When the Gospel is not Good News

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve made the Gospel sound more like a courtroom summons than an invitation to healing.

It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with, not from the vantage point of a seminary lecture hall, but from a much messier space—real life, real suffering, and the quiet processing that happens in hospital rooms and quiet, anxious evenings.

As Christian leaders, especially those of us shaped by modernist approaches to evangelism, we’ve learned to begin our Gospel message with sin. "All have sinned," we say, and it's true. But over time, I've begun to ask—is that really where Jesus starts?

Last week, I sat with a dear friend who had grown up under the weight of emotional abuse and chronic rejection. He wasn’t a hardened rebel or a proud skeptic. He was, in many ways, a bruised reed. And he recounted to me what happened when well-meaning Christians came to him with the standard message: “You’re a sinner, and God cannot accept you unless you repent.”

What they didn’t realize is that he already believed he was unacceptable. He didn’t need to be convinced of that. He needed to hear that God saw him. That God wanted him. That he had inherent worth, not because he had earned it, but because he was made in the image of God. Because he was loved.

I think of the woman caught in adultery. There’s no record of her repentance. No theological dialogue. Just Jesus kneeling beside her, standing between her and her accusers, and saying, “Neither do I condemn you.”

That wasn’t a theological loophole. It was an act of restoration. An act of dignity. And perhaps that dignity was the soil in which true repentance could finally take root.

John tells us Jesus came “full of grace and truth.” I used to hear that description of Jesus as balance: Hard Jesus vs Soft Jesus. But I wonder if it’s something much deeper. What if the truth Jesus brings is the truth of who we are? The truth that confronts the lies shame has written into our bones: You’re unlovable. You’re too broken. You’ll never belong.

Truth, in that sense, is not the opposite of grace. It is grace.  It is, in fact, the most reliable grace.

When I cared for my Kimberley during her cancer journey, I experienced what it meant to feel inadequate, powerless. Everything in me was poured out for someone else, and yet I could not change the outcome. That experience of being completely helpless to change my broken world often led me to a familiar place of self-loathing and shame.  But it has also opened my eyes to how many people are walking through life with the quiet ache of unworthiness.

So much of our evangelism is designed for the willful, the defiant, the independent. But what about the traumatized? The shamed? The ones who already believe they are enemies of God, not because of theology, but because of experience?

If the Gospel doesn't sound like good news to them, is it still the Gospel?

For me this isn’t a call to abandon truth, but to reframe it. To preach sin not as a legal transgression alone, but as a distortion of our belovedness. A sort of cancer that has mutated our original DNA.  To see repentance not as a precondition to grace, but as a response to it.

I’m still learning. Still unlearning. Still being humbled by the way Jesus moved toward the broken—not with a finger pointed, but with arms open. And I wonder what it might look like for us to do the same.

Maybe—just maybe—people would run toward a Gospel like that.