If we are going to share the Gospel in a post-Christian culture, we have to be clear on what exactly the Gospel is ourselves. We’ve spent the previous two installments of our teaching series, When Faith Isn’t Assumed, talking about the reality of truth and the person of Jesus. Today we are rounding out this sequence by coming back to Jesus again. This time, instead of focusing so much on who He is, we are giving our attention entirely to what He does: Jesus saves. Let’s talk about it.

The Message that Saves

If you were to walk up to a random stranger on the street and tell them you think they are a sinner in need of salvation, you may get one of a variety of reactions, but none of those will likely be very positive. They may just roll their eyes and walk away from you. They may tell you where to take your opinion of them. They might even punch you in the nose for saying something so offensive to them. Simply put: They won’t like it. But just because they won’t like hearing it does not for that reason make it any less true. 

The truth about this world is that it is broken. We may not agree on how. We may not agree on the ways that brokenness manifests itself. We may not even agree on what counts as brokenness and what doesn’t. But we nonetheless agree that it is indeed broken. Take the recent culture-wide debate over immigration enforcement as a prime example of this. To oversimplify things a bit, you have one side that is utterly convinced that those opposing immigration law enforcement and the tactics of those who do so actively are as wrong as they can possibly be. They are contributing to lawlessness and a host of other problems facing this country. Meanwhile, the other side is equally convinced that those who are pushing for broader and stronger immigration law enforcement are the moral equivalent of Nazis and they are increasingly bolder in such assertions. Now, whichever side you happen to fall on here—and that’s between you and God; I’m not judging one way or the other—it is clear that these two sides are about as far about as they could be on what is right in this situation. Yet in spite of that, they are in complete lockstep with each other on the fact that we are facing grave problems as a culture. Our world is broken. There’s simply no denying it. 

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to solve the problem either. We have. A lot. We’ve tried all sorts of different methods to fix it. We’ve tried laws. Then more laws. And then, when those didn’t work, we tried even more laws. We’ve tried various religious solutions…which are really just a different form of rules and laws to solve the issue. We’ve looked to moral reformers who give stirring speeches about the need for us to do this or that to make things better. We’ve tried punishing those who contribute to the problem more stringently. We have tried more different solutions than we can count. For all of this variety, though, there is one thing all of these different solutions have had in common: They have all relied on external means to get the job done. Again, what exactly these means have been are all over the map, but they have nonetheless all been external to us. 

All of these solutions have been external to us because try as we might, we can’t seem to get at what’s inside of us very well. In fact, we can’t get to that at all. We can only ever deal with external matters. Now, sure, we can do some introspective work either on our own or with a therapist—and sometimes that’s a really good idea—but this only ever gets us so deep. The brokenness that keeps working its way out of us no matter what we seem to do on the outside, though, comes from a level more foundational than even something like intensive psychiatric treatments will ever be able to touch. 

In all of this, two things very quickly become clear. First, external solutions aren’t getting the job done. And while it is tempting to throw up our hands and just embrace the chaos, standing in the way of this is the fact that we don’t like the chaos, and the fact that something inside of us—some memory from the distant past that continues to haunt us—knows that the brokenness and chaos aren’t how things are supposed to be. The other thing that keeps rising to the top here is that we seem to be the source of the problem. The evidence for this is that it only really exists where we do. Yes, there’s an element of brokenness to creation itself as demonstrated by things like natural disasters, but the real and most significant problems consistently come from us. What’s more, everyone contributes to the problem in some way, shape, or form. Even if someone’s personal contribution seems small to us, they are still contributing to it. In other words, we are all part of the problem. I mean, yes, we want to excuse ourselves, but in our most honest moments we know we can’t. Oh, and there’s one more thing: We don’t seem to be able to solve this problem on our own. It’s like we’re just trapped in the mess, and nothing we do ever manages to get us out.

Well, what do you call someone—or a whole group of someones—who are in a situation that is actively harmful to them in some way, but which they are powerless to escape on their own? I don’t know about you, but I would call those people slaves. They are prisoners to this situation, whatever it is, and the only way they are going to get out of it is for someone else to help them. They need—we need—saving. The only real question that remains here is this: Who is going to help us with this? 

Now, my guess is that most of you probably didn’t need to have that particular case made for you this morning. We didn’t get all the way to the end of the argument where a full and clear Gospel presentation could happen, but you could see where I was going with that, right? You had already accepted that argument when you walked in the door. But what you have now heard is one way to present the need for salvation to someone who doesn’t already believe it. That’s what it looks like to share the Gospel with someone else. That’s not the only way to do it. And in practice, it’s probably not going to look exactly like that even if you take this path because the other person involved in the conversation represents a variable that could take things off in all sorts of different directions. But it is one approach to doing it. And for the last couple of weeks, with another couple to go, we have been talking about sharing the Gospel with folks who don’t know it. More specifically, we have been talking about sharing the Gospel in a post-Christian culture where faith isn’t assumed. 

A post-Christian culture is one that used to mostly trade on ideas and beliefs that are rooted in a Christian worldview context, but doesn’t any longer. Europe, especially Western Europe, is a post-Christian culture. Where it hasn’t been taken completely over by Islam, most of Europe is actively returning to a modern version of the paganism that Christianity drove out more than 1000 years ago. More personally than that, we are living in the midst of a post-Christian culture. We are more religious than our European counterparts, and there are still many elements of Christianity left in our cultural memory, but they are fading quickly. Sharing the Gospel in this kind of an environment doesn’t look the same as it did a generation ago. If we don’t approach it in a different way, we’re going to run into nothing but frustration and failure. 

To this end, in the first part of this journey we talked about the importance of establishing a foundation of truth. This is because a post-Christian culture is also often a post-truth culture. Without a God in whom we can objectively root the truth, truth becomes whatever we make it to be. And, in this situation, the person with the most power gains the ability to force whatever he sees as the truth on everyone else around him. In answer to this awful state of affairs, the Scriptures remind us that the way that seems right to us may not actually be the right way to go. It may be a way that leads to death. Truth doesn’t come from within. It is revealed to us by a God who loves us. 

Then last week, we shifted from talking about truth in the abstract to talking about the person to whom the truth points: Jesus. With the help of Paul’s incredible exaltation of Christ in the opening of his letter to the Colossian believers, we marveled together at just who Jesus really is. As Paul highlighted Jesus’ cosmic deity and His intimate, personal involvement in our salvation, what became unavoidably clear is that Jesus is in a class all to Himself. There’s just no one else like Him in all the world. There never has been. There never will be. 

Well, knowing who Jesus is is something that is vitally important. But knowing who Jesus is is not something that we learn and share for its own sake. We have to move on from there to what Jesus does, what Jesus did, and what Jesus will continue to do until His final return and the restoration of all things. And we did that some last week, but this week, I want to dive even deeper into what Jesus came to do. Jesus is the eternally preexistent second member of the Trinity, the source and substance of creation. What Jesus came to do is with all the power of God working in Him and through Him to reconcile our relationship with our heavenly Father by paying the price our sins demanded with the sacrifice of His own body in our place. In other words: Jesus came to save us. This morning we are going to come back to Jesus one more time, but this time we are going to focus in on just one thing: He really can save us. 

Jesus proclaimed this message Himself several times and in several ways that have been preserved for us in the Gospels, but the first time this was publicly proclaimed by someone other than Jesus was on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit first arrived and filled the original group of 120 Jesus followers who formed the first church. Peter delivered this sermon, and he preached a message that we need to not only hear ourselves, but which should form the core of all of our efforts to proclaim the Gospel still today. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Acts 2, and let’s take a look at what Peter had to say. 

Acts 2 opens with the promised arrival of the Holy Spirit. Jesus had told the group to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit arrived before they went to try to do anything particularly active to carry out His instructions to make disciples of all nations. He didn’t tell them exactly when the Spirit would come or how they would know when He arrived, so they all just stayed together, took care of some administrative details in managing the group’s leadership, and prayed. When the day finally came, there was no denying what was happening. The Holy Spirit arrived in grand fashion and made quite a scene with His entrance. It was enough of a scene with all the disciples speaking in languages other than their native Aramaic, that a crowd gathered outside the room where it all happened wondering what was going on inside. Seeing the crowd, Peter walked outside and let them all in on the secret: God was doing the very thing the prophet Joel had told the people would happen when the last days finally arrived. 

He went on from there to tell them pretty directly how it had happened and what their role was in all of it. Look at this with me now starting in Acts 2:22: “Fellow Israelites, listen to these words: This Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs that God did among you through him, just as you yourselves know.” In other words, everybody there knew who Jesus was and what He was at least rumored to have done. They all likely knew about His death at the hands of Rome. “Though he was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail him to a cross and kill him.” It may have looked like Jesus’ end was tragedy and chaos, but God knew just exactly what was happening and how He ultimately wanted things to unfold. 

Yet Jesus’ apparent end at the hands of Rome—hands the Jewish religious leadership acting as representatives of the people themselves put Him in—was only apparent. His end was not the grave He was buried in after He died, but something entirely more glorious than that. “God raised him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by death.” On the third day after Jesus was dead and buried, He rose again in power and glory. And this was all precisely in line with what God the Father had told the people was going to happen through the prophets. “Brothers and sisters, I can confidently speak to you about the patriarch David: He is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn an oath to him to seat one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was to come, he spoke concerning the resurrection of the Messiah: ‘He was not abandoned in Hades, and his flesh did not experience decay.’” Having proven by the Scriptures that it had to happen, Peter goes on next to state the truth to the people as plainly as he could in v. 32: “God has raised this Jesus; we are all witnesses of this.

Raising Jesus from the dead wasn’t something God did only for the sake of Jesus alone. He did it so that He could pour out blessings on us through Him, starting with the blessing of the Holy Spirit whose coming precipitated all of the action taking place here. “Therefore, since he had been exalted to the right hand of God and has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit, he has poured out what you both see and hear. For it was not Dvaid who ascended into the heavens, but he himself says: ‘The Lord declared to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”’” Even more explicitly than this and using language now that would have grabbed hold of the attention of everyone within the sound of his voice, Peter states plainly what’s going on here: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” 

That word, Messiah, meant something to Peter’s Jewish audience. It meant something similar to, but also different from what we hear when the word is spoken. For them, it meant that God hadn’t abandoned His people. It signaled the beginning of the time when He was going to return to rescue and restore them from their badly broken state back to the wholeness and holiness He had planned for them from the beginning. This salvation that they were picturing was a good thing, but it was also a thing very much limited to them. The standard understanding of God’s action on behalf of His people in that day was that it was going to be for them and only for them. No one else was going to benefit. That, of course, is not nearly all God actually had in mind, but the right response to His work was the same whether they properly understood its full extent or not. 

Struck to their core by this incredible message of hope, the crowd cried out to Peter what their response should be. Verse 37 now: “When they heard this, they were pierced to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles: ‘Brothers, what should we do?’” That is the question, isn’t it? What should we do in light of this incredible news about who Jesus is and what He has done for us? 

Peter doesn’t leave them—or us—hanging. “Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’” Got that? The right response to who Jesus is and what He has done is to go to Him with a heart of repentance, be baptized as a sign of the forgiveness you have received in Him, and to by all of that receive the filling of the Holy Spirit who will enable and aid you in walking the path of repentance. If you haven’t done that, you need to. If you did it once long ago, but never really did anything about it, you need to make it official. If you have done it in the privacy of your own head and heart, you need to make it public. You need to plant your flag firmly and boldly on the ground that Jesus cleared, on the rock of who He is. You need to let Him save you from your sin, from the prison that you have spent far too long trapped in, contributing in one way or another to the world’s brokenness. That’s the only response that makes any sense. 

What Jesus did, He did for you. He did it to save you. And save you He can. Because as Peter makes clear here, Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. If you are willing to trust in Him, Jesus will save you too. He will do it for anyone and everyone. “For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” And how do you know if you are one “the Lord our God will call”? Because you answer His call. His call is for everyone. His call is for you. Will you answer it? Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. 

This is the news we need to receive if we are going to proclaim the good news to a culture that needs to hear it. This is a message we need to make sure we are proclaiming to that culture. Jesus is the answer to that question we left hanging at the beginning. He is the one who will save us from the mess of our sin. He will save everyone from the mess of their sin. Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. He saves the people we expect. He saves the people we don’t expect. He saves the people who are like us. He saves the people who are nothing like us. He saves the people who don’t even like us (and sometimes we return the disfavor). Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. 

Friends, this is a message that needs to be heard. It is a message Jesus Himself called us to proclaim. If we are going to see His kingdom advance, it is a message we have to proclaim. We can’t grow the church on community alone—although that matters a great, great deal even as we have been reminded lately by having it taken away from us. Community will strengthen the existing church, but like water poured into a cistern quickly goes stale if it is not actively flowing back out, unless we are actively proclaiming the Gospel to others who have not heard it and also inviting folks who are following Jesus but don’t have a firm and clear church home to connect with this one—that is, unless we are actively and intentionally reaching out with the good news of the Gospel—our community will eventually grow stale and poisonous. That’s not something we want. Proclaiming and sharing the Gospel is how we help avoid that. We share the news that Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. 

And the incredible thing here is that we don’t have to wonder about the results of getting this right. Luke tells us. Check this out with me in the epilogue of the chapter starting in v. 42. We’ve talked about this before and recently, but it’s worth hearing again because this is where we are aiming our efforts. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayers.” In other words, they were committed together to being the church. And as a result, “everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.” 

Let that picture fill your mind and direct your imagination. This was a community that was thriving in every respect. There would yet be challenges they would have to overcome both internally and externally. But they were being the church together. They were impacting their community together in ways that would spread out in waves, eventually changing the whole world. But they weren’t just being the church for themselves and by themselves. They were telling others about it. They were inviting others to take part in this incredible community with them. They were living bold as believers in their communities. They were proclaiming the Gospel publicly and privately. They were living out the love of Christ in practical, meaningful ways. They were demonstrating what the salvation of Jesus looked like where people could see it, and they were backing up that demonstration with direct invitations to anyone and everyone to come and experience it for themselves. They made sure their community and beyond knew beyond a shadow of doubt that hope and help and life—that salvation—was available in Jesus. Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. 

And in the end, look at what happened. “Everyday the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” God honored their faithfulness, He honored their efforts to proclaim the Gospel, to share the message of salvation in Christ with those who would hear it, and He turned hearts and minds to build up their community, making it stronger and stronger and stronger. And eventually, they changed the whole world. Whether we are sharing the Gospel in a mostly Christian context, a pre-Christian context, and anti-Christian context, or a post-Christian context, the message is still the same: Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. If you know it, you need to share it. You need to invite someone else to experience it with you. That can start with something as simple as an invitation to church. Most of you are here because you were invited. Pay that forward by being the reason someone else is here like you are this time next year…next month even. If you responded to someone’s invitation, so will they. If, on the other hand, you don’t know it, then it’s time to embrace it. Jesus saves all those who trust in Him. That’s what we proclaim. Starting next week, we’ll wrap up this journey by talking about a couple of specific ways we can gain inroads to sharing it.