said, “Shut up, anyway.  You did not get it here.”

It is good news.  It is a happy day.  It is a glorious day!  It is a marvelous day.  It is the gospel day.  It is the day of grace!  It is the day of victory.  It is the day of triumph.  It is the day of resurrection!  It is the day of everything good!  That is the gospel.

And there is nobody in the earth that sing like Christian people sing, nobody in the earth.  Nobody in the earth has got a choir like this choir—unless the church next door has.  There is nobody like us, nobody.  That is God in us; that is the Lord’s power upon us, I say.  It is the good news.

Let me tell you, I can remember—can you?—I can remember the battle over there in the Philippine Islands and the men of Bataan and Corregidor.  And when that fortress fell, and those remaining survivors were taken by the Japanese, do you remember that?  And do you remember the death march of those survivors from Bataan?  Do you remember that?  And do you remember MacArthur saying, “I shall return?”  Do you remember that?  And do you remember the days when our men went from victory to victory and island to island?  Do you remember that?

And do you remember the day when they did that bold and unbelievable thing?  When the islands were still in the hands of the Japanese, our American soldiers found out where those men in Bataan were being starved as prisoners.  And they found it, and they organized an expedition, and they went up to it, though it was far in enemy territory.

And those Yanks came with snippers, wire cutters, in their hands, and they surrounded that barbed wire and they began to cut it open.  And those poor American boys on the inside who had been in that death march and who had been starved to death, and who had gone through every kind of privation, and sorrow, and persecution, and hurt, and beating, those men, when they heard the commotion, they were afraid, they trembled.  That meant death, they thought.  And one of the men spoke and said, “Steady there, boy, steady there; the Yanks are here, the Yanks are here.  This is liberty, this is freedom.”

And they gathered those men that had been on that death march from Bataan.  They gathered together and they rescued them and brought them back.  And do you remember the story read in the newspaper, do you remember it?  Those men, the American Army, when those boys were brought back on the death march, when they were brought back, those men lined up the roads for miles on either side and stood at attention as those boys marched by.  That is good news, is not it?  Good news, “Steady there, buddy, the Yanks are here.  This is liberty, this freedom, this is glory.”  Good news!  Good news!  That is the gospel.  That is the gospel.

“Fear not; I bring you this day good tidings of great joy.”  Well, why?  Why good news?  All right, this is the why.  That is what the chapter is about.  This is why this is the good news, the gospel is the good news. First, it is the good news because the grave and death are no more—not to us, not to us.  That is good news.

All of this chapter here, the rest of it, that is what it is about: death cannot even approach a Christian any longer.  No more this old Adam may die.  It may go back to the dust, but we are going to exchange this old body that ages, and decays, and decomposes, and goes back to the ground.  We are going to have a better body, a resurrected body, a glorious body.  And that is the good news.  That is the good news.  Paul says, “For me to live is Christ, but to die is gain.”  That is good news.  That is good news.  No more death nor fear of it, no more grave and its victory.  This is the good news.  Christ has been victorious for us over death and the grave.  That is the gospel.  That is the good news.

What is the good news?  This is the good news.  Our sins are all taken away, “I delivered unto you that which I received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”  That is the good news.  “God commended His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  That is the good news.  Psalm 103 says He has taken our sins and He has separated them from us as far as the east is from the west.  How far is that?  500 million, trillion miles that direction and 500 trillion, million miles that direction—I do not know how far the east is from the west, but however far that is, that is how far God has separated our sins from us.  We do not suffer them.  We do not die for them.  We are not judged for them anymore.  Christ has borne them away.  That is the good news.  That is the good news.  That is the gospel, “He has died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”

What is the good news?  The good news is that our judgment is past.  Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus.”  John 5:24, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”  That is the good news.  That is the gospel.  That is the glory of the Son of God.  There is no judgment day for us, just a day of rewards for what we have done that is good and blessed.  But the judgment day for us is past.  Our judgment was the day of the cross, when the Lord died for our sins.  That is the good news.  That is the glad tidings.

I grew up ’way out there in the Panhandle, in the northwestern part, and I have seen those prairie fires cover the horizon.  At night you can see that dull red glow on the horizon.  People frightened, for sometimes, if a wind catches it, a prairie fire will go faster than a horse can run.  It is a devastating and terrible thing.  I have seen lots of times when the men in our little town would be called out, and every boy and every man that could walk and do would go out there to fight an enormous prairie fire.

If you are ever caught in the front of a prairie fire, what would you do to save your life?  What would you do?  For a prairie fire will destroy you.  It destroys everything in its path.  And I will say, it can run faster than a horse can race.  What would you do?  This is what you do.  Get you a match and light a fire around you.  And let the wind catch it and burn out a great area of the prairie around you.  Then stand in the middle of that burnt area.  And when the great prairie fire comes, it does not burn there, it is already burned; and the fire goes around you, and you live.

That is what it is to be safe in Jesus.  The judgment for us is already past, it is already over.  It fell on Jesus at the cross.  He died in our stead, that is the good news.  That is the gospel.  We are saved through Him.  We will never be judged.  That is the good news.  What is the good news?  We are reconciled to God in the Lord Jesus Christ, “And while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, how much more, being reconciled, we will be saved by His life.”  [Romans 5:8,10]  We are reconciled to God by the death of His Son; that is the good news.  That is the good news.  Everything is all right in our Father’s house, reconciled by the death of His Son.

Some of these things that I remember are all, so many of them are melodramatic.  I do not do much of it.  As I got older, I got away from it.  But when I was a boy, when I was a boy, listening to those preachers, mostly unlettered, and untaught, and unlearned in a little bitty church, as I listened to them, they would talk about things like this a great, great deal.  And I remember them.  It made an impression upon me.

And this is one of them, this is one of them: reconciled to God by the death of His Son.  One of those men told a story that he got from somebody else, I am sure.  But the story was this: there was an Englishman and his wife, well-to-do with only one son.  And that boy grew up, the only child in the home, and they spoiled him.  And they ruined the lad, and he grew up a brat.  He grew up incorrigible.  And he grew up and he broke the heart of his father and his mother.  And the father and the son often quarreled.  And upon a day in one of those bitter quarrels, the father said to the son, “Son, you have broken your mother’s heart, and you have broken my heart.  Now you get out and do not you ever come back again, do not you ever.  You get out.”

And the boy said, “And I will get out and I will never come back until you ask me to come back.”  And the father said, “I will never ask you to come back.”  And the boy in his rash statement said, “And I will never return.”  And the boy left.

Now that is father and son.  And a father can get rid of his boy and, to some extent, forget him.  But you cannot do [that] in a mother’s language and in a mother’s soul.  She grieved for that boy and she grieved for that son.  And she wrote to the boy, pleading with the boy to come back.  And he said, “I will not, until my father asks me.”  And she pled with her husband, “Please, ask for the boy to come.”  And the father said, “I will never ask him to come back.”

And the mother grieved like a mother would.  And she grieved her health away and her life away.  And the physician came in to see her.  And he said, “There is nothing I can do.  I have no medicines for this.  This woman is broken-hearted, and she is grieving herself to death.”  And when she became so low, her husband there by her said, “Something I could do?”  And she looked at him, and he knew exactly what that look meant.  And she said, “Will you send for our boy?”  And the father said, “Why, I will.  I’ll tell him you want to him to come back home.”  She said, “He won’t come.  You have to do it yourself.  Please, please, for my sake, before I die, could I see my boy just once again?”

And the father acquiesced.  He went to the dispatcher’s office, and he sent for the boy.  And the boy came.  And when the boy came, and came into the room, why, the father—there by his wife—the father got up and turned his back and looked out the window, wouldn’t even look at the boy.  The boy came over to his mother.  And she hugged him and kissed him and so good and glad to have him.  And she said to the son, “Son, speak to your father.  Speak to your father.”

And the boy said, “I won’t.  Not until he speaks to me first.”  And she said, “Husband, this is our boy.  Speak to your boy.”

“I will not.”

In despair, that poor mother seized the face, seized the hand of her boy, and reaching out, seized the hand of her husband.  And pulling their hands together, she joined them and looked longingly into the face of her husband and in despair and grief into the face of the boy.  And she died there, holding their hands clasped together.  And the boy looked down into the face of his mother and up to his father, and the father looked down into the face of his wife and across to the face of his son, and together they opened their arms.  They fell into one another’s arms.  They kissed one another and wept away the days of their sorrow.

Those old-time preachers that I used to listen to would tell things like that.  And I never forget them.  Then that old preacher would make his point.  As that obstreperous and hardened father and that wayward and prodigal boy were reconciled over the death—by the death of that dear mother, we are reconciled to God by the death of His Son.

The illustration, like all illustrations, it isn’t quite true.  It doesn’t quite fit.  But the sentiment is true.  We were enemies to God, the Book says.  We were wayward and prodigal, the Book says.  And God’s face was turned away from us, the Book says, and we were in the way of the wrath and the judgment of a righteous and holy and indignant God.  And the Lord Jesus Christ in His death dragged the winepress of the fierceness of Almighty God.  As and the Revelation says: “Which red blood flowed out.”  In the death of His Son, in the death of the cross, we have our reconciliation with God.  Sins paid for, atonements made, you are welcome back.  Whoever you are—vile sinner, that all of us are—we are welcome back, welcome back, arms outstretched, like the father in the parable looking down the road waiting for the prodigal son.

And as Paul says in the fifth of 2 Corinthians, “As ambassadors for God, God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.  We plead with you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.”  [2 Corinthians 5:20] Come back home.  Come back home to God.  Come back to the Lord.  The good news is the door is open and welcome.  That’s the gospel, that’s the glad tidings.  It's heaven now.  It’s forgiveness now.  It’s glory yet to come.  “I declare unto you the gospel, He died for our sins; [was] raised for our justification; [is] someday coming again for us in glory.”  [1 Corinthians 15:1]  That’s what it is to be a Christian, to accept the marvelous overtures of grace and love and mercy from Christ Jesus our Lord.  That’s it.  That’s it.

While we sing our song tonight, somebody you, somebody you, accept Jesus.  Accept the goodness and the grace and the mercies of God.  Take Him as your Savior, trust Him.  Would you come and stand by me?  “Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him I will confess before My Father which is in heaven.”  [Matthew 10:32]  We’re to do it openly and publicly.  “I accept the free pardon of God for my sins.  I’ll take Him as my Savior; the atonement mine. I’ll believe.  I’ll trust.  I’ll pray for my unbelief and my distrust.  That God will give me greater faith.”  Some of you to come into the church, “Put my life here in the church.”   While we sing, while we make appeal, somebody you, would you come?  Will you come while we stand and while we sing? 

 

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