News, Not Advice

“So with many other exhortations he preached good news to the people.” – Luke 3:18

When was the last time you received news? For me it was last Wednesday afternoon. I was at home on the computer when a text ran across the upper corner of the screen: “Your children are at school waiting for you – Roni” Roni is Elijah’s kinder teacher, and it suddenly occurred to me that Wednesday was an early pick-up day! I was operating under the assumption I had another hour to prepare after-school snacks and pick them up, when in reality I was already thirty minutes late. Needless to say, I dashed out the door.

The word “gospel” in the Old Testament is Hebrew bisser ("herald") and besorah ("tidings"), and in the New Testament is Greek euangelion, a compound of eu (“good”) and angelion (“announcement”). Luke here uses a form of that word, euaggelizo, which the ESV translates in a nicely literal way: good news. Martyn-Lloyd Jones contrasts advice with news: “Advice is counsel about something that hasn’t happened yet, but you can do something about it.  News is a report about something that has happened which you can’t do anything about because it has been done for you and all you can do is respond to it.”

The gospel is received as news, not advice. Advice is something you use to help you live the way you want. News is something to which you respond and change. Advice places the burden on you, to do something to achieve salvation—but the gospel is news that it all has already been done. Yet neither is the gospel advice you can pick and choose from—it calls for either rejection or response. Elijah’s teacher did not text me a suggestion. She texted a statement of fact: I either believed it or not, and the evidence of that belief was action.

The gospel is shared as news, not advice. The messenger doesn’t create the content but reveals it. Too often, we think about information as something we must make palatable: the right phrasing or tone so as to not be too off-putting. There is strategy in how we share the gospel, but at heart it’s not up to us. The gospel is not advice to be packaged for consumer comfort. It’s a truth to be revealed, unveiled, pronounced. Sometimes boldly, sometimes quietly over time, but news nonetheless.

Listen to the angels in Luke 2: “Behold, I bring you good news.” The Christmas story is an announcement. It is not a story about moral examples, ethics, aphorisms, or a systematic theology. At the core, it is something that blazes into our lives like the text box across my screen: here is news you should know. What are you going to do about it?