And I am in the midst of this chapter now – Chapter 5 – “For”
“Gospel is the shocking, provocative, revolutionary, subversive, counterintuitive good news that in your moments of greatest
despair,
failure,
sin,
weakness,
losing,
failing,
frustration,
inability,
helplessness,
wandering,
and falling short,
God meets you there-
right there-
right exactly there-
in that place, and announces,
I am on your side.
Gospel insists that God doesn’t wait for us to get ourselves polished, shined, proper, and without blemish. God comes to us and meets us and blesses us while we are still in the middle of the mess we created.
Gospel isn’t us getting it together so that we can have God’s favor; gospel is us finding God exactly in the moment of our greatest not-togetherness.
Gospel is grace, and grace is a gift. You don’t earn a gift; you simply receive it. You don’t make it happen; you wake up to what has already happened.
Gospel isn’t doing enough good to be worthy; it’s your eyes being opened to your unworthiness and to Jesus’s insistence that that was never the way it worked in the first place.
Being a good person, then, naturally flows not from trying to get on God’s good side but from your realization that God has been on your side the whole time.
Gospel calls you to a major change in thinking, a giant shift in understanding, a massive leap in how you see yourself, otherwise, you’re stuck in the same old points program, trying to earn what is already yours.”
— Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk About God