— by Dr. Michael A. Graham
Dedication
This essay, “The Gospel No One Wants (And Everyone Needs),” is dedicated to my old friend John Gough, whose life and words recently reminded me of what truly matters.
After publishing a more technical essay, “Covenant Theology is Not Mono-Covenantalism,” I was surprised to see a comment from John on Facebook. Hearing from John again—after fearing he had passed into glory—was both a surprise and a joy. His simple words carried a profound weight: “It’s all I can do to understand the verse ‘Jesus wept.’”
John has a remarkable story of how the gospel transformed his life: from years in prison and estrangement from his family to serving as a chaplain in a senior living center with his grandchildren serving at his side. His comment inspired me immediately to begin working on a more personal and practical essay in his honor, aiming to make the gospel accessible to all.
Without realizing it, John was channeling the voice of Jack Miller, a theologian and pastor who constantly urged his students, pastors, leaders, and missionaries, “Just make the gospel practical.” Thank you, John, for pressing me once again to make the gospel clear and accessible, and for showing me its beauty through your life. This essay is for you, brother, and for the Christ we proclaim.
This essay is my attempt to do what John, and Jack Miller before him, have challenged me to do—make the gospel practical and personal. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no one needs the gospel more than I do.
Introduction: The Gospel for Me
It’s taken me a long time to see something clearly: no one needs the gospel more than I do. This is not hyperbole or some false humility. It’s the truth.
I’ve come to realize how often I, like so many others, have tried to escape the very thing I need most. The gospel is not something we master. It masters us. But if I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that our hearts are incredibly skilled at evading grace. We may speak about it, preach about it, and even teach others about it, but when it comes to living under the gospel—letting it change us, free us, and reorient our entire lives—we resist it with all we have.
Someone might object to the idea that no one wants the gospel. After all, if we are truly in Christ, shouldn’t we desire the gospel above all else? Yes! By the Spirit, every true Christian loves the gospel and longs for more of Christ. However, the tension lies in what Paul describes in Romans 7: we still wrestle with sin, and the old self in us clings to control, resists grace, and seeks to justify itself. It is not our new heart in Christ that resists the gospel, but the sin that still clings to us, pulling us back toward self-reliance and control. This is why the Christian life is one of ongoing repentance and faith, daily reorienting the believer to Christ’s finished work. As long as sin remains, so will the temptation to resist the very thing that gives us life. The good news is that the Spirit continually draws us back, reminding us that Christ alone is our righteousness, our rest, and our hope.
This isn’t just my struggle. It’s universal. Inside and outside the church, we resist the gospel because it leaves no room for negotiation. It demands that we come empty-handed, dependent entirely on God’s grace, and let Him have complete control. That terrifies us. Thus, we create elaborate ways to maintain control. We compartmentalize. We try to hold on to just enough of our own righteousness to feel strong, to feel in charge, to bargain with God.
But the gospel isn’t about us getting it right. It’s about the gospel getting us right. Flawed, messy, and riddled with failure, my story is not an example of someone who figured out how to live the Christian life. It’s a story of someone who was found by grace, over and over again, despite my relentless attempts to live by self-trust. If there’s one thing I hope you take from this, it’s not how terrible I’ve been or how authentic my confessions are. It’s this: the gospel is enough. The gospel is for me. The gospel is for you. And nothing else can bring the new and abundant life we so desperately need.
Learning to Live a Double Life
I grew up in a family that looked good on the outside. The Grahams were a good Christian family. We went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday evening. We sang in the choir as a family, and my parents were even invited to speak at my high school about their parenting because all of their children, generally speaking, made good grades and stayed out of trouble.
As I watched my parents walk out of the teacher’s lounge the day they spoke, I wanted to throw up. I couldn’t reconcile the public image of our family with the reality I experienced at home. While I want to honor my parents, I also have to acknowledge that our home life was difficult in ways that shaped me profoundly. I learned from an early age to hide what was really going on, to project an image that didn’t match the truth. It became second nature to live a double life, appearing righteous on the outside while burying my struggles, fears, and failures deep inside.
This wasn’t all the fault of my parents. The pattern began in my early teens when I started working for my father’s company. My job was to fuel shrimp boats, which could hold up to 20,000 gallons of diesel. These long hours often left me alone, and I had access to the magazines the captains and crews kept onboard. That’s when I was first exposed to pornography. What began as curiosity quickly became a habit, and soon it led to compulsive masturbation. The shame of both became a heavy burden I carried into adulthood. Living a very sinful life in private while pretending in public to be something I was not deeply divided my heart and seared my conscience.
At the same time, I was playing the role of the “good Christian boy.” I went to church, sang in the choir, and did everything that was expected of me. However, the disconnect between my public image and my private life grew deeper. I didn’t know how to stop, and I didn’t feel safe enough to tell anyone. I learned to compartmentalize my life, pretending everything was fine while hiding the shame and guilt that consumed me.
That struggle followed me into adulthood. Even as I grew successful in business and ministry, I carried that hidden burden. Outwardly, I was the picture of a faithful Christian leader: running my own real estate business, teaching Sunday school, and leading ministry programs. Inwardly, I was exhausted, weighed down by the double life I had been living since my teens.
The more I tried to manage the tension, the hollower I felt. I didn’t yet understand that the gospel wasn’t just for non-Christians. It was for me.
The God Who Shuts Us Up
I thought I became a Christian at thirteen. At church camp in Bethlehem, Florida, south of Enterprise, Alabama, I responded to an emotional call to accept Christ. My mom, Ann Graham, also gave her life to Christ at the same camp. When I walked the aisle, I genuinely believed I was giving my life to Jesus. I even preached when I returned home, and someone told me I should consider becoming a pastor. I dismissed it outright. That wasn’t part of my plan.
What I didn’t realize then—and wouldn’t fully understand for decades—was how little I grasped the gospel. To me, Christianity was a starting point. You accepted Christ, and from then on, you lived a life of gratitude. What powered that life of gratitude was left to you. It was like being handed the keys to a car, told it was fully fueled, and expected to drive forever without ever stopping at a gas station. Over time, I collected my sins but had no idea what to do with them, so I just stuffed them into a drawer and tried to forget about them. The gospel, as I understood it, was for non-Christians. Once you were saved, you were supposed to move on to discipleship: books, techniques, and strategies for living the Christian life. I didn’t see the gospel as an ongoing reality. I saw it as the doorway, but not the house.
That perspective followed me into adulthood, where my carefully compartmentalized life began to crack under the pressure. When I got married, I thought I was a good husband. My wife, Vicki, didn’t see it that way. One day when I was twenty-six, seemingly out of nowhere, she left me. I was blindsided. When I asked her why, her response stopped me cold: “That’s why! Because I’m miserable, and you don’t even know why. I’m raising the kids alone while you’re off working for your father. You don’t see me, and you don’t care.”
I had no idea. I was so wrapped up in my own pursuits at work and in the church that I completely missed her pain. God graciously saved our marriage, but just barely. He didn’t heal everything overnight. Instead, He left open just enough cracks for His light to begin seeping in. I didn’t know it at the time, but He was setting the stage for something much bigger.
Vicki had watched my self-centeredness grow from when we married when I was twenty-three through the births of two children. By my late twenties, I had started my own real estate business. We bought, rehabbed, and sold houses while managing a team of realtors. God blessed my efforts, and I made more money than I had expected. Years earlier, I had promised God that if He made me a millionaire before I was thirty, I would use the money to bless others. He did it. Instead of keeping my promise, however, I spent the money on myself. The more I accumulated, the more self-centered I became.
When the money started drying up in my early thirties, I panicked. I thought God was punishing me for being selfish. I decided to fix things in my own strength. I confessed to Vicki that I hadn’t tithed properly and needed to make it right. She was surprised but supportive. I wrote a high five-figure check to the church, but I couldn’t just drop it in the offering plate. I arranged a meeting with the pastor at Shoney’s in Enterprise, Alabama, and handed him the check. As I walked out of the restaurant, I felt relief. I thought, “Now God can get back to blessing me.”
Before I could even enjoy that thought, the Spirit pressed something heavy on my conscience: “Not only are you a thief and a liar, but now you’re trying to bribe Me?” It was devastating. I had hoped for a “Well done, good and faithful servant,” but instead, God exposed the depths of my self-righteousness. It wasn’t just my actions that were wrong. It was my heart.
Then I heard something by Jack Miller that changed everything: “The gospel is for Christians too.”
It was a completely new idea to me. I had always thought the gospel was for non-Christians to get them in the door. Now I began to see that the gospel isn’t just about conversion. It is about life. It is about me. Week after week, as I shared the gospel, I was hearing it myself. And the Holy Spirit was using it to renew me.
Around this time, I was teaching a Sunday school class on the Ten Commandments using Lifeway material. Each week I stood in front of the class, teaching about God’s law. Instead of feeling proud or accomplished, however, I felt crushed. The law revealed my failures with unbearable clarity. I didn’t love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I didn’t love my neighbor as myself. I was a liar, a thief, and an adulterer in my heart. Every week, the law broke me a little more. And every week, I had no answer for it.
Then came an early morning encounter with God in my basement.
I was working through Lesson 5 of the Sonship course, a leadership training course through World Harvest Mission which focuses on the law and the gospel. I had turned in my homework and was preparing to call my mentor. Before Vicki joined me, I sat in the basement and casually prayed, “God, I love you, and I want to honor you.” Before I could finish, it was as if the voice of God pressed His truth on my heart: “You do not love Me. You do not want to honor Me. You love yourself. You want to honor yourself. Even your religious activities are ways you’re trying to use Me to benefit yourself.”
I froze. I wanted to argue, defend myself, or blame someone else. But I couldn’t. It was as if God put His hand over my mouth. I was completely shut up. All I could hear was the truth: “You are a fraud, a thief, a liar, an abuser of My grace.”
Then, in the midst of my despair, God spoke to my heart: “This is the Mike Graham I died for.”
In that instant, everything broke open. It felt like a death—a death to my self-trust, my schemes, and all my attempts to make myself righteous. What followed was not despair. It was life and freedom.
I began to weep, not the kind of shallow tears that come from being caught, but something far deeper. It felt as though the tears started in my toes and rose through my entire body, carrying with them years of shame, guilt, and striving. Then came the joy, a joy that was so overwhelming, it burst from my mouth in song. I found myself raising my hands in praise, singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,” because I had never felt so loved or so free.
That moment wasn’t the end of my story. It was the beginning of learning to live under the gospel, not just talking about it. It’s what continues to anchor me, every day, in the truth that the gospel is not about me getting it right. It’s about the gospel getting me right.
What began as a moment of being silenced by God’s truth became the starting point of discovering that the gospel isn’t just for my initial salvation. It is for every day of my life.
The Gospel for Christians Too
At the same time that I was teaching Sunday school on the Ten Commandments, I was leading Evangelism Explosion (EE) training at my church. EE nights were structured into four hours (teaching, praying, visiting, debriefing), and I dreaded them. By Sunday night, I was already exhausted from teaching Sunday school and running my business. By Monday afternoon, I was hoping my trainee would cancel.
During one EE session, I was exhausted and secretly wishing the evening would be canceled. Maybe it would rain, or no one would be home, or perhaps everyone would just be uninterested.
That particular night, nothing was happening. We knocked on doors, tried to start conversations, and prayed, but it felt as if the night was dragging on without results. Two hours of rejection can feel like an eternity, and I was ready to call it quits. As we drove, we passed two teenagers on bicycles, a boy and a girl. I thought about stopping but kept driving. Then, conviction hit me: how could I not at least try? I turned the car around.
The teenagers were open to talking, and we started sharing the gospel. As the trainer, I let my trainee take the lead. She presented the gospel beautifully, and by the end of the conversation, both teenagers gave their lives to Christ.
The story didn’t end there. It would have been wrong to send them home to explain to their parents what had just happened, so we accompanied them back. Their parents listened to the gospel, and they, too, gave their lives to Christ.
I was deeply convicted that my wish that the night would just end was a sinful form of praying. The gospel was at work in all of us. Despite my unbelief, that night ended in spontaneous worship. We didn’t leave as the same people who had arrived. The gospel wasn’t just transforming the lives of the people we spoke with. It was transforming us.
It wasn’t just that night. Every Monday night something remarkable was happening. As we practiced sharing the gospel and went out into the community, I began to feel refreshed. By the end of the night, I was full of joy and energy. It made no sense to me. I started asking others in the group if they experienced the same thing. They did.
Looking back on those Monday nights, I realized we weren’t just sharing the gospel with others. The Holy Spirit was sharing the gospel with us. Week after week, I went into those evenings dragging my feet, and I left them renewed. The gospel wasn’t just something I preached but something I needed to hear.
This was the first time that my heart understood the words “faith comes through hearing and hearing through the Word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). I had been treating discipleship as a series of steps to follow or skills to master, but now I saw it as the glory of God’s gospel. I realized that my exhaustion came from trying to power the Christian life myself. I had been drawing on my own righteousness and effort, but it was killing me and others. God showed me that the gospel is in fact the “living and active” Word of Christ (Hebrews 4:12) applied by the Spirit to save others and to sustain me as well.
It also changed the way I viewed the church. I started to see how much of our ministry was focused on telling people what to do: how to be better Christians, better parents, better spouses. While there’s a place for practical teaching, we had lost sight of the fact that the gospel isn’t just the starting point. It is the source of ongoing transformation. Without the gospel, all our efforts become just another form of self-righteousness.
Each Monday night, I thought I was bringing the gospel to others, but in reality, the Spirit was bringing me back to life through the spoken message of the gospel. It was what I needed most. That is the power of the gospel. Christ doesn’t just save us once but saves us every day in every moment. He doesn’t just convert us. He renews us, revives us, and reorients us to Him. That is why the gospel is for Christians too.
The Righteousness-Sucking Lamprey
It was during my time with Sonship that the metaphor of the lamprey came to me. For those unfamiliar, a lamprey is a parasitic fish that attaches itself to its host and feeds off it, draining its life while giving nothing in return. It’s an unsettling image, but it struck me as a vivid description of what happens in the church when we lose sight of the gospel.
Jack Miller, with his characteristic bluntness, often called himself an “approval suck.” He would say, “I don’t just want approval. I need it. I crave it.” The more I heard him talk about his own struggles, the more I realized I was the same. I wasn’t just seeking righteousness in Christ, but I was drawing it from others. And I wasn’t alone.
In many churches righteousness operates like currency. Pastors and leaders are often seen as the most righteous people in the congregation, and they draw their sense of worth from the approval and admiration of others. Missionaries might value even higher on the righteousness scale since they are seen as those who have given everything for the kingdom. Then there’s everyone else, striving to measure up, drawing what little righteousness they can from their comparative standing in the church.
It’s subtle, but it’s everywhere. Regular church attenders might feel more righteous than those who only come on Christmas and Easter. Those who serve in ministry might feel more righteous than those who don’t. Even within ministries, comparisons abound: one leader might look down on another for not working as hard, not sacrificing as much, or not being as spiritually disciplined. It’s a hierarchy of righteousness, and it’s exhausting.
The problem isn’t just that we’re competing for righteousness. It’s that we are drawing it from one another. Like lampreys, we attach ourselves to others and try to siphon off their approval, their respect, their validation. In doing so, we drain the life out of each other. No one thrives in this system: not the leaders, not the congregation, and certainly not the church as a whole.
The most devastating part of this system is that it replaces the gospel with a counterfeit. Instead of drawing our life and righteousness from Christ, we draw it from each other. Instead of living in the freedom of grace, we live under the crushing weight of comparison. Instead of being a community of grace, the church becomes a breeding ground for guilt, shame, and self-righteousness.
Jack often pointed out that the church is filled with people who don’t share their faith, not because they lack training or courage, but because they feel unworthy. A Fuller Seminary study confirmed this, revealing that the number one reason Christians don’t evangelize is that they feel they aren’t good enough. In other words, they have a bad conscience. They don’t believe the gospel applies to them.
When I first heard that, it broke me. It explained so much about my own struggles and about the church at large. It’s not just that we don’t want to share the gospel. It’s that we do not believe it is good news for us. We’ve traded the liberating power of grace for the exhausting demands of performance, and the result is a church full of people who are spiritually burned out.
This is the real tragedy of the righteousness-sucking lamprey system: it turns the church into a place where people feel the least free. It should be the opposite. The church should be the place where we hear, over and over again, that our righteousness is not our own. It’s Christ’s. It’s given to us freely through faith. Because of that, we don’t have to compete or measure up. We don’t have to suck righteousness from one another because we have an infinite supply in Christ.
This realization was transformative for me. It gave me a new vision for what the church could be: a community of grace where people are free to confess their sins, share their struggles, and point one another to the only source of true righteousness. It’s not a utopia. It is the reality of what happens when the gospel is at the center. The righteousness-sucking lamprey cannot survive in a church that is drinking deeply from the streams of living water.
If the lamprey represents what happens when we lose sight of the gospel, then the streams of living water represent what happens when we rediscover it.
Streams of Living Water
The turning point in my understanding of the gospel wasn’t just seeing its power to save. It was seeing its power to transform—a power that didn’t stop at conversion but flowed into every area of life. As I’ve been sharing the gospel with others, I have seen how it doesn’t just bring life to them but brings life to me, to the church, and to everyone it touches. It is the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise in John 7:38: “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”
One of the most vivid examples of this came when I taught a course based on Jack Miller’s evangelism booklet A New Life. I designed the course with the simplest of goals: to help people learn the gospel, share the gospel, and see how the gospel applies to their lives. At first, participation was reluctant. The church I was serving in was full of introverts who didn’t want to be forced into uncomfortable situations like knocking on doors or engaging strangers. I made it clear that we wouldn’t be doing any of that. All I asked was that they come, listen, and learn.
Over time, the course became something far greater than I anticipated. Each week, we spent time memorizing the gospel, practicing sharing it with one another, and praying for people in our lives who needed to hear it. At first, people were hesitant. They stumbled over their words. They worried about sounding awkward. As the weeks went on, something incredible happened. People started to open up, not just about their desire to share the gospel, but about their own struggles, their fears, and their need for the gospel in their own lives.
Every issue imaginable surfaced in those sessions: parents struggling with their kids’ choices, people wrestling with political divisions, theological questions, and personal wounds. What struck me was how these discussions weren’t argumentative or divisive. They were grounded in the gospel. Instead of fighting over who was right, people were asking, “What does the gospel say about this?” “How does Jesus meet us here?” As they prayed for one another and encouraged one another, something beautiful began to happen.
These introverts, who were so reluctant at the beginning, started sharing the gospel on their own. They didn’t need to be pushed. They were compelled by the Spirit. Some shared it with friends and family. Others shared it with coworkers. Many of them came back with stories that left us in awe, not because they were dramatic, but because they were so clearly the work of God.
The most striking thing was how much joy and life these people experienced. Sharing the gospel wasn’t a duty or a chore. It was a source of vitality. It was like the Mondays I spent in Evangelism Explosion, leaving those four-hour sessions full of energy and hope, except this time, it wasn’t just me. It was everyone in the group.
This is the power of the gospel. It doesn’t just flow into us; it flows out of us. It doesn’t just bring life to individuals. It creates a community of grace, a community where people aren’t afraid to confess their sins, share their struggles, and rejoice in the work of Christ. It creates a community that isn’t drained by comparison or self-righteousness but filled with the living water that Jesus promised.
I’ve seen this transformation in myself as well. When I’m exhausted, discouraged, or overwhelmed, the last thing I want to do is share the gospel. Every time I do, however, I come away renewed. It’s a paradox that only makes sense in light of the gospel itself. The more we give it away, the more we receive. The more we pour out, the more we are filled. It is not something we can manufacture or force. It is the work of the Spirit, taking the gospel and making it alive in us.
This is what the church is meant to be: a place where the living water flows freely, not just for us, but for the world. It starts with embracing the gospel for ourselves, not just as the message that saves us, but as the message that sustains us, renews us, and sends us out with joy.
Returning to Our First Love
The church in Ephesus was busy, productive, and doctrinally sound. They worked hard. They endured suffering. They resisted false teaching. Even so, Jesus said to them, “You have forsaken the love you had at first” (Revelation 2:4). It is a sobering reminder that we can be doctrinally correct, morally upright, and sacrificially committed and still lose sight of the gospel.
In many ways, this is the crisis of the modern church. We are active and engaged. We run programs, preach sermons, and defend doctrine. In all this, it is easy to lose sight of Christ Himself. We start to rely on our own strength, to measure our success by worldly standards, and to live as though the gospel is only for non-Christians. We push Christ to the margins, not with our words, but with our hearts.
Jack Miller had a way of illustrating this from Revelation 3:20, where Jesus says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.” He said Christians love to talk about this verse as proof of our free will: “Jesus is knocking, and we just have to open the door!” Jack saw it differently. He said most of us have piled the furniture in front of the door. We’ve bolted it shut and added deadlocks. We don’t want Jesus to come in and disrupt our lives, so we barricade ourselves in with our achievements, our ministries, and our self-righteousness.
Jesus doesn’t give up. He sends the Holy Spirit into the basements of our lives, turning up the heat through our struggles until we’re desperate for air. When we cannot take it anymore, we finally clear away the furniture, unbolt the locks, and open the door. Then we say with a smile, “Look what I did! I used my free will to let Jesus in!” Jack would laugh at the absurdity of it. We did not open the door because we were good or wise or spiritually aware. We opened it because Jesus wouldn’t stop knocking and the Spirit wouldn’t stop working.
This is what it means to return to our first love. It is not something we can manufacture or will into existence. It is the work of the Spirit, taking the gospel and pressing it into the deepest parts of our hearts. It is the realization that we are more sinful than we ever dared admit, yet more loved than we ever dared dream. It is the joy of finding, again and again, that Jesus is enough.
Jack’s vision for this renewal was grounded in his understanding of the gospel. He often spoke of the gospel as a promise—a declaration of God’s unrelenting love for sinners. He loved to outline five facts from A New Life booklet:
1. A loving God sent His Son Jesus into the world to bring us a new and abundant life (John 7:37–38; John 10:10).
2. Why are so many people without this new life? Because people are self-centered, not God-centered. “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23; Ephesians 2:1).
3. Self-centered people are separated from a Holy God by three big barriers: a bad record (Romans 3:23), a bad heart (Mark 7:21), and a bad master (John 8:34).
4. God’s solution to the problem of self-centered people is to remove these barriers: giving us a perfect record (1 Corinthians 1:30), a new heart (Ezekiel 36:25–26), and a good master (Matthew 11:28–30). “The free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ” (Romans 6:23).
5. How do we receive this new life? Turn in sorrow from your sins (Isaiah 55:7) and trust in Christ alone for salvation (Acts 16:31). This new life continues in the same way it began—in faith and prayer (Colossians 2:6).
These facts weren’t just a framework for conversion but were the lens through which Jack viewed all of life. He saw the gospel as a daily necessity, not just a one-time event. Fact 5, in particular, was central to Jack’s understanding of the Christian life. Just as we receive the gospel by faith, we must continue to walk in it every day—repenting, believing, and living under its transformative power.
Jack also saw A New Life as much more than a tool for evangelism. He described it as a revival booklet for non-Christians and a renewal booklet for Christians. He believed the gospel wasn’t just the entry point to the Christian life but the ongoing power source for living it. This is why he insisted that the church must come under the preached message of the gospel. He leaned on Calvin’s commentary on John 1:14–18, which speaks of the fullness of Christ, grace upon grace, an inexhaustible supply of righteousness and life that flows to us through the Word.
For Jack, sharing the gospel was not just about knocking on doors or handing out tracts. It was about living under the gospel ourselves and inviting others into its fullness. He saw A New Life not as an outdated evangelistic tool, but as a small theology textbook and a pictorial catechism on what it means to live and share the gospel. It was a way to center people on the promises of God, the power of the Spirit, and the sufficiency of Christ.
Returning to our first love means rediscovering this gospel, not as a theological abstraction, but as the best news we’ve ever heard. It means letting go of our self-righteousness, our control, and our pride. It means embracing the Spirit’s work in our lives, even when it feels as if He’s turning up the heat. It also means drinking deeply from the streams of living water that flow from Christ.
The church doesn’t need a new program or a new strategy. It needs the gospel. The gospel doesn’t need to be reinvented. It just needs to be rediscovered. As Jack often said, “The gospel can change anyone, anytime, anywhere—including you, including me, including the church.”
Conclusion: The Gospel Nobody Wants (And Everyone Needs)
When I read the statistics in The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis and Michael Graham (not to be confused with myself, Michael A. Graham), I feel the weight of what’s happening in churches across America. I also feel hope because the gospel is not a relic of the past. It remains the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16). It is not just for salvation at conversion. It is for every moment of the Christian life.
The great dechurching is a wake-up call for the American church, but not in the way we might think. It is not a call to innovate our way out of this crisis or reinvent discipleship with the latest program. It is a call back to the gospel, not as an abstract concept or buzzword, but as the life-giving work of the triune God to save and sanctify sinners.
Jack Miller’s ministry taught me something simple yet life-altering: the gospel isn’t a message you graduate from. It’s not just the doorway into the Christian life; it is the whole house. Yet for most of us, myself included, it is the one thing we resist the most. Why? Because the gospel confronts us with our helplessness. It tells us we bring nothing to the table. It strips away our pretense and exposes our desperate need for grace. In doing so, it also offers us everything: freedom, joy, peace, and a love that does not waver.
The power of the gospel is not in the message itself as mere words, but in the living work of the triune God behind the message. It is the Father’s eternal plan of salvation, the Son’s perfect work of redemption, and the Spirit’s ongoing ministry of conviction, regeneration, and renewal. When we speak of the gospel, we speak of Christ crucified, risen, and reigning, the Spirit applying His work to our hearts, and the Father’s unshakable love drawing us into His family.
I’ve seen this power in my own life. Week after week as I taught Evangelism Explosion and rehearsed the gospel message, something happened. I thought I was teaching others, but God, through the Spirit, was teaching me. The gospel wasn’t a technique or strategy that brought life. It was the personal work of Christ brought home to me by the Spirit that transformed my heart.
That is what happened in Jack’s ministry. He wasn’t a genius strategist. He simply believed in the power of God working through the gospel. He trusted that every member of the church, no matter their age, education, or experience, needed to know the gospel and be equipped to share it. In recent years I’ve been both humbled and amazed that the gospel message has had the same impact on children as young as five and adults of seventy years. Jack saw gospel presentation not as a formulaic tract but as the promise of a loving God who sent His beloved Son into the world that everyone who hears might have a new and abundant life (John 10:10).
The gospel does not merely address the barrier between the lost and the saved. It also addresses the barriers we have built within the church between evangelism and discipleship, mission and renewal, justification and sanctification. These are not barriers God placed in the church. They are ones we have constructed, carving up the gospel into disconnected compartments and scattering its power.
When the gospel is proclaimed and heard, God’s own gospel harmony begins to work. It brings together what we have fragmented. Evangelism and discipleship are not separate categories; they are one. Mission and renewal are not competing priorities; they are the Spirit’s unified work. Justification and sanctification are not disconnected realities; they flow from the same source: the triune God’s saving work through Christ, applied by the Spirit.
Prayerlessness and gospel-lessness go hand in hand. When we neglect the gospel, our prayers often become transactional, focused on getting what we want rather than being transformed by God’s presence. When the gospel takes hold of our hearts, prayer becomes the natural language of dependence and joy. It moves us from self-reliance to God-reliance.
This truth became especially clear to me during the course A New Life at Hickory Grove Church. The two-hour sessions were packed with gospel discussions, broken into four segments, with prayer reserved for the end. Week after week, the conversations about the gospel grew so that the time flew by. As the course progressed, some of the wiser, godlier members said, “Mike, you’re talking too much, and we don’t have enough time to pray.” They had heard enough from me, and they wanted to talk with their heavenly Father.
At first, I thought, “Why wouldn’t they want to hear me talk some more?” Then I realized that this is every undershepherd’s job: to bring people to Jesus and then shut up. That lesson—hard as it has been for me to learn over three decades—is what gospel ministry is all about.
The gospel breathes life into prayer because it makes us alive in Christ. It shifts our focus from ourselves to God and others. We weren’t just talking about the gospel—we were praying it, letting it shape our hearts and our intercession. The gospel freed us to pray with expectation, knowing that God’s power, not ours, would accomplish His purposes.
Here’s the challenge. What I’m saying will sound overly simplistic to many. It will be dismissed as outdated or too elementary because we think we’ve already received the gospel and need something more. We nod politely but inwardly think, I’ve got this. What I need is something deeper. Not so. The gospel is deeper, richer, and more practical than anything else once we stop trying to master it and let it master us.
This is not a wall we can climb through human effort or ingenuity. The barrier between evangelism and discipleship, between our need and God’s provision, can only be torn down by the Spirit. It is a supernatural work. However, that is what gives me hope. The gospel is not just shallow enough for a child to grasp. It is deep enough that even angels long to look into it (1 Peter 1:12). It’s not just for conversion. It is for renewal and revival, for every day of the Christian life.
Every generation of Christians has had to rediscover the gospel, not because it changes, but because we do. From Paul to Augustine, Luther to Edwards, and Jack Miller to today, the lesson is the same: we must not assume the gospel. We must proclaim it, live it, and trust it to do what only it can do. It will humble us, strip away our illusions, and leave us clinging only to Jesus. But in that place, we will find life, new, abundant, and eternal.
The gospel nobody wants is the only gospel that all of us need—God’s gospel that gives us life now and forever—and that is very good news.
