The Explicit Gospel

Pastor’s Bookshelf - Welcome to my bookshelf! Each month I will discuss a recent book that I’ve finished. *disclaimer; I don’t always have time to sit and read physical books, but I do quite a bit of my reading through audiobooks these days.*

This month I’d like to talk about The Explicit Gospel by Matt Chandler

“Gospel” is one of those words that gets thrown around a LOT in Christian circles, and sometimes it almost seems as though we are using the same word for completely different things. The word “gospel” literally means “good news” and Pastor Matt Chandler pushes back on careless usage of the word in this extremely well thought out, but practical book. Even for church folk, some of us may not have heard the fullness of the gospel message. He writes with both the UN-churched and the OVER-churched in mind. Sometimes folks sit in the pews for decades and still don’t quite have a complete handle on what the gospel of Jesus Christ really is. As Matt writes, “the gospel of Jesus is EPIC” and as Christians we have a responsibility to understand, with clarity, what that means.

I read this book physically (not on an audiobook, or a kindle), and because it was physical – I took me a lot longer to get through. But over the months of reading, I can’t tell you how many times my poor wife had to listen to me get up from my reading chair and rush over to her to show her some new awesome thing that I found in this text. “Wow, look at this – I have to tell you about it right now!”

As Pastor David Platt writes in a review, “Clarifying, convicting, comforting, and compelling. I wholeheartedly invite you to read this book and then to spend your life making this gospel explicit in every facet of your life and to every corner of the earth!"