GOSPEL BEAUTY

What is it?
This is the beauty that we see in Jesus himself as we glimpse him in the gospels. There we see that broken immoral people were attracted to Jesus and that he welcomed them in such a way that many of them were found by God. At the same time we see that the moral and religious people of the day (the Pharisees and Sadduccees) were highly offended by Jesus.

If we are going to be like Jesus then we will have to believe the gospel so that the following traits are visible in us:

Love without expecting affirmation or applause
We need to love and serve others as Jesus served the 10 lepers of which only one returned to thank him. As servants who God has given to the world to demonstrate his care, we must not be expecting that the world will respond with gratitude to our good deeds. If we believe the gospel, we will be free of the need for affirmation in order to serve others, because we have the eternal and unchangeable embrace of God himself bestowed in the gift of sonship. Our good deeds should be visible before others so that they glorify God the Father, not us (Matthew 5:16)

Truth without pride
Jesus was and is the truth of God. He reveals God's truth and does so in the fullest humility of the incarnation (Philippians 2:5-11). Knowledge of the truth has the tendency to result in pride (I Corinthians 8:1) that results in our thinking of ourselves as superior to others (as if we were so smart that we discovered the gospel and the revelation of God on our own). Of course the gospel shows us that we did not find God but that he found us, that he opened our blind eyes to truth and all the truth we have we have received is a gift from him. The gospel produces a deep humility that allows us to hold truth deeply and dearly yet without any sense that we are better because we have been let in on the mystery of the gospel.

Purity without being judgmental
Jesus was truly in the world, but not of it. The gospel produces the obedience of faith that results in a life of holiness before God and a life that has a growing hatred of sin (Romans 1:5). Jesus was pure but did not alienate those who were immoral. In fact he was accused of being a drunkard and a glutton because he spent so much time with people who the religious people of the day thought were impure. Much of our separation from the world is really a judgmental disdain for the people and lifestyles of those who are without God. The gospel shows us that God does not judge the people of the world but has come, in Christ, to redeem them (John 3:17). Jesus sends his new covenant people to do the same, to be with those who are impure and announce the freedom of the gospel to them.

Holiness without moralism
The gospel destroys moralism because it summons us to abandon all our claims to goodness, to any form of righteousness before God and to accept that alien righteousness of Christ (Romans 1:17). We tend to drift into self righteousness based on our obedience to God's commands, our maintaining spiritual and religious lifestyles (everything from Bible reading to church attendance), or simply our being respectable and responsible people. Like Paul, we must choose Christ's righteousness as being above all else in our lives and thus abandon any and all claims upon God based on our performance (Philippians 3:4-11).

Community without hypocrisy, without masks
Jesus intends his followers to share a deep quality of life with each other (John 17:11) so that those who believe the gospel relate to each other in loving honesty as people who are in the process of being redeemed. Because Christ is our righteousness, and his acceptance is the basis for our acceptance of each other (Romans 15:7), we can be real about our struggles and failures. Thus, we do not need to wear masks that hide our flaws and make us appear to have life all together. Jesus in his high priestly prays that our unity would be part of the way a skeptical world will be convinced of the truth of the gospel.

A heart of compassion for those who do not know Christ, without fear of being contaminated or corrupted
We in the church are isolated from those who do not know the gospel. We are afraid of the people of the world in part because we think that if we have close relationships with them that we (or our children) will be contaminated by their immoral lifestyles or their worldviews. Unless we are deeply aware of our sinfulness and our continuing need for a savior, we will not have compassion on those who do not know Christ and instead will view them as threats to the kind of culture we want to see in our nation.