Jesus is the greatest demonstration of God’s love for us! He is the Son of God: God in human form who came, lived, and died among us as a man. He stepped down into our broken world. All the pain and brokenness we see in our lives are evidence of the sin that is in us and in those around us, but God didn’t leave us in our brokenness. He sent His Son, Jesus, to restore us to God and a life of eternal joy and peace. Jesus fulfilled ancient prophecies from the Old Testament over the course of His life and ministry, performed many miracles, demonstrating supernatural lordship over creation at both a spiritual and material level, and died unjustly at the hands of the religious and secular authorities of His time. The life he lived was completely sinless, and yet He faced some of the greatest hardships ever recorded in human history. He did this to take the penalty for our sins. Three days after His death he came back to life, interacting with hundreds of witnesses before ascending to heaven.

Though Jesus was fully human, with all of the limitations and frailties that are a part of being human, He was also fully God – the same and only God responsible for creating the universe. 

Jesus’ teachings and actions, recorded in the four accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, model the kind of life to which we should all aspire, defined by love, grace, and compassion. However, more than that, Jesus urged people to turn away from sin in their lives and to renew their relationship with God. For us on our own this is an impossible feat. We were all created to be in a loving relationship with God, but our relationship with Him was broken because of sin.

The result of that broken relationship is emptiness, restlessness, and an unfulfilled longing within each of us. But, through accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, believing that He died and resurrected to redeem us from sin, we can receive His righteousness and be renewed in our  relationship with God, being counted as children of God. This is the gospel: that God loved the world so much that He sent His only son to live a perfect life and to die sacrificially, bearing the full weight of our sin, rescuing us from an eternity separated from God and freely offering the opportunity to live rightly with God forever.