1 Cor 2:2   For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

     

The apostle Paul was totally focused. He knew exactly what the Gospel was all about. It was about Jesus Christ and about him being crucified for us.

 

The Gospel first displays Jesus as the Son of God from heaven. If he is not that then everything else is pretence. Only the Son of God was ‘big enough' to take the sins of each and every one of us. He is first and foremost the Son of God – divinity!

 

But then incredibly, despite his total goodness – or rather perhaps because of it – he was arrested, falsely tried, condemned to death and crucified. If that had been all that happened then we would have been left in doubt – was he just a man, a deluded man? But after three days he rose from the dead and we knew – this was God's Son and he has done what he said he would do, taken our sins, taken our punishment and earned our forgiveness.

 

These are the fundamentals of Christian belief and without them you have no belief. Without them we still have our guilt and our fear of being punished by God, and our sins, but now we know he has redeemed us by what he did on the Cross. We aren't redeemed by trying to be good, or by praying a lot and going to church. We are redeemed by one thing and one thing only – the death and resurrection of the Son of God. Rejoice in that daily. Give thanks for it!