I first posted a version of this in August of 2008. Beautiful truth like the riches of the Gospel merit repeated display.
---- ---- ----

My small group in Austin started studying through the Sonship curriculum in June of 2007, mostly meeting every two weeks, and we finished late this spring. The late Jack Miller founded World Harvest Mission and directed the development of the Sonship perspective. Sonship enfolds many things, including a relentless exposure of the idols we worship, an explication of what it looks like to live as “an orphan” and what it looks like to live as an adopted son or daughter of God.

I classify our small group as ‘broadly evangelical’ with a few of us shaped more particularly by Reformed theology. Also, we are busy. We studied this curriculum amidst demanding work and family schedules, home buying and moving for all but two of the participants, significant career change for an individual, a wedding for one couple, pregnancies for two couples. Thus, going through a Sonship lesson every couple of weeks didn’t necessarily upend the deeply sedimented notions of ‘broad evangelicalism’ with regard to the Gospel. Seeds were sown but the requirements for thriving in the everyday of work and family responsibilities were not fertile soil for the seeds.

Off the cuff, most people in our group thought this: the Gospel is a message for lost people to become Christians. More particularly, it’s a message encapsulated by four propositions. Believe this four point outline, pray a prayer, and the Gospel gets you into the Christian game. Sonship detonates this perspective of the Gospel, but again, while seeds were sown, there were years of broad evangelical teaching, singing, practicing, conferencing to undo.

After Sonship we began studying Galatians. The Holy Spirit continued and deepened His work in our group. As we have discussed the Gospel more directly, often in person-specific ways in our group meeting but also in informal discussions on the fly and over meals, the Gospel is not merely a message for unbelievers to become believers.

The Gospel does not only get one "in the game," after which people walk out their faith animated by discipline and obedience. Rather, the Gospel gets one in the game and is the game and is what brings a believer all the way Home. The discipline and obedience practiced by Christians flow from the Gospel, not as distinct-from-the-Gospel human work that engineers the favor of the Lord.

Naturally, it’s not appropriate to disclose in public the specific ways the Lord has applied the Gospel to individuals in our Austin small group. Generally, though, I can report that most of us have been changed, and at least one in our midst has experienced dramatic transformation. Here’s what we’re learning—the Gospel is multi-faceted. It is not merely Four Spiritual Laws. In fact, the Four Laws communicate only one half of one facet of the Gospel.

Justification is a great grace and essential—of the essence—of the Gospel. Justification is both the remission of sins by the work of Jesus on the Cross, and also the imputation of Jesus’ righteousness to believers (the half that the Four Spiritual Laws woefully neglects). All by God, all given by grace.

Is this the sum total of Gospel? Is the word “Gospel” coextensive with “Justification”? No. Everywhere we see euangelion in the Greek New Testament, can we substitute “Justification”? No.

Justification is an essential facet of the overall Gospel of the Kingdom of God. But so is adoption. So is redemption. Jonathan Leeman, who works with 9Marks Ministries, wrote a piece on this very theme. Jonathan and I have sparred in the past about the relationship of the Kingdom to the Gospel, and this article I came across makes me even more hopeful that Jonathan and I will someday be able to resolve our disagreement. Jonathan, in summary form, highlights the many facets of the overall Gospel message.

Excerpt from Leeman’s article

Yet Scripture gives us a variety of metaphors for explaining what Christ’s atoning work accomplished: propitiation, justification, reconciliation, redemption, freedom, adoption, conquest, and so forth. Moreover, it’s commonly pointed out that each one of these metaphors or family of metaphors carries with it a host of associations. Justification resounds of the law court. Redemption takes us to the marketplace. Reconciliation the family. And so on.

Not only that, when we add the array of emotionally resonant images from the vast tracts of Old Testament and Gospel narrative—”I brought you out of Egypt”; “You have played the whore with many lovers”; “my compassion grows warms and tender”; “Lord, I want to see!”; “The kingdom of heaven is like…”—we find ourselves with an embarrassment of riches for explaining the good news of what God has accomplished in our salvation.