Here's a great illustration of the gospel from an old book. The book is
The Second Mile by Fosdick. I have no idea how old it is since a friend loaned me the book and lo and behold it is missing the first ten pages. What to do? Read it anyway.
This is great:
"It was in escaping from this legalism [the legalism of rule-keeping and counting up your good deeds and bad] that Paul said he became a Christian. No man is really a Christian until he has escaped it. If a boy, adopted into a strange home, and unruly in his new surroundings, should perforce be given a set of regulations which he must observe, he might become more orderly, but he would hardly by that alone become a true son. But if some day the love of the father or mother should be persuasively revealed to him, so that the love that had been there always laid masterful hold on him, and his love, newly born, should spring up in answer, flooding his spirit with its loyalty, and if, knowing the new life in him, he should take the rules and tear them up, saying "Because I love you I will do all these and much more beside," then a true son would have been begotten. He would have been "born again."
"If ye love me, ye WILL keep my commandments," said Jesus and this statement of inevitable consequence is summed up in Paul's sublime word, "Love is the fulfilling of the law." Apart from love a man cannot keep so many rules or do so many deeds as to make himself a Christian.
"When good seed falls on good ground and is received there is fruit. I am now, more than ever, convinced that the issue is the message. Tweaking the methods and trying to substitute technology for living truth just doesn't work. Jesus commissioned his followers to proclaim his kingdom message in all the earth - knowing that it produces His rule when it is heard and heeded. It is the greatest honor to join the chorus of gospel preachers throughout history in echoing that transforming sound. It is true that hell's strategy is to silence the sound by corrupting it with other sounds that cater to those who have itching ears. There are many sounds being made in the name of the gospel that will ultimately produce death. The clear sound from the Word (the living Christ) produces a life of love that by its very nature changes everyone it touches. This battle of the sounds will rage until the end." - Dudley Hall
"Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin; and, 'God has made us so' - that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child's inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food." - from Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason
