William Carey and the Gospel

I find that making the distinction between standing for one's own doctrine in comparison to taking a stand for the gospel is a important distinction to make. I agree that William Carey would have likely been the type of person that took a stand for the gospel. The problem that some churches have today is that they take a stand for their doctrine in such a way that it causes confusion among non-believers.

According to my understanding of the scripture, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact the three major points of the life of Christ is that he was born, died, and arose from the dead. Today many pastors will peach a gospel of prosperity, good works, the end times, or even social goodness and welfare.

The fear I have is that so many pastors believe that just about everyone has already heard about the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that they realize that in order to be successful in ministry that they have to make the gospel into something else that not everyone thinks about on a regular bases. The problem is that the birth, death, and resurrection are not just superficial occurrences that happened, but instead those are the focal points that all salvation flows from. In fact everything that exists and has is being reflects the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening showing a parallel to the birth and death of Jesus Christ, and the very next day the run rises again to symbolize the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We sleep at night to symbolize the death of Christ, and we awake in the morning to symbolize the resurrection. Normally any entertainment will have a beginning when people are getting acquainted with characters, processes, objects and such, a middle that comprises of a climax and conflict, and an end that describes a defeat of evil and restoration; moreover, thus even entertainment follows the paradigm of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The question that makes the gospel a very hard thing to express is the question of, "how do I get saved?" When this topic was approached with Jesus in Matthew 19:16-30, Jesus is seen advising a rich man to follow him, sell everything that he has, and to give it all to the poor for eternal salvation, and Jesus concludes the subject by saying that salvation is possible with God but impossible with man (Jesus however soon describes that the twelve will sit on twelve thrones judging the Israelites). The point to be made is that people often try to grasp for salvation as something that they can do or accomplish, but Jesus makes clear that this is not the case.

Most if not all doctrine that churches make up has much to do with the subject of what people must do to be saved, and this takes the form of beliefs, worship, teachings, practices, behaviors, feelings, and sometimes even works. For Paul he rests his salvation so much in the fact that he was crucified with Christ in Galatians 2:20 that for him salvation was not simply a matter of what he must do to be saved. Overall, when the Lord appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 22:6-12) with a great light, what had happened is that Christ had been 'born into Paul' (so to speak) as like seen in the 2 Corinthians 4:6 passage that talks about the light entering our hearts and giving us revelation (this light is Jesus as seen in John 1).

The gospel of Jesus Christ thus is not what we do, but it is what God has already done and continues to do. God continues to save people, but God has already saved us all from the time that he paid the price. William Carey would have had to have believed that something more than human efforts had been needed for salvation to be possible because otherwise he would have been ridiculous to have opposed the common norm, gone way out of his way to do evangelism, and even put missions above individual church doctrine; moreover, the human efforts of Carey would have likely been viewed negatively during his time by many people that commonly would have had other ideas about salvation.