“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” [First Corinthians 15: 3].

In my post of October 31, 2025 I ran the risk of offending some readers of this blog.  I felt the need to define the word Gospel.  The reason I did that was due to the nature of Matt Chandler’s approach to the Bible.  He is bold in his claim that many Christians do not know the “explicit Gospel.”  He is also bold in his claim that many Christians “assume” they know Scripture when they have only put minimal effort into the study of Scripture.  First Corinthians 15: 3 makes direct reference to the issue of “first importance,” that Jesus died for our sins according to the Word of God.  Chandler is “getting back to the basics,” “practicing the fundamentals” or “starting from scratch.”  He aims to correct the problem that has occurred in Christian evangelical circles:  too many believers think they  know the Gospel but they really don’t know it at all.  They have never taken God’s word into their heart. 

Before I go too far and offend again, there is a major difference in getting busy with Jesus and taking God’s word into your heart.  In this country we know how to get busy.  Christians spend a lot of time with fellow Christians doing wonderful things and those wonderful things are important, but we don’t spend much time in God’s word.  There is no doubt that we own Bibles; we just don’t read them.  According to New Yorker Magazine, the Bible “is the best-selling book of the year, every year.  Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that is that Americans purchase some twenty-five million Bibles every year, twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book.”  According to the Crosswalk blog, “the Bible is indeed the most owned book in America with nearly nine out of ten Americans owning a Bible and Americans own an average of 4.4 copies per household. However, it is also the least read book, with most Christians never reading the Bible from cover to cover” [Crosswalk, “The Bible is Consistently a Best Seller” accessed November 11, 2025].

Bible owners have a litany of excuses for not reading The Book; just type “reasons people don’t read the Bible” into your browser.  “I just don’t have time.”  “That language is difficult.”  “It is not exciting enough. I don’t like boring reading.”  “I just don’t understand the historical background of the Bible.”  The excuses people provide for not reading The Bible just go on and on, and some of them may be valid, but some of them are not [ I am just being honest and honesty hurts sometimes].

The basic problem amounts to this.  We claim to be people who know God but we don’t read His word.  It is like trying to fight a battle without a sword.  Not reading the Gospel is leaving too many people of Christian faith feeling lost, powerless and open to incorrect interpretation of Scripture. 

Chandler’s plan is to write a book with two over-arching approaches to Scripture and those approaches are what he calls “The Gospel on the Ground” and “The Gospel in the Air.”  Let me explain.  By Gospel on the ground, he thinks Christians need to know the Bible narrative.  Chandler sees the Bible as a story of God’s self-sufficiency that ends with man’s response to the Gospel’s good news.  God reigns supreme over every part of the story and He is continuing to reign on the earth today.  God is working in my life and the lives of those around me, what Chandler calls “the capturing and resurrecting of dead hearts.”

By Gospel in the air he means the Gospel from “30,000 feet up.”  Whereas the “ground” is the micro view, the air is the “macro view.”  Jesus’s life fits into the big picture of God’s plan for His world from the beginning of time to the final redemption of His creation; after all, Jesus appears in Revelation 21:5 when He says He is “making all things new.”  Chandler writes “When we consider the Gospel from the air, the atoning work of Christ culminates and reveals to us the big picture of God’s plan of restoration from the beginning of time to the end of time.” 

It is a mighty big “ask” to inspire Christians who barely read the Bible to begin to read it from two vantage points, but that is what Chandler is proposing.  He feels when Christians try to operate with the limited knowledge we have, we are going to have misunderstandings of Scripture, we are open to heresies and we may even attack our own Christian brothers due to false “Biblical” ideas.  Let me pause and ask does this sound like what some Christians are practicing today as they mix all types of Biblical ideas with full-throated efforts to gain political power?

It is no wonder that this is happening because lack of Gospel knowledge is allowing it.  As stated above, Christians want to be busy and there is nothing busier than attempting to help engineer American society into a Christian theocracy.  But is that the aim of the Gospel?  I don’t think so.  Chandler feels there is a need to get back to what is of “first importance.”  He wants to make sure that all who believe in Christ are on the same page here [God’s page].  There is a need for us to be talking about what God is talking about. 

To do that we have to open our Bibles and yes, read from TWO vantage points.