Skip to main content

good news or good advice

D. Martin Lloyd Jones (the man with many names), when describing the gospel, differentiated between news and advice.  The gospel is good news; it is not good advice.  Advice is when you receive suggestions about something that may or may not happen in the future.   News, on the other hand, is a report about something that has happened and about which you can do nothing to change the outcome.  The only thing you can do with is news is respond to it.

When we proclaim the gospel as good news, we are not offering suggestions or advise about what to do; we are declaring what God has done — and how people ought to respond to it.  The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus cannot be changed.  There is nothing we can do to alter what happened 2,000 years ago.

All we can do is respond to it.

Perhaps our message would have more clarity and ring with more certainty if we saw ourselves more as news reporters and less as advisors.