The Heart of the Gospel: God's Transformative Love & Grace
Grounded in the Gospel part three. The cross of Christ reveals God's love and unleashes God's grace so that we are given a new identity as a child of God.
So far in this series I introduced what the Gospel is and outlined what the Gospel contains. We can summarize both of those so far in one sentence:
The Gospel is news about: 1) who Jesus is, 2) what Jesus did, and this news is good because 3) we sinners have a broken relationship with God that, 4) can be restored if we trust in Jesus by faith. Or to put it another way: trust by faith (4) in the one-and-only God-Man Jesus Christ (1), who was crucified in our place and who rose from the dead (2), so that our relationship with God—which was broken due to our sin (3)—can be restored for eternity.
Relationship restored is what the Good News of Jesus is all about. God wanted relationship in the beginning by creating Adam and Eve. The Fall of mankind into sin messed that relationship up, and there have been consequences ever since. But God the Father made a way to get His kids back. That way is Jesus. That way is the cross.
In this article—part three of the series—we will get more practical by zeroing in on the heart of the Gospel. What we’ll find is: the Gospel introduces us to a loving Father who transforms us through grace—by giving us a new identity—thanks to the cross of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Christ Crucified Shows God’s Love
The Bible is crystal clear that the sending of Jesus to die on the cross—for the sake of people who don’t deserve it—demonstrates God’s love toward us.
Romans 5:6-8 says:
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (ESV, emphasis mine).
Similarly, John 3:16-17 says:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him,” (ESV, emphasis mine).
And lastly, 1John 4:9-10 says:
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” (ESV, emphasis mine).
Jesus emphasized this self-sacrificial goodness of God when He called Himself the good shepherd who lays His life down for the sheep (John 10:11,15) and who goes out of His way to rescue lost wandering sheep (Luke 15:3-4).
God cares about lost sinners and wants to see them come back home, like the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). In the parable, the younger son: loses his way, makes a fool of himself, hits rock bottom, realizes he made a mistake by sinning against his father, and decides to head back home unsure if his father will receive him back or not. The father’s response was compassion and love, so much so that he ran to his son and embraced his son as soon as he saw his son returning. Then he threw a party and treated his sinner of a son like he was royalty. A loving Father wants His lost kids back, and heaven rejoices when the kids come home (Luke 15:7,10).
Only a God who is love (1John 4:8,16) is willing to put on flesh and have the nails marked with our name on them driven into His hands and feet instead. Jesus gave His life for us because that’s what love does.
If the Gospel is the news about what Jesus did so that our relationship with God can be restored (which it is), and if the sending of Jesus to die our death in our place was motivated by love (which it was), then at the heart of the Gospel is the love of God. God is good! God the Father’s arms are wide open for those who come to Him on His terms. His arms are open to forgive repentant sinners, and He is ready to receive all who want to be His children.
Your New Identity as God’s Child and His Friend
Faith in Christ is not merely a mental decision. It involves death and birth. It’s an identity change down to the nature of your being. The old you dies and the new you is birthed by the Holy Spirit (John 1:12-13, John 3:1-15, 1John5:1) in a supernatural activity that we Christians call being “born-again,” or sometimes we call it “regeneration.” These terms signify that an internal transformation takes place. It happens because God does it. God accomplishes this miraculous work of implanting His Spirit inside you when you trust Jesus by faith. Through this spiritual birth, the Holy Spirit takes the resurrected Christ and infuses His nature into us (2Peter 1:4). That is why the Bible says a Christian becomes a new creation according to the image of Christ (2Corinthians 5:17, Colossians 3:10). Galatians 3:26 says “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith…” (NIV). Similarly, 1John 5:1 says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…” (ESV).
When you place your trust in Christ by faith, God through the Holy Spirit turns your sin-loving heart of stone to a God-loving heart of flesh (Jeremiah 31:31-34, Ezekiel 36:24-28). God takes wandering orphans and adopts us into His family as His children, filling us with His very own Spirit so that we know we are His (Romans 8:9,15, Galatians 4:6) and so that we can live like we are His (John 15, Romans 12:1-2). God transfers you from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:13). You go from a child of the devil to a child of God (John 8:44, 1John3:10). You go from an enemy of God (Romans 5:10, James 4:4) to a friend of God (John 15:15, James 2:23).
A Christian is God’s friend. A Christian is a child of God. A child of God is loved by God the Father and loves the Father back. Because the relationship is restored thanks to Jesus’ work on the cross, there is a genuine love and affection God wants us to experience. It’s not a theoretical love, but it is a real love because the relationship is real. The apostle Paul in Ephesians 3:14-19 prayed that we might comprehend, know, and experience this love:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14-19 ESV, emphasis mine).
Arguably the biggest perk about being God’s kid, is that you have the opportunity to get to know Him relationally. Knowing God is not some presumptuous hubris thing. Knowing God is what God desires for every one of His kids. God put on flesh, suffered, and died, so that we can begin to enjoy relationship with the Father—for the rest of eternity, yes—but also right now. The great J.I. Packer once wrote: “What were we made for? To know God. What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God. What is the ‘eternal life’ that Jesus gives? Knowledge of God…What is the best thing in life, bringing more joy, delight, and contentment, than anything else? Knowledge of God….Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.”[1]
During Jesus’ high priestly prayer in which He prayed for us right before going to the cross, He said: “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” (John 17:3, emphasis mine). If you’re a Christian because you’re trusting Jesus by faith, you will know God face-to-face in the age to come after Christ returns, but you can start getting to know Him now. A great way to start is to read the Bible, see how God has revealed Himself through His Word, and start talking to Him in prayer.
The Great Exchange of the Cross: Jesus Takes Your Sin, Gives You His Righteousness
The heart of the Gospel is God’s love that makes the grace of God available to us, thanks to the Father sending His son to save us by dying on the cross. The identity change into a child of God takes place through the cross. Understanding the great exchange of the cross is really the meat of the power of the Gospel. When I talked about the four essentials of the Gospel, #2 was “what Jesus did” (His crucifixion and resurrection). That was big-picture and brief. So, let’s go deeper. Where the rubber really meets the road with the cross is whether we understand what happened through the cross and how it affects us right now.
The great exchange goes like this: Jesus died our death, so that we receive His life. Jesus willfully took what He did not deserve (John 10:18). Sinners—by faith—are given what we do not deserve (Romans 3:22-25).
Jesus died our death & bore our sins
Jesus is God who was without sin, who: lived a perfect life, completely fulfilled God’s law, was innocent of any wrong doing, but was crucified by evil men because it was God the Father’s sovereign plan to rescue us back to relationship with Him. Jesus died a sinner’s death, even though He was with without sin. He died that sinner’s death so that we don’t have to, which is mercy (not getting what we deserve). Thanks to Jesus taking our place on the cross as our substitute, we who trust in Him by faith are spared the wrath of God (1John4:10, 2Peter 3:10-13). God’s future wrath will passover us because Jesus is our Passover Lamb. 2Corinthians 5:21 captures this well: “He [God the Father] made Him [Jesus] who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” (NASB). That verse encapsulates the great exchange.
When 2Corinthians 5:21 says Jesus was made “to be sin on our behalf,” what that means is Jesus took our place on the cross as our substitute. And it makes more sense in light of the system of sacrifices in the Old Covenant. The entire Old Covenant model of continual animal sacrifice—which unlocked some measure of forgiveness of sins for God’s people—was meant to point ahead to Christ and meant to be fulfilled in Christ who offers complete forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22,10:4). Jesus is the perfect once-and-for-all sacrifice who unlocked and secured God’s mercy (Hebrews 10:1-18). The point of sacrifice was always mercy (Hebrews 10:5-10, Hosea 6:6, Matthew 19:13). The point of sacrifice was always restored and maintained relationship (Leviticus 1-7, 1Samuel 15:22). Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross in our place provides forgiveness of sins to those who repent, who believe in Him (Acts 2:38, Ephesians 1:7, Colossians 1:14, Titus 2:14).
We get Jesus’ life & righteousness
But as you can see, 2Corinthians 5:21 also captures something else. Jesus’ death also provides grace (getting something we don’t deserve), because we receive Jesus’ very own perfection. The end of that verse says: “…so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” (NASB). The key words here are “in Him.” The righteousness of God is only found in Christ. So, when we receive Christ through faith, we receive His righteousness.
This is known as the great doctrine of “justification by faith alone,” which has rightfully been brought back to the center stage of Christianity thanks to the Protestant Reformation. When a person has faith in Jesus Christ, they are justified by faith, not by their works (Galatians 2:16). Or to put it another way, we receive not a righteousness of our own but a righteousness “which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith…” (Philippians 3:9, emphasis mine). If we trust Jesus, we are justified in God's sight—as if we never sinned—because Jesus’ sinless life is transferred to us from God’s perspective. We not only receive a neutral standing with God because of forgiveness of sins, but we also receive a positive standing with God thanks to Jesus’ imputed righteousness.
We get a fresh slate, and we get new clothes clean as snow. All thanks to the cross. All thanks to Jesus.
Co-Crucified and Co-Resurrected in Christ
Within Protestant evangelicalism we tend to emphasize Christ dying for us and Christ being risen from the dead for us. Those are bedrock truths that should be emphasized. What sometimes gets lost by those emphases is realizing that I have been co-crucified and co-resurrected in Christ. This is a very biblical truth that takes the cross from something distant occurring a long time ago to someone else (Jesus), to something deeply personal that affects me right now. For me personally—thinking back to the first couple years after I became a Christian—the Gospel made more sense to me and I started experiencing the power of God’s grace in my life more when I started identifying myself as being co-crucified and co-resurrected in Christ.
If you trust Jesus by faith, then God considers you “in Christ” right now. There is a union to Christ that is true on a spiritual level because of the work of the Holy Spirit when our faith is in Jesus. Because of our union to Christ, we are joined to Jesus’ death and His resurrection.
The Bible says that if you’re trusting Jesus by faith, the old you died on the cross. The basis of this is found in Romans 6. The Holy Spirit says in the inerrant Word of God that “our old self was crucified” with Christ on the cross (Romans 6:6, emphasis mine). That is past tense. This is true for you as a Christian even if you’re not aware of it. This is difficult for the natural mind to understand because spiritual wisdom taught by the Holy Spirit is spiritually discerned, not naturally discerned (1Corinthians 2:14). So, I get it if your brain says ‘me dying in-Christ on the cross doesn’t make sense.’
The same Romans 6 passage also talks about us identifying with Jesus’ resurrection. Here is Romans 6:3-11 with the parts about co-crucifixion and co-resurrection in bold:
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death He died He died to sin, once for all, but the life He lives He lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:3-11, ESV).
Another way to think about being co-crucified in Christ is circumcision of the heart. The Old Covenant practice of circumcision was meant as an identifier of who was a child of God, but it was a type or shadow of the heart circumcision of the New Covenant that takes place through the Gospel of Christ crucified. For example, Paul says in Colossians 2:11-12, “In Him [Jesus] you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were raised with Him through faith in the powerful work of God, who raised Him from the dead.”
The apostle Paul understood these truths, which is why he said confidently “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me,” (Galatians 2:20). If you are a Christian, then the old you—who was a powerless slave to sin—died in Christ on the cross. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory,” (Colossians 3:3-4). That is why God says you are no longer a slave to sin, that you are free from the power of sin (Romans 6:14-23). Jesus bore your sin on the cross (Hebrews 9:28). Jesus defeated sin through the resurrection and therefore you can have victory over the power of sin now because you are in Christ. The new you that is born of God is able to obey and please Him because you have the Holy Spirit in you now who produces the fruit of the Spirit (John 15:1-11, 1John5:3, Galatians 5:22-23). You have been changed from the inside-out.
These scriptures have clearly said that we share in Christ’s resurrection in some capacity now, but it is also true that our final resurrection has not occurred yet. The resurrection of Christ we share in now is of the Holy Spirit sharing the nature of the resurrected of Christ with us in making us a child of God. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you now (Romans 8:11). Yet, we still have our old bodies and old mindsets that need to be renewed according to the Word of God as we experience temptations. The resurrection life of Jesus we have now through the Holy Spirit is a down payment, a taste of what’s to come (2Corinthians 1:21-22, Ephesians 1:13-14).
If you find this reality of being co-crucified and co-resurrected in Christ confusing or challenging—or if you want learn more about it—I highly recommend a book written by little-known wise old sage Dan Stone called The Rest of the Gospel. This is the #1 book I recommend to new Christians and also to believers who want/need to be revitalized by the Gospel of grace and by the power of the cross. I read that book a couple years after being saved, and it helped me embrace the great exchange of the cross even when at times it felt too good to be true.
Almost Too Good to be True
I have heard trustworthy pastors that I respect say that you know the Gospel is being preached correctly when it seems too good to be true by those listening. What these pastors are getting at is how immensely good the Gospel is, and how immensely undeserving we are of Jesus. It’s possible to imagine dying for a good person who might be deserving of it—just as it’s easy to love people who love you back—but it’s a lot harder to die for a sinner or to die for your enemy (Roman 5:6-10, Luke 6:32). But that’s exactly what Jesus did. And that’s what God the Father wanted, because He loves you. He wants relationship with you, the type of relationship a good loving Father has with His children.
In the next installment of this Grounded in the Gospel series, we will look at the how this too-good-to-be-true feeling people sometimes get when they hear the Gospel can become an obstacle that prevents people from receiving God’s forgiveness.
[1] J.I. Packer, Knowing God. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 29.
About the Author
Colin Rieke is a regular guy whose life was really messed up before finding wholeness in God’s grace through Jesus Christ. Colin is a writer/podcaster, loves having conversations with people about truth, and aspires to be a vocational pastor-theologian. Colin reads theology, church history, and biblical counseling books in his spare time for fun, and he is passionate about offering biblical solutions to people’s real life challenges so that they live healthy lives transformed by God’s grace. Colin became a Christian as an adult around the time he graduated from college with a BA in Philosophy, then he met his wife Rachelle at church, and they got married in 2016. Colin graduates from Phoenix Seminary with an MA in Christian Ministry in 2025, and hopes to either finish his MDiv thereafter or pursue a PhD.
