I WOULD REMIND YOU
Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. (1Co 15:1-2)
Paul reminds the Corinthians of the Gospel. Did they forget? Do we forget the Gospel? I mean, how could we?! (And, so what if we do? So long as we believed it, right?)
What is the Gospel
The Gospel—the Good News about Jesus—is spelled out in the following verses: “That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve…” (1Cor 15:3-5)
Notice a few key features. The Gospel is about Jesus, the Christ. It is not about us, the sinner with a self-improvement plan. The Gospel is “according to Scripture.” That is, it is not a separate thing discovered within the dusty collection of Jewish history known as the Bible, but rather it is “in accordance with” the Bible; it is the fulfillment of the Bible’s message. Also, the Gospel is real history. It happened. The Gospel happened within the story of the Bible, and within the real world.
The Gospel is the Good News about all Jesus really did, according to God’s plan as described ahead of time in the Bible.
Why we need reminders
We need reminders of things that are important, but that we tend to forget. We don’t want to forget them, but we tend to and do.
The Gospel falls into this category. It is very important, but the relevance of Jesus to our laundry, bills, and errands can seem a stretch, and the story of the Bible seems complicated, and, well, it happened, which is great, but then so what now?
But the Gospel is too important to be forgotten. It is a message that changes the relationship of everything in our lives to everything else in our lives. It’s understandable that we forget it, but it’s not good.
We need reminders because we forget. We have limits in how much we can pay attention to. Forgetting is built into what we are. We forget because we are limited, and because we prioritize other things. We always remember priorities. We also forget because we get distracted. What we remember are those priorities that we pay attention to. So we forget if there’s a shift in our priorities or a shift in our attentions.
Who can remind us
Why don’t we like to be reminded of things? Reminders call attention to our limits, our misplaced values, our distractibility. We don’t like to think about these things. But we need to be reminded. We are limited creatures who tend to be distracted and to misjudge what’s valuable.
So we need something that we don’t like. We need to be reminded, but we don’t want to be reminded.
Do we want to be reminded more than we want to let ourselves forget the Gospel? That’s a value question. (The answer is “yes.”)
We need to give permission, therefore, to someone or some community to do for us something we’re not necessarily going to like, but that we know we’ll truly appreciate. So we not only allow them to remind us, we ask them to remind us. We want them to do something we need but won’t like.
Who will do this for you?
God designed the church to be the place—the community and the event—where that reminding happens. Without regular reminding, as Paul goes on to explain, the power of the Gospel in our lives begins to dry up. It gets to where Paul begins to wonder whether the Corinthians have believed in vain or not. That’s not a conversation you want to have!
But the power for Christian living doesn’t flow from a list of shoulds or oughts but from the Gospel truths about Jesus found in Scripture. It pours forth from Him, and enters our hearts and lives, through our remembering. So we need friends to remind us.
So don’t be afraid to remind each other of the good news of the Gospel. (And don’t be surprised if they’re a bit offended.) Don’t be offended when you’re reminded of the good news of the Gospel. We like to give advice, we like to receive tips’n’tricks. But what we need is to remember who Jesus is, what He has done, and what this means for us. That’s what we need to know, which will produce in us steadfast, immovable, abounding energy in service for Jesus’ sake. (1Cor 15:58)
Heavenly Father, our world and my heart are bent towards novelty, towards quick, superficial, solutions to our problems. But what we need is not something new, but something old, retold. And what we need are not bandaids but nutrition, not shallow crutches but deep solutions. So as we enter, again, the Christmas season, help us to see past the shiny, the plastic, the novel, to the dim and quiet room where lay the Savior of the world. Give us good ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to receive, the many layers of the message of Christ and all it means for us. In His Name, Amen.
Photo by Pratik Gupta on Unsplash
