When I was a kid (wiwak?), the church in which I grew up used this phrase a lot to describe someone who had become a Christian and become a part of our community of faith: “He/She obeyed the gospel.”

We all knew what that meant. This person had done five things (anyone want to say this along with me?):

1. Hear
2. Believe
3. Repent
4. Confess
5. Be Baptized

Those were the five steps to salvation in our church — all of this together constituted “obeying the gospel.”

But then I got a little older, and, dare I say, a bit more theologically sophisticated. I began to read smart people who asked questions about what exactly the gospel is and what it is not. And most of the people I was reading at the time came to one conclusion: the gospel is Jesus’ life, death, burial and resurrection. They drew this conclusion from none other than the Apostle Paul himself who said as much in 1 Corinthians 15.

Say what you will, Max Lucado’s book No Wonder They Call Him the Savior changed my life and will forever retain a very soft spot in my heart.

But I continued in my education, reading more and more people smarter and smarter who continued to debate just how to precisely define this word “gospel”. Part of what was fueling my search was the fact that, if the gospel were just an historical event — or even a series of historical events — how in the world are you supposed to obey it?

I could easily complete that list we’d memorized in church wiwak — thus obeying the gospel. But all this new information made it exceedingly problematic for me to put it all together — especially if you think about all the times Jesus preached without giving any clear commands for us to obey. How do you obey Jesus when he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”?

Am I supposed to become poor? I want to inherit the kingdom of God. What do I have to do?

Or how about when he says, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit”? I want to be a good tree, but Jesus won’t tell me what I have to do to become one!

Stuff like this used to really frustrate me. Until recently.

I’ve recently come to think of the gospel as Jesus — specifically his words and his actions on our behalf — and his invitation for each of us to become a citizen of his kingdom.

And I’ve recently come to think of obeying the gospel as simply this: living as if it were all true.

What would that look like? How different would you life be if you lived as if the whole Jesus thing were true?

In the Gospel of John, the love God has for the world leads directly to the offer of eternal life. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, the same offer is made, but the wording is different. The offer in those Gospels is citizenship in the “Kingdom of God” (Mark & Luke) or the “Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew).

Same offer — different words.

Now, using “Kingdom” at all is a bit of a risk for Americans living in 2011. Such language can carry ideas of oppression, domination or slavery. America was birthed out of the rebellion against such things. Consequently, we don’t much care for kings or for kingdoms.

But when you read how Jesus talked about God’s kingdom, it doesn’t sound much like the thing we’re afraid of. In fact, he once told people that such thinking was upside down. Rulers in the Kingdom he came to initiate would be servants. First in line would be last and vice-versa (see Mark 10:42-45).

Jesus, who was the most rightside up person to ever live, says we’ve got our notion of what a real King looks like backwards because we’ve only seen the way the ideal has been perverted by fallen, greedy humans. Without abandoning our terminology, Jesus comes to redefine those terms so we can better understand what he’s about. He will be King, but he will be unlike any King we’ve ever had before. He’ll have all the good parts of being King with none of the bad parts.

This is nearly impossible for us to fathom. But it’s true.

I think it is precisely because we’ve misunderstood the idea of King and Kingdom that Jesus’ message is so often misinterpreted as bad news instead of good.