Michael Horton says this about the Gospel,
"Don't take the Gospel for granted. Don't assume that your people already get it because you don't, I don't, none of us gets the Gospel. It is unfamiliar, strange, and counter intuitive every time we hear it, and so we need to hear it over and over again, and not just as a slogan, you know: Come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins.
Charles Spurgeon said: preaching Christ and Him crucified--when Paul said, I had determined to know nothing among you but Christ and Him crucified, Paul didn't mean that he just ran around yelling, "Christ crucified, Christ crucified." He meant that in all of the Scriptures, Christ is either anticipated as the One who will be crucified for our sins and raised for our justification, or He is announced as having arrived. And so, as we preach the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, not our own hobby horses but the Scriptural text, we must ask how Christ, if He could show the disciples on the Emmaus Road how everything in the Scriptures pointed to Him, we need to be able to do that in the pulpit, and not assume anything when it comes to our parishioners' knowledge of the Gospel.
The Law is in us by nature. You don't have to tell anybody you need to be nicer, that you need to love your wife or your husband, and that you shouldn't leave your children unattended. You don't have to convince people these things are true. They already know it.
Pastors, you always need to convince not only your parishioners, but yourself, that the Gospel isn't too good to be true, that the Gospel really is an objective event that has happened regardless of what it looks like inside of me. It's the hardest thing in the world to believe the Gospel. "
