This Is The Gospel
There is a moment in 1 Corinthians 15 where everything in the letter comes to a point. Paul has spent fourteen chapters dealing with a church that was pulling apart at the seams — divided over personalities, confused about worship, compromised in its ethics, and puffed up with its own wisdom. And now, after all of that, he stops and says: let me make something clear to you. Not something new. Something you already have. Something you already received and believed and built your life on. The gospel.
He calls it the message of first importance. That phrase is worth sitting with. Paul is not saying the gospel is one of the church’s priorities, somewhere near the top of a long list. He is saying it is the thing everything else is ordered around. It is the load-bearing wall. Remove it, and nothing else holds. The Corinthians had filled their church life with debates about teachers, arguments over gifts, and confusion about all manner of things — and Paul’s word to them is the same word every generation needs to hear: keep the main thing the main thing.
The gospel Paul delivers is not a feeling or a philosophy or a general religious idea. It is three specific historical facts. Christ died for our sins — not as a martyr, not as an inspiring example, but as a substitute, bearing in our place what we deserved. He was buried — a detail that confirms the death and answers every attempt to explain the resurrection away before it even gets started. And he was raised on the third day. That third fact is the hinge of the whole thing. It is, as Paul will go on to show, the one event that makes every other claim of the Christian faith either true or worthless. The resurrection is God’s declaration that the debt of sin has been paid in full.
Paul does not leave the resurrection as a theological claim and ask his readers to simply accept it. He produces witnesses. Real, named people. Peter. The twelve apostles. James, who was the Lord’s own brother and who had not believed in Jesus during his earthly ministry — until something happened after the tomb was found empty that turned a skeptic into a martyr. And then more than five hundred people at one time, most of whom, Paul pointedly notes, were still alive when he wrote these words. That is not the language of legend. That is an open invitation: go and ask them.
And then Paul adds himself to the list, and the way he does it is striking. He calls himself one born at the wrong time — someone who came to the resurrection appearance late, out of sequence, and without any right to be included at all. Because before the risen Christ met him on the road to Damascus, Paul had been the church’s most dangerous enemy. He had not simply doubted the resurrection. He had actively worked to silence the people who proclaimed it. By every measure, he was the last person who should appear on a list of resurrection eyewitnesses.
But that is exactly what makes his testimony so powerful. Paul does not include himself in this list as an afterthought. He includes himself as evidence. His life — the transformation from persecutor to apostle, from the man who hunted Christians to the man who suffered everything to bring the gospel to the world — is itself a demonstration that the resurrection actually happened and that the grace it unleashed is real. By the grace of God I am what I am, he writes. And there is nothing falsely modest about it. It is simply the only explanation that fits the facts of his life.
That is the invitation the gospel extends to every one of us. Not just the assurance that our sins are forgiven — though they are. Not just the promise of life beyond death — though that promise holds. But the living, present, daily reality of a grace that takes the most unlikely people and makes them into something none of us could have managed on our own. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in the life of every person who has trusted him. The gospel is not the starting line you cross and leave behind. It is the ground you stand on every day.
This Sunday we will be in 1 Corinthians 15:1–11, continuing our series Building on the Foundation. We hope you will join us as we look together at the message Paul calls the most important thing he ever had to say — and consider what it means to hold it, live it, and never let it go.
Union Avenue Baptist Church — 2181 Union Avenue — Sundays at 10:45am — unionavenue.org