The Gospel According to Matthew

This week I opened the Bible to study the book of Matthew. The last time I read something out of my bible was January 30th because school has been an actual hell hole into which I seem to have fallen. Please don’t follow in my footsteps and not read the Bible just because life gets hard. I’m really sorry to tell you this but life is hard and will always be hard and that’s really not an excuse to not read it. A friend once told me a quote by famed German theologian Martin Luther that goes “I have so much to do today that I’m going to need to spend three hours in prayer in order to be able to get it all done.” That’s the attitude that I would like to have but alas, I am not quite there yet.



Let’s just take a step back here and talk about my week. Thursday and Friday were pretty normal days. Thursday night was particularly fun because I got to see a friend from out of town. Saturday I needed to get work done but it felt like instead of doing work I ran every errand humanly possible so nothing was actually achieved and then I went to a friend’s birthday party. Sunday was church and during Sunday school one of my friends named Farm (this is a nickname, his parents didn’t really name him Farm although it’s central Illinois and I wouldn’t be surprised) gave a really good demonstration of how to share our faith or evangelize. The Superbowl was Sunday night so OF COURSE, I had to go to another party. Monday through now has been nonstop work and typing and frankly, my hands feel like they’re going to fall off and I’m over it.



Throughout all of this, I think the highlight of my week was seeing Farm give the demonstration of how to share our faith. For my time in the word, I decided to go back to the story of the Gospel and unpack what it meant for myself.



For those who don’t know, the Gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ coming and dying on a cross for our sins and rising again three days later. Why is this good news? And who is Jesus Christ? Why did he have to die? What is sin? Those are probably some questions you might have and that’s ok! We’ll go through each of those questions step by step but first, let’s start with humans and our sin.



Humans have this thing called “sin”. A common misconception about sin is that it is the bad things you do. That’s untrue. It’s the bad that you are. The bad that you do comes from the bad that you are. Every bitter and ill-thought you’ve ever had towards yourself or someone else, every act of selfishness, every time you had an inflated ego, every time you’ve ever lived to please people. That was sin. Acting in and through you. This has been a problem since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve (the first people created) had a desire to do what they wanted to do against God’s will and warning. In Genesis 2 God has Adam and Eve in this garden named Eden and He gives them simple instructions “You may surely eat of every fruit of the garden, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Well, their desire got the best of them and they chose to ignore God. Later on, this backfires and they get kicked out of the garden and Adam says to God “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” There goes that sin again. Adam chooses selfishness and places the blame on his wife Eve and even on God even though in the end he inadvertently admits that he ultimately chose to eat it. Thus begins the long history of humans following their own selfish desires and not having a true relationship with God.



Well, this all sounds very terrible, right? It sounds like we’re stuck and that there’s nothing we can do. That’s correct. There is nothing we can do. But there is Hope! Thankfully God is so gracious and loving that he provided a way for us to have redemption from our sins. We’ll cover that in a future post. Hopefully, I didn’t scare anyone because as horrifying as this story is it is also hopeful.



We’ll continue to go through the different components of the Gospel and how they all mesh together to create one beautiful story of hope, redemption, sorrow, and anticipation as we look to future things!