The gospel, the greatest message man has ever received. Powerful to affect salvation toward all men. Beautiful, glorious, life giving, peaceful, marvelous. The gospel is all this and much more. The gospel man's need and God's gift. The gospel is revelation and expectation. The gospel is salvation.
Of the gospel the apostle Paul said it was the power of salvation. (cf. Rom. 1:16). This makes the gospel of great importance because all are in need of salvation from the consequence of sin. The gospel story is the good news of the means God has provided us so that we may have our sins removed and be reconciled to God.
A good place to start in our study is a consideration of what the word gospel really means. The term originally meant a reward given to a messenger who brought good news, but by the time the New Testament was being penned the idea of a reward had been dropped and the word referred to the good news itself. The good news is that Christ has come and an avenue to heaven and God is now available to all men. The gospel is good news on many levels. It is good news that Christ was born into this world as a man to suffer temptations and trials like you and I. It is good news that Christ never yielded to those temptations and thereby living a sinless life. It is good news that being without sin Christ left us an example to live by and became a perfect sacrifice for sin. It is good news that the Holy Spirit inspired the New Testament writers preserving God's will to the lost and saved. It is good news that at a time of God's choosing Christ will return and faithful Christians will be able to spend an eternity in the direct presence of Almighty God.
This and many other things are all good news and interrelated. The good news that we want to focus on in particular is the good news of salvation through Christ.
In order to see that the salvation offered through Christ is good news we must first see our desperate need of it. The need of salvation is certainly common to all men. It is a need of all because all have sinned (cf. Rom. 3:23). Sin loosely define is a violation of God's will. We can sin by doing those things that God has forbidden or in failing to do what he has commanded. The Bible tells us that the individual who denies the quilt of sin is void of truth (cf. I John 1:9-10). We need to be convicted of sin, and our need for a savior. Their is a need for a savior because we can not save ourselves. No good deed or deeds done by our own