My Experiences With The Gospel Essays Examples

When I look at the gospel through analytical eyes rather than experiential ones, what stands out the most to me is the sheer improbability of something like the coming of the Messiah, at least from a rational perspective. The desire for a Messiah was considerable, given that God’s chosen people were living in captivity for much of their history and longed for rescue. Isaiah 9:1-7 refers to the coming of a savior who would shatter yokes, bars and rods, and all of the means of war burned to make way for peace. Isaiah 42:1-7 echoes this by praising the coming Servant of the Lord, who was to bring justice and faithfulness and free those rotting in prisons and dungeons. Ironically, as Isaiah 53 attests, God’s chosen would not even recognize their savior but would instead despise him and destroy him for their own iniquities. Nevertheless, like the father of the prodigal son in Luke 15, God would still welcome each of us home when we are ready to accept Him. Like the patient Savior in Mark 5, Jesus would still drive out those compulsions that possess us. The same fate that brought Lazarus out of his tomb on John 11 awaits all of those who believe. In the context of my own major at GCU, my personal experiences, and modern society, this message is more resonant than ever.
I plan to teach at the middle or high school level, and so my major is in secondary education. One reason I feel called to work with this particular age group is that the secondary years are when children start to approach adulthood and begin asking the questions that will define their identities for years to come. Often, they feel that their parents are the very last ones who will be able to answer those questions for them, but when they feel respect and attention from a teacher, they will reach out for guidance at times. In addition to teaching my subject matter, I feel that as a teacher I can make a significant difference in shaping the priorities and ethics of the next generation of our nation’s leaders. While I plan to teach at a public school, I still want to instill the right sorts of ethics that point my students not only toward the possibility of the existence of God, but also toward the necessity of living the sort of moral life that makes one a powerful member of society.
My own personal experiences have brought me into close contact with the gospel. As a child, I had a neighbor who was one grade younger than me. He and his family were Jewish, but most of the people in our neighborhood were Christian. Many times, as we walked home from school, some of the other kids in the neighborhood would pick on him, calling him names like “Jew-boy” and “kike.” I asked my parents about this, and they told me that no one should use that sort of name, particularly someone who calls himself a Christian. After that, I helped stand up for my friend. My mother sat down with me a few weeks later and told me that Jesus taught us to love one another before all else, and that to stand up for my friend in the face of that bullying was the sort of love that Jesus taught. I wanted to know more about that love, and later when I came to believe in salvation, I knew that that same love would connect me to God and help me enter heaven, a place I knew I did not deserve to enter on my own merits.
Modern culture and society have very little in common with the gospel, particularly in the United States. Too many Americans focus on the self and on short-term solutions, with the ultimate result being that people place too high a reward on the here-and-now and the superficial rather than building the sort of discipline that is essential for appreciating the meaningful. One example of this is the recent success of the Martin Scorsese film The Wolf of Wall Street. For better than three hours, this film shows people using drugs, drinking and having sex (both as couples and in groups), in situations showing an utter lack of any of the disciplines that lead to long-term meaning, like compassion, restraint, grace or dignity. While it is a stretch to say that mainstream American society embraces the values of that movie, the fact that it was allowed to screen with an “R” rating and that the mainstream press has said nothing about its objectification of women or the sheer ridiculousness of trying to pass off a work of pornography as cinema is quite telling. Our lack of ability to focus on the truly meaningful means that the gospel lacks resonance with far too many Americans.
In general terms, the gospel is a radical reversal of many of the terms on which many of us live day to day. To imagine a deity not only taking on human form but then going through physical pain and death just to redeem the very people who are administering that pain and that execution is beyond the means of most of us. For those who are locked into a narcissistic world view, the gospel veers from a matter of faith to one of insanity. The fact that such love comes across as irony is perhaps the cruelest fact of all.