The Event of the Good News is intensely personal. That Event was the worst and the best experience of Jesus’ life. As you share in the best of the Good News, the Event will become your own greatest experience.
Paul was a leading spokesman for Jesus. Like others, Paul focused on the Person of the Good News. He shared the Good News in the Greek city of Corinth, and later wrote back to the believers:
For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Corinthians 2:2-5).
Jesus’ worst experience was being “crucified”—executed as a criminal. Hung up and nailed on a wooden cross, He died from torture that inflicted the greatest pain possible. Yes, strange as it sounds, this is the Event of your Good News. This was how Jesus fulfilled His claim to be the world’s bread.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh (John 6:51).
There is more to the Event. Jesus also predicted that, after giving His life, He would also take it back.
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep…. I lay down My life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again (John 10:11,17-18).
Jesus predicted this resurrection so often that His enemies sealed and guarded His grave. Yet, just as Jesus promised, He went to the grave dead, and later emerged alive! Those who had watched Him die, and then saw Him alive again, were the first to tell the Good News. Peter was one of them. He shared “the Good News of peace through Jesus” by saying,
And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead (Acts 10:39-41).