ONE28 started studying “The Gospel-Centered Life” on Sunday morning during Sunday School. We are going through the study in our small groups.

The first lesson of this study started out by saying, “‘The gospel’ is a phrase that Christians often use without fully understanding its significance. We speak the language of the gospel, but we rarely apply the gospel to every aspect of our lives.”

We quickly learned how the gospel should not just be the “front door” to the Christian life, but the “hallways” that we walk through everyday. At our conversion, we saw the cross bridged the gap between God’s holiness and our sinfulness. As we progress in our Christian life, our awareness of these realities should continue to grow. Then the cross will loom larger in our hearts and lives.

Here’s the diagram to help explain this:

And yet we often fail to see God as holy as he is. We think higher of ourselves than we should. In doing this, we “shrink the cross.” The cross of Jesus is not the large, needed solution to our sin in our hearts that it should be.

If we see God as he describes himself in the Scriptures, then we would see our sin as wicked as it is. Instead, we tend to minimize our sin. We minimize it by defending, faking, hiding, exaggerating, blaming, or downplaying it.

This lesson helped us see how the gospel of the cross enables us to come to grips with our own sin and God’s holiness in a truthful, honest way.

Please pray that the cross of Christ would loom large in the hearts of the students.