The Power of the True Gospel - A Guest Post by Phylicia Masonheimer

*I’m delighted to have my friend, Phylicia Masonheimer, guest-posting on the blog for me today! You may remember her from episodes 21 and 45 of the podcast or from her article in issue 1 of Spirit-Filled Woman Magazine. Just last month, Phy’s inaugural traditionally-published book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful: Finding Soul-Deep Strength in a Skin-Deep World, released out into the world. I’m thrilled to be partnering with her today, via an excerpt she is sharing from the book, to get the word out about this excellent and much-needed resource!

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Every year thousands of women gather together to listen to yet another speaker tell us who we are in Christ. These conferences, retreats, and conventions are well-intentioned. Some of them equip and educate women in the Word of God, or at least attempt to do so. Then the next year rolls around and we find ourselves once again seated at the women’s conference, learning once again that we’re “beautiful daughters of God.” Yet each year we return home to the same struggles and sins we had before the conference. The spiritual high of the speaker’s message fades. Something is missing.

At home, many of us face difficult marriages, lonely workplaces, unfriendly mirrors, and overwhelming motherhood. Insecurity and guilt take a back seat at a women’s conference, but here at home? They loom large. The Jesus whose presence was so tangible in a worship-filled sanctuary is now seemingly impossible to reach.

The Problem of Shallow Teaching

The problem of shallow Christian teaching pervades women’s conferences, retreats, ministries, and devotional books. We have heard the same message time and time again—a message meant to empower us to live better lives. Yet no matter how many times we hear it, change evades us. If this message is so powerful, why haven’t our lives, marriages, and experiences of motherhood changed for the better? Why does the Christian life still feel so heavy if Jesus promised His burden was light (Matthew 11:30)?

Women face many difficulties in our daily lives, things we never expected and never wanted. This is life in a fallen world, and Christianity is supposed to have an answer for our struggles. But the answers we’ve been given aren’t helping us live more peaceful and victorious lives. We’re still down in the mud and the broken places, wondering how this could possibly be what Jesus meant when He said, “My yoke is easy”.

The Full Impact of the Gospel

Gospel is a vague word for many people, conjuring images of Billy Graham rallies and the hymnbook in Grandma’s church. But the gospel is simply this: the whole story of Christ’s work to save us.

What we hear from the pages of a devotional or the stage at a women’s conference may feel right, but is it the stuff of freedom? We all want to know we’re desirable, but will being called beautiful give us lives of purpose and depth? Judging by the results so far, the answer to both these questions is no. Being told we’re beautiful in God’s eyes is a surface response to a soul-deep problem. That problem is our own sinfulness.

Sinfulness isn’t a word we like to attribute to ourselves. It’s uncomfortable and ugly. We’d much rather talk about God’s love for us— and that’s what many female writers and teachers do. But when we ignore the impact of sin on our own natures, we can’t comprehend the greatness of God’s love. In John 3:16, Jesus says, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” God does love us— so much so that He sacrificed His Son. But when we only focus on the first half of this verse, we’re missing the entire point. God doesn’t love us because you and I deserved it. He loves us in spite of our- selves. We are so sinful, so unable to bridge the gap between ourselves and a holy God, that He sent His Son to die on our behalf.

This is why the apostle Paul said, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23); death is the ultimate separation from God. Apart from Jesus, that’s just what will happen to us. Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t just a nice plan to get us out of trouble. His punishment replaced ours! Because God so loved the world, Christ paid the debt we owed.

This is the gospel. This is the good news of Christ Jesus for those in need! But many female Christian leaders have parsed the gospel into “pleasant” and “not-so-pleasant” pieces. Consequently, we hear a lot about God loving us, calling us beautiful, and celebrating us as women, but not much about what had to happen for us to receive this extraordinary love.

The incomplete gospel of modern Christianity gives general solutions to very specific problems. Our struggle against sin manifests itself in specific ways: addiction, anger, fear, legalism, shame, and so much more. The problem for women today is the “good news” preached to women doesn’t have the necessary depth to free us. It’s not enough for Christian women, and we deserve more. We deserve to know the complete gospel and to understand how it frees us to live lives of both present and eternal impact.

What does the gospel have to do with our daily life? Everything.

The defeat we experience in relationships and in temptation happens because we don’t know how to rightly live out the gospel. And often we don’t live out the gospel because we haven’t heard it taught accurately. Many of us assume that if God loves us (a word we often define emotionally), and we love Him back on an emotional level, somehow we will live a life of eternal impact. This might satisfy us during an early-morning quiet time with coffee and a candle, but that kind of faith crumbles when we face conflict.

In crisis, we discover just how weak this gospel is. In the midst of a marital fight, a debilitating illness, or a sudden financial setback, knowing we are beautiful daughters of God falls rather flat. There has to be more to the gospel, the more that Jesus promised in John 10:10. And there is! The complete gospel—our sinfulness, God’s grace, Christ’s imputed beauty—empowers us with a strength the incomplete gospel cannot supply. Without the whole truth about who we are and what God does for us, we will never know the fullness of the life God intends for us.

What We Really Need to Understand

So we need the full story, the whole gospel. The complete gospel enables us to live free from sin, shame, defeat, and stress. Yes, God loves us—but that love came with the highest of costs: Jesus’s death on the cross. Acknowledging our own sinfulness is the first step to realizing the magnitude of God’s love. When women recognize the lengths to which God went in order to bring them into His family, they are transformed. The bondage of besetting sins becomes surmountable. Chains of addiction are broken one by one. Challenges, fears, and difficulties that could not be conquered by an incomplete gospel are crushed by the power of complete truth.

Our God is a God of freedom. While we live in fallen world, Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33). Every day that we walk by the Spirit of God, we have what we need to conquer weakness and sin. But it takes more than a feel-good message and an occasional prayer to get there.

Within each woman of God dwells the Spirit of God, who grants us wisdom to comprehend who He is (John 14:26), but we don’t know how to access that wisdom. We have the capacity to be curious about spiritual things. But surface-level messages kill such a curiosity. In a sense, many Christian influencers talk down to us instead of speaking to the capability of the Spirit within us. These messages are just enough to keep us going in our spiritual walk, but not enough to aid deeper growth.

The true gospel is available to all of us through God’s Word. We must learn to study it. We must know it well enough to rightly divide the truth and check teachings against the Word of God as the Bereans did (Acts 17:11).

Women who love God and cultivate this holy curiosity aren’t satisfied with shallow teaching. By rejecting this imitation spirituality and seeking God’s intentions for our walk with Him, we grow into a robust faith, a faith able to weather even the most difficult or mundane of circumstances: the death of a parent, the betrayal of a friend, the pain of infertility, the fear of financial ruin, the difficulty of long-term singleness.

Are you done living on the surface? Are you ready to dive deeper in your faith, your understanding of God, and your walk by the Spirit? Are you hungry for more and better in your spiritual life? That’s what God wants for you, and He’s just waiting to take you deeper with Him.

*This is an excerpt from chapter one of Phy’s new book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful: Finding Soul-Deep Strength in a Skin-Deep World, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million, CBD or anywhere books are sold. The wording of the headers and emphasis are my own.*

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Phylicia Masonheimer is a blogger, author, speaker and podcast host who teaches Christians how to know what they believe and live it boldly. Her heart is to teach women the history and depth of the Christian faith; the “why” behind the Bible. Her social media and blog cover topics ranging from sexuality to motherhood to Bible study and faith in seasons of grief and loss. Phylicia graduated from Liberty University with a B.S. in Religion. While there she met her husband, Josh, and together they have two daughters. After living in Virginia and Pennsylvania, they finally returned to Phylicia’s hometown in northern Michigan, where they now live on a small farm in the country.