So far we have looked at Mark Dever’s first two marks of a healthy church, namely, expository preaching and biblical theology. A third mark of a healthy that Dever points out as foundational is a Biblical Understanding of the Good News. To be a healthy church we should have a right understanding of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.
He writes, “A healthy church is a church in which every member, young and old, mature and immature, unites around the wonderful good news of salvation through Jesus Christ.” Much is being written today calling congregations to be “gospel-centered”--that everything they say and do be about the gospel and flow from the implications of the gospel. To be sure, if we cease to rightly understand, proclaim, or live the gospel, we have ceased to be a NT congregation.
A healthy congregation continues to grow deeper in her understanding and application of the gospel to daily life as she lives for the glory of God and the Great Commission.
What is the gospel? I like the way it is put in the following sentences from another book co-authored by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander: “This gospel, then, is that God is our holy creator and righteous judge. He created us to glorify him and enjoy him forever, but we have all sinned, both in Adam as our representative head, and in in our own individual actions. We therefore deserve death--spiritual separation from God in hell--and are in fact already spiritually stillborn, helpless in our sins and in need of God to impart spiritual life to us. But, God sent his son Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to die the death that we deserved, and he raised him up for our justification, proving that he was God’s son. If we would have Christ’s perfect righteousness credited to us, and the penalty for our sins accounted to him, we must repent of our sins and believe in Jesus Christ for salvation.”
This represents a good summary of the Doctrine of Justification by faith. That is good news! Maybe take some time to meditate on this truth today.
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