Easter 2026 has come and gone.  I know it is a cliché but God has a formidable sense of timing.  For Easter I reposted a special message and as I continue my discussion of Matt Chandler’s book The Explicit Gospel, I am confronted with the need to discuss man’s response to the Gospels.  After the resurrection, God is calling for us to respond to the cross.  Personally, maybe God is calling me for my own response to the Gospels.

Again, what a formidable sense of timing…

We celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus the only Son of God and what that sacrifice did for us, and now to use another cliché, “the ball is on our court.”  Chandler is still talking about the Gospel on the ground in the fourth section of the first part of his book so let’s do a quick review: section one was about God, His holiness, perfection and rightful authority.  Section two was about man’s sinfulness and rebellion.  Chandler is very hard on mankind; we are hopeless lost sinners in need of help [some people object to his “tough” approach].  Section three is about Christ, His life, death and resurrection and what that does for us sinners.  Jesus is the solution for us, holding out hope from God when we had no hope. Jesus bridges the gap between God and man.   After the cross, we can talk to God directly.  After the cross, Jesus is our advocate who sits at the right hand of the Father, someone who understands the problem of sin that we all have and the need for our forgiveness and God’s grace.

So what do WE do now?  Let’s go back to that ball; oh yes, “it is in our court.”

How do we respond?

Here is the short answer.  We should repent of our sins…

Now that I have reviewed what I have commented on so far in The Explicit Gospel, it is almost as if Chandler is calling his readers to the prayer rail.  He wants all of us to confess our sins.  More than that, he is telling us we need to confess our sins. 

God has provided the “good news,” that a pathway to more righteous living is possible but no one is obligated to take that pathway.  We have a choice.  In His divine design, God has allowed us the same privilege of choice that He gave Adam and Eve.  We can continue to live in our sin or we can repent, truly repent.  You might wonder about the word truly.  Why write “truly” repent?  My reasoning  is based on that times that I have repented of my sins in my life [kinda…].  I really did not repent because I knew I would revisit my sin at a later time.  I enjoyed it too much.  At the time of repentance I was miserable and I needed salvation, a reprieve from my guilt, but it was not honest repentance.  Honest repentance is a deep desire for God to help us, change us, to help us walk away from the sin.  Again it is our choice.  He wants us to choose Him because we love Him more than we love the sin.

Secondly, God wants us to have faith in Him.  He will give us all that we need.  I have friends who are about to take much greater chances that I do as a Christian.  They are missionaries and they have been so for some fifty-odd years.  At the age of seventy-four they are ready to embark on another mission to a Muslim country.  They are not sure one hundred percent sure of what they will find when they get there, but they have faith that The Lord will provide.  More than that; they know He will.  That is what Chandler is talking about.  Besides repenting of our sins, he says we need to have faith that God will provide for our needs.  That is a big leap for many of us.  We want to know what God has in store for us: a bright future, all the money we will need [an excess would be nice], a job that provide great status in our community, but most of all, we want CONTROL over our future.  We want to direct our future, not allow God to do that for us.  We want to know where we are going and by the way, we want to make sure we have ample provisions when we get there.

Lastly we should be ready to be transformed.  If we repent and develop faith, get ready to be used.  God will find a way to use you to accomplish His mission on this earth.  The irony of this is that His mission should become our mission.  Chandler has written so much on this in his book so far.  We want to serve Christ but we want to serve Him on “our terms”.  In recent years, something has happened to the Church in America.  I [and many others] have labeled it cultural Christianity.  At the risk of being too simple, Jesus boiled down our faith to the “greatest commandment”:  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all of your soul and all your mind and all your strength.  The second is this: love your neighbor as yourself.”  Simple yet elegant.  Easy to remember but this Scripture encompasses a lot.  Yet in America today, many just don’t get the message.  Instead of God transforming us His way, many feel righteous worshipping politics [power],  morphing the church in ways that Americans can feel entertained in God’s sanctuary, and yes [as Chandler says] pastors water down God’s word to make it totally warm and fuzzy [more people will attend that way].  God wants to grow us.  To use Scripture from Galatians 5: 22-23 as my basis, He want us to show the world visible evidence that God is working in our lives.  We have just experienced Easter when Jesus hung on the cross in our place.  At the end of His life, the Temple curtain was torn from the top to the bottom.  We can have joy in the torn Temple curtain.  We are no longer separated from the Holy of Holies.  God put His Spirit within us in the form of The Holy Spirit.  Maybe that is one of the greatest miracles.  We have a direct connection with God, the Father.  If we respond to the Spirit, God will grow us in directions that are pure God, not some versions of Christianity that are driven by an American lifestyle.

So we are ready to see what Matt Chandler has to say about Man’s response to the cross.  He feels the Gospel has such power that it necessitates reaction.  Jesus’s death of the cross demands response.  Chandler says the Gospels make us move toward Christ or away from Him.  “The explicit Gospel invites belief by demanding it. 

Let me close by referring to Chandler’s opening comments on his intro to Chapter Four.  He is a “no holds barred” writer.  Readers either like him or hate him.  He lays it all out:  “we are stained with sin from conception; we are rushing headlong into the fires of hell before we can even walk” [64].

It sounds like we are bound for hell doesn’t it?  Then Chandler offers a recalibration of our destination:  “Jesus lays his body across the path; there is no ignoring Him.  If it’s headlong into hell we want to go, we have to step over Jesus to get there.” 

This should get our attention.

But will it?