The Good News

 

Jesus came to give us Good News! This good news is called the gospel. At Pine Grove Community Church we like to share the good news that Jesus shared. Jesus said that He had come so that we might have life and to have it abundantly! Jesus wants to radically change our lives—for the better. He wants to take away a life marked by aimlessness and hopelessness, and fill it with passion and purpose.    

For us to truly understand the good news, we need to understand the bad news. The bad news is that we are sinners who are separated from God because of our sins. The Old Testament Prophet Isaiah said, “Your iniquities (sins) have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear." We need to understand that every one of us has sinned and that sin has placed a barrier between us and a Holy God that loves us.

The Bible tells us, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  Every person stands guilty before a Holy God who demands holiness. This is truly bad news. There is nothing that we can do to remedy this situation on our own. Romans 6:23 says that “The wages of sin is death.” As we go through life living independently from God, living life for ourselves, we sin, and God’s Word says that the wages we will pay for committing that sin is death. Death means eternal separation from God in a place called hell.      

We cannot “make up” for our sins. We cannot earn forgiveness. We cannot do enough good things to pay the price for our sin. So what do we do? Since God loves mankind so much, He put a plan in place. His plan was that His son Jesus would come to the earth and live a perfect life, a life that we cannot possibly live; then He would pay the price for that sin for us. He would willingly die on a cross in our behalf as the perfect substitute to pay the price for our sin. II Cor. 5:21 states that "God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."  

Jesus summed up the gospel very well in John 3:16 when He told us how much God loved us and what God did in our behalf, so that we could be in a right relationship with God and have eternal life in heaven. In John 3:16 Jesus told us: "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” God loves us, so much that He sent His One and Only Son to die on a cross in our behalf; the good news is that if we believe the message about Jesus, we can be forgiven of our sins and made right with God. A person who truly believes in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ will live a life marked by repentance. When we truly believe, we will turn from our old life of selfishness and sin to begin a new life that is marked by a desire to obey God and to follow Christ.     

The good news of the gospel truly changes lives! We have seen it many times over at Pine Grove Community Church. We have seen alcoholics leave their life of addiction to alcohol and become truly changed people, men who love their wives and their children. We have seen people with chaotic and aimless lives transformed to people with a passion to tell others about the life changing power of the gospel.       

We invite you to join us and to watch Good News at work in the lives of the people at PGCC.