the gospel

We have all heard the gospel presented as God's triumphant answer to human problems--problems of our relation with ourselves and our fellow humans and our environment. Well, there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem--the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man's relation with his Maker. And unless we make it plain that the solution of these former problems depends on the settling of this later one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses of God--for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact. No reader of of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems--fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest--but equally no reader of the new Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin against God.

~J.I. Packer
In My Place Condemned He Stood
p. 41

I think so many of us are guilty of this: trying to make the gospel more palatable but ending up preaching something that is not the gospel. I know I am guilty of trying to make the gospel more palatable and missing the main point in the process. The heart of the gospel is that we are sinners who deserve the wrath of God, but God put forth Jesus to receive His wrath so that, when He shows eternal grace to those who have put their trust in Him, He is just...the penalty we deserve has been paid. Anything that does not have at its center the reality of our sin, the penalty it deserves and the provision made by Christ is not the gospel.