The Gospel is Simple—Stop Overthinking It, No PhD Required

The gospel is simple and available to all. No, it is not. I tried to be saved, and it did not work. Yes, it is complicated. How do I repent correctly and have enough grief? She is exactly right. What must I do? I have done everything. Do done. You seem to be trying to save yourself. Stop trying to do and trust that Christ has done everything required on your behalf. Listen to what this pastor shared on how simple the gospel is.

The gospel, however, must be simple if it is to be made available to all. Aren’t you thankful that you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in philosophy to be saved? I mean, that would be awful if you had to be an expert in all the various philosophies and know how to thread the needle through the good and the bad of all the different philosophies of the world and all the religious teachers. If you had to sort all that out. What a disaster that would be. But we have something else entirely. We have a simple, basic gospel, easily understood and made available to all. And if even children can be saved, then it must be simple. How can you have a gospel that children can be saved by a message they need to believe if they can’t understand it? It has to be simple and basic, and the gospel must be simple because it’s not something you have to accomplish, but rather receive. It’s simple because someone else did it all. You just have to receive it. If it were instructions about all the things you had to do in order to be saved, you might expect it to be very complicated. You have to do this, and you have to do it this way and not that way and not that way and not that way and not that way, but this way. Not that way and not that way. Just being impossibly hard. All the things you have to do perfectly. But someone else in the gospel. The good news is someone else had done all the things perfectly that we couldn’t do right. Christ came and lived a sinless life and died as a substitute sacrifice for you. That you might just believe that and receive it. Have your sins forgiven, be made right with God, be ushered into the kingdom of light? What a thing! What a simple gospel.

Many in the world are offended at what a child can understand. Let’s think of it this way. Suppose you had been dealing with a problem for years and years. It was causing you lots of time and money and effort to deal with this thing. And for years and years, you have been dealing with it in a certain way, or you’ve been trying all sorts of new things all the time, trying to figure it out ineffectively, and then all of a sudden, someone else comes up with the very basic, simple idea that when you hear it, it feels too simple. It feels foolish, like a child came up with this thing. It’s ridiculous. You might laugh at the person and say something like, no, no, that would never work. And the idea is rejected. But suppose someone, your neighbor, decides, you know, maybe that is a good idea. And they just they implement it and it gets used and it works. And immediately the entire problem goes away. Now you can see that the idea was rejected merely because it was simple when in fact it was the best solution, the only solution.

Now, some people still don’t like it because it feels beneath them. They might say something like, well, I wouldn’t, you know, I wouldn’t think of something like, I’m smart. And I didn’t think of that, but I wouldn’t think of that because that’s too simple. A simple-minded person would come up with that solution. I’m not like that. I’m sophisticated. That’s beneath me. It’s like, well, but the only solution there is, it’s like, well, okay, but that’s, you know, but I still deal in the realm of complicated things. And that’s, that was why I didn’t come up with that. That sort of a thing. I wouldn’t think of something like that because it’s just too simple. The reason that person thought of it is because they’re so simple-minded. The person who’s intellectually prideful will look down on even the best solution merely because it’s simple.

This is the way it is with the gospel. Many people reject the gospel because it’s simple. It’s just too basic. It’s too childish. A little kid can believe it. How can this be the grand solution? The power of God in the world is something a child can understand. Seems ridiculous. It’s got to be more complicated than that. And you can imagine all the long-robed professors at colleges and various places, you know, not liking the idea that the greatest thing they could know is something that little children could understand, the thing that would transform their life and society. It’s not all they’re learning, but this very simple message to say that the message was, can save the world and fix the greatest and most difficult issues facing humanity, can be easily understood by a child, is deeply offensive to many. It’s simply too low a thing for them. It requires nothing from them but humility, sincerity, and honesty. But what they love is intellectual complexity and puzzles and competing schools of thought and the grandiose language of teachers and personalities.

It is what Paul says to the Corinthians: Greeks seek wisdom. Many today are put off by what they consider the utter childishness of the Christian message. To be sure, a person must humble themselves as a child to enter the kingdom, right? Unless you turn, Jesus says, and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. You see, the gospel is not about making much of you, but requires you rather to realize your foolishness before God or anyone who refuses to do that ever enters the kingdom. You need instruction from God. You need His help. And it’s a simple message that He’s offered to help you with. It’s basic. God sent His Son into the world so that anyone who would believe in Him would live forever and not perish in judgment. It’s pretty simple.

This excerpt is from Pastor Chad Thompson’s Roman series, which you can listen to on Christ Fellowship of Hannibal’s YouTube channel.