vintage Gospel

This past summer I had the opportunity to serve in the San Juan mountains in southwest Colorado at a Christian camp. The experience had a huge impact on my spiritual outlook and perspective. Thanks to solid leadership, I was able to study the huge issue of what the Gospel is and what it means to every follower of the Way. Put simply, the Gospel is what Christianity is and should be about. Without, the Christian life is reduced to a mere works based religion and you may as well just put it on the shelf with Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, take your pick. At the center of the Gospel lies the God-Man Jesus Christ. Based on His work that He completed on the cross we no longer have to strive to obtain a works based salvation. Put simply, Christ came to redeem us, or buy us back if you would, from a terrible position of certain damnation. He did something that we could never do in and of our own power. He layed His life down in our place so that we don't have to spend an eternity in total separation from our Father.

In todays realm of Christianity, I feel we have lost in a sense the beauty of the Gospel. In all reality, it should be lived out each and every day. Especially in Western life and culture we expect to have this "spoon fed" Christianity and feel as if we attend church once a week and decide to pray for our food twice a day, then we're alright with God. In a positional sense, sure go on with your apathy and keep sucking on that baby bottle. Things start to get a little tough and you remember, oh yeah, God. What can He do for me? We rarely take a serious look and ask ourselves, what can I do for Him? It seems as if we must lose all faith in ourselves before we can place all of our faith in Him.

With all this said, I would like to encourage all of you to take a look at the book of Galtians in relation to what we're facing today. This is the only letter that Paul penned in which there is no mention of commendation for the recipients. A lot of it had to do with the fact of how serious the matter was at hand that Paul was dealing with. Search it out, I feel you'll be truly blessed.