Simple gospel. That’s how most Christians describe the salvation message of Jesus.  We’ve gotten used to the idea that the eternal benefits of Christianity are easy to access and easy to understand.  “Why, even a child can receive Jesus!” we often say.

Most Christian believers come to faith within the first 15 years of their lives.  It’s a well-known fact that the older you get the less likely you are to believe.  That reality is much more about the nature of long-term rebellion than any inadequacies in the message.

The gospel is wonderfully complex, like a rose made up of many petals.  Each petal is beautiful in its own right, but must not be mistaken for the whole rose.  The loveliness of the entire flower results from the combination of petals.  The same is true of the message of salvation in Jesus.  You can pull the petals off and examine them individually, but by themselves none of them are an accurate picture of the whole message.  Getting our mental arms around the entire content of God’s revelation on any given subject is the best way to avoid serious error. So, it’s simple and yet complicated.  Easy to access and yet can take a lifetime to understand and appreciate.

When C.S. Lewis, with his scholar’s intellect, found faith in Christ credible, it was because he saw the marvelous way Jesus’ message fit together into a cohesive harmony of truth.  Simple magnificence!

When I trusted Christ as a child of six, the gospel was on my level.  Now, later in life, it is increasingly full of new discoveries and deeper levels. Shouldn’t we expect that to be the case if it is in truth God’s message to us?  A message that originates in the mind behind the universe should be both immediately accessible and infinitely more than what was seen at first glance.