This beautiful love story and your part in it unfolds like this:

1. The one and only God, who is holy, made us in His image to know Him (Gen. 1:26-28).

2. But we sinned and cut ourselves off from Him (Gen. 3; Rom. 3:23).

3. In His great love, God sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to come as Savior and rescue His people from their enemies—most significantly their own sin (Ps. 2; Luke 1:67-79).

4. Jesus established His Kingdom by acting as both a mediating priest and a priestly sacrifice—He lived a perfect life and died on the cross, thus fulfilling the law Himself and taking on Himself the punishment for the sins of many (Mark 10:45; John 1:14; Heb. 7:26; Rom. 3:21-26, 5:12-21); then He rose again from the dead, showing that God accepted His sacrifice and God’s wrath against us had been satisfied (Acts 2:24, Rom. 4:25).

5. He now calls us to repent of our sins and trust in Christ alone for our forgiveness (Acts 17:30, John 1:12). If we repent of our sins and trust in Christ, we are born again into a new life, an eternal life with God (John 3:16).

Now that’s Good News!

To better understand this Good News, it helps to biblically unpack the words God, Man, Christ, and Response.

God. God is the Creator of all things (Gen. 1:1). He is perfectly holy, worthy of all worship, and will punish sin (1 John 1:5, Rev. 4:11, Rom. 2:5-8).

Man. Man was created good (Gen 1:26-28, 31) but rebelled against God in the garden (Gen 3:6-7) and since the fall of Adam, all humans are sinful by nature and birth (Ps 51:5; Rom 3:23). "Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned... one trespass led to condemnation for all men." (Rom 5:12, 18) From birth, all people are alienated from God, hostile to God, and subject to the wrath of God (Eph. 2:1-3).

Christ. Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, lived a sinless life, died on the cross to bear God’s wrath in the place of all who would believe in Him, and rose from the grave in order to give His believers eternal life (John 1:1, 1 Tim. 2:5, Heb. 7:26, Rom. 3:21-26, 2 Cor. 5:21, 1 Cor. 15:20-22).

Response. God calls everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and trust in Christ in order to be saved (Mark 1:15, Acts 20:21, Rom. 10:9-10).

Material has been adapted from The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever, pg.43