Our Witness: God’s Good News

Our Witness: God’s Good News
by Rick Warren

“Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone.” Mark 16:15 (NLT)
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Every Christian is called to share with others what we’ve been given from God. But, I’m often asked, what exactly are we supposed to share?
Here’s your message in two words: good news.
Mark says in our key verse today that we’re to tell the good news to everyone.
Do you like to get good news? Everybody does. Do you like to share good news? Most people do. At my house, we compete to see who gets to share the good news.
Now, many of us think, “The people I work with, my friends, they’re not interested in the good news.”
But, we’re dead wrong! They may not be interested in religion, but they are interested in the good news. The problem is not that our friends and co-workers aren’t interested; the problem is we’ve forgotten how good the good news really is.
Once you’ve been a Christian for a while, you forget how miserable it was to live without hope. You forget what it was like to worry where you would go when you die. You forget what it was like to have guilt, fear, regrets, bitterness, and boredom in your life – a life before Christ brought meaning, purpose, and significance.
What happens to most of us is that the longer you’re a Christian the more you tend to take for granted how good the good news really is. Likewise, most people who do not know Jesus don’t understand how good the good news really is.
If you go out on the street and ask people, “How do you convince God to like you?” most of them will probably say, “You’ve got to work real hard to get God’s approval and you’ve got to be really, really good. You’ve got to keep a lot of rules and you probably have to follow a lot of regulations and do some rituals. You’ve got to be religious. I’m none of those things, so I’m never going to please God or get to know him.” If that’s what some people think the good news is, it’s no wonder they don’t get too excited about discussing it.
But here’s the good news: you are able to enter into a relationship with God through an attitude of trust – trust in Jesus Christ – and not through a religion of rules, regulations, and rituals.
God says you get to know him just by trusting him. If you trust his Son with your life, you get forgiveness for your past, a purpose for living in your present, and a home in heaven in the future.
Is that good news? Do you think anybody you know would be interested in that?
The good news keeps sounding better and better because the bad news of the world keeps getting worse and worse.