The Unfolding Story - The Gospels

Trusting God the Son

At last! Two thousand years after God promised to bless the nations of the world through a descendant of Abraham, Jesus Christ is born.

So it is with a sense of anticipation that we open the pages of the New Testament to discover how God will deliver His people from evil and bring us into a relationship with Himself in which we know His presence and His blessing. This continuing series will take you to the heart of the Bible story.

The four Gospels introduce Jesus, recording His life, teaching, miracles, death and resurrection. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John will show us how Jesus offers Himself as the one in whom we may find forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God and the power to live a new life.

When a story is reported in many newspapers, we would expect to find considerable repetition of the central facts, and some information that would be unique to one source. That is precisely what we find in the four gospels. They are drawn from eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, and together bear witness to the central facts of His life, death and resurrection. But each of the Gospels makes a unique contribution to the story.

Think of a picture printed in one color, and then reproduced in two, three and four colors. With each additional color, there is a new richness in the image. The one-color print would be sufficient to convey the image, but the four-color print brings out its full splendor. In the four gospels God gives us a full-color, high definition portrait of His Son, Jesus Christ.

In our journey through Matthew and Mark, I have chosen to focus on some central themes in the teaching of Jesus. We will discover how He fulfills God’s promises, calls us to repentance, offers entrance to heaven, invites us to follow Him, reveals His authority, warns about the dangers of hell, and demonstrates His almighty power.

In our journey through Luke’s gospel, we will focus on the main events in the life of Jesus: His birth, baptism, temptation, transfiguration, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven.

In John’s gospel we pick up the great promise of the second coming of Jesus and discover why the Gospels were written. But our central focus from the fourth gospel is the awesome mystery of the Trinity that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This truth is of central importance to the Christian faith and I have chosen to focus on Jesus’ clearest and most remarkable statements about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in John chapters 14, 5 and 16.

This second part in our series of the Unfolding Story of Bible takes us through the greatest story ever told, and it is my privilege to invite you on this journey of discovery!

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This study is broken down into three stages:

1 - The Old Testament

2 - The Gospels

3 - The New Testament