Web Stuff Wednesdays

Hello again from your friends at Church Plant Media. We’re here with a few more ideas for your church website content. With Advent upon us and Christmas quickly approaching, we wanted to encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to share the gospel online. As we all know, this is the time of year when people are the most likely to attend your church service and visit your church website.

In his book, Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus, Pastor Jared Wilson writes, “The gospel’s content—Jesus’s sinless life, sacrificial death, and bodily resurrection—is deep and multifaceted… Or we may say that the gospel is a diamond—it is… one precious jewel with many different facets, each with a brilliance and vision of its own.” With this in mind, we acknowledge that there are as many different ways to share the gospel as there are facets on a diamond. But even the beauty of a diamond can be conveyed with simplicity.

Although we thank God for all of the church websites that clearly articulate the good news about Jesus, we are also very aware that not every church takes the opportunity to tell it often and tell it well. Sadly, many churches preach about the law (God’s commands) as if that were the gospel (God’s gift). Many other churches don’t even mention the law when presenting their version of the gospel. We want to advocate for a proper use of both law AND gospel when telling the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

In order to share the gospel on your church website, you first need to understand what the gospel IS NOT before you can rightly share what the gospel IS. To understand the difference, we recommend listening to the helpful sermon What Is The Gospel? from our friend, Dr. Voddie Baucham. You can also view the transcript and read along while you listen. To save you some time, here are all of his main points:

Romans 9:30-33 is about a difference between works and gospel.
#1: The gospel is not just how we get saved or a plan of salvation.
#2: The gospel is not the commandments to love God and people.
#3: The gospel is not the teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels.
Romans 1:16-17 is the thesis statement for the book of Romans.
#1: The gospel is news and we cannot live out front page news.
#2: The gospel is God-centered and it is not man-centered.
#3: The gospel is Christ-centered and is not just theological.
#4: The gospel is cross-centered and is not about your worth.
#5: The gospel is grace-centered and is not a result of works.
#6: The gospel is eschatological and is not psychological.
You look at everything though the prism of the gospel.

Dr. Baucham summed up his message with this exhortation:

We can remember that… can’t we? It’s news. It’s God-centered. It’s Christ-centered. It’s cross-centered. It’s grace-centered. It’s eschatological. We can remember that. What is the gospel? It is an announcement of what God has done in Christ through the cross by grace to give eternal hope to those who have faith in him. That’ll do in a pinch.

This is the kind of gospel that churches need to be sharing on their websites. A gospel that explains both the problem (how we broke God’s law) and the solution (how Jesus paid our fine). The father of the Reformation, Dr. Martin Luther once said, “The first duty of the gospel preacher is to declare God’s Law and show the nature of sin. Why? Because it will act as a schoolmaster and bring him to everlasting life which is in Jesus Christ.” Three centuries later, Charles Spurgeon the “Prince of Preachers” taught his congregation a similar truth:

I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the law. The law is the needle, and you cannot draw the silken thread of the gospel through a man’s heart unless you first send the needle of the law to make way for it. If men do not understand the law, they will not feel that they are sinners. And if they are not consciously sinners, they will never value the sin offering. There is no healing a man till the law has wounded him, no making him alive till the law has slain him.

We urge you dear brothers and sisters in Christ, please share both the law AND the gospel. Don’t mix them up and don’t preach one without the other. Both are needed. Think about them like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in the same manner that Goldilocks considered the Bears’ food and furniture: the first was “too hot” and “too hard” (the law by itself), the second was “too cold” and “too soft” (the gospel by itself), and the third was “just right” (the law and gospel together).

Here are 2 creative videos that share the law/gospel in less than 5 minutes.