How Parenthood Changed My View of the Gospel

The message of the Gospel is beautiful in its simplicity. It is straightforward, it never changes, and it holds equal power for every individual who believes. Behind that simple message, though, is an infinite and incomprehensible divine power.

God is behind the Gospel, and He is capable of anything.​

• He can make a Gospel simple enough for a child to understand but complex enough for scholars to discuss for centuries.
• He can make a Gospel simple enough to distill into one sentence and complex enough to fill an entire book.
• He can make a Gospel simple enough to understand at the time of salvation and complex enough to still be learning about it twenty years later.

The Gospel is beautiful because the mind and heart of the God who created it to save a sinful world are beautiful. But, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I believe that while the message of the Gospel is the same for everyone, the beauty of it looks just a little bit different to each individual believer.

God uses the Gospel to save sinners from their sins, but each sinner is a unique individual. When we come to Christ for redemption, we all see a God and a message that can deliver us from our destructive path, but for each of us, that path looks a little bit different.

When I accepted Christ as my Savior, I was a child growing up in a Christian home. I hadn’t experienced much of the sinful world yet, and the Gospel, while saving me from sin, death, and hell, was, in my mind, only saving me from what I currently knew of sin, death, and hell.

The longer we live, the more we grow to understand how much the Gospel of Jesus is really delivering us. We understand sin, death, and hell more and more, and that makes us grow to appreciate God’s love, grace, and forgiveness more and more.

The Gospel becomes more beautiful with age.

Along with age and change come different stages of life that also alter how we view the Gospel. For me, the biggest change in my view of the Gospel so far happened when I became a mother to my daughter, Lucy.

Did the message of Jesus’ salvation become more or less important to me? No.

Did I suddenly understand some hidden component of the Gospel? No.

What did change was who I saw most clearly when I pictured Jesus dying on that cross. Jesus’ death is a moment of anguish for both God the Father and for His Son, Jesus Christ. What I realized after becoming a parent, though, was that I had always pictured that beautiful, horrid moment from the perspective of Jesus, the dying Son of God.

• I imagined his physical pain as the nails and thorns dug into His body.
• I imagined his emotional pain, as His Father turned His back on Him for the first time in eternity.

As a mother, however, I now see the Gospel narrative from a different point of view—the view of God the Father, turning His back on His own beloved Son.

For the first time in my life, I can grasp the suffering of God the Father as the salvation story plays out in my mind. As a mother, I cannot fathom the agony of not only telling my child to lay down her life for somebody else but also refusing to change my mind as she begged me to take away this responsibility. My heart breaks for God the Father as He, for the sake of a sinful world, deserts His dying son in His time of utmost suffering.

As sinners saved by this Gospel, we see the beauty of salvation—we reap the benefits. But for God the Father, Jesus’ death was an unbelievably painful sacrifice made, not for His own benefit, but for the good of the sinners rebelling against Him.

This perspective of the Gospel doesn’t change what salvation has already done for me, but it does make the Gospel even more beautiful to me than the day I received it. It’s just one more facet of the simple, complex, and beautiful redemption story that increases my gratitude for my God and His amazing offer of salvation to all who believe.

​What about you? Can you remember a time in your life when your perspective on the Gospel shifted or your appreciation for it grew?