What is the Gospel?

Sitting with one of our youth pastors this past week, he turned to me and asked “What is the Gospel?”

After pausing a second I answered as most of us would.  The Gospel, good news, is a personal relationship with God.  It’s John 3:16 that “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
This pastor then asked me, is the Gospel only personal then, between God and the individual, or is it for the whole world?

I had to think about that.  Is the Gospel only the story of salvation, or is it something more?  Does it only create a world of those who are in (saved) and those who are out (unsaved)?  Can the Gospel also be the Muslim man receiving food, the Hindu child being healed, the atheist knowing love?

I honestly don’t know where those lines are drawn, but I do know that my grasp of the Gospel was expanded this past week through the youth groups here.

Let me start by saying Adventures in Missions firmly believes that God is living and active today.  That if we are willing to listen and seek God’s voice He will speak to us.  And we can act on what we hear.  We practice this in Adventures Youth by having the teams spend time in listening prayer before going out into the community.

During prayer one team received several images from the Lord.  Some got colors, yellow and blue.  Others saw pictures of a bananas, a boy in a yellow shirt, bare feet, running water, a child that was sick, and an old man that needed prayer.

As they walked out into the community, no one really knew what to do.  There were a lot of awkward starts and stops, staring down streets without direction, and several times when they wondered “what if” as they passed a yellow door, or a women walking barefoot.

Then they came across a table of bananas under a blue umbrella.  With boldness one of the students knocked and they were met by a woman who invited them in.  All along the walls were pictures and photographs.  Every single one of them included a person in a yellow shirt.  The team quickly discovered that there were 3 sick children in the house; only one of them was able to get out of bed to be prayed over.

After praying the mother gave each team member a banana as a gift.  The story continues not only that day, as the team was led to a house with an old man who was diabetic and they were able to wash his bare feet, but the following day when they returned to the home with the children.  What the team found were two children that were completely healthy and running around and a third who had improved greatly from the day before.

I realized after hearing their story that though gospel is about salvation and sharing Jesus it is also about hearing what God is speaking.  That He is speaking, not only about heaven and hell, but about heaven invading earth, through healings, provision and love.  It makes me wonder what kind of Gospel am I living?