All gospel, all the time?

In response to my recent post ‘False gospels and me’, Neil Foster asked this:

I find a dilemma. As a Christian person whose full-time job is not preaching, I find myself (even outside work hours) often speaking about issues that are not a central part of the gospel. Same-sex marriage and religious freedom, for example. Yet I think I am doing so because these are important issues as to which the gospel has clear implications, and because many in our society are confused or wrong about these issues. I take as many opportunities as possible to speak of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, but probably a survey of (say) my Facebook posts would see those posts as somewhat less than the ones on the other issues. Am I simply wrong? Or is there an argument that some people need to be speaking in direct response to what the world is speaking about, while bringing the gospel to bear on those issues wherever possible?

Neil (as usual, in my experience) asks a perceptive question. If we want the gospel to remain central, and to keep articulating it clearly and often (as I suggested), does that mean that we are somehow compromising or failing when we talk with people about issues that are implications of the gospel but not the gospel itself? Or, for that matter, if we address apologetic questions? Or (if I may take it further) if we do good works that benefit others, since these works too are the fruit of the gospel, not the gospel itself?

Is a relentless 24/7 ‘good news cycle’ of gospel proclamation the only valid action for a properly gospel-focused person to engage in?

Put in this way, the answer is obvious. The faith we have in the gospel should end up “working through love” (as Paul puts it in Gal 5:6) and produce all manner of godly speech and action, including the kind of thoughtful challenges that Neil might be sharing with friends about same-sex marriage or anything else.

Would it be possible to end up only (or even mainly) talking about these moral issues, and so give the impression that Christians are more interested in morality than redemption? Or would it be possible to do lots of good works but not get around to telling people about the gospel that is driving these works (so they give credit to us as being particularly nice people)? I imagine that most of us have erred on that side of things at one time or another. In this case, it is perhaps not so much ‘gospel-faith working through love’ as ‘love heading off on a trajectory of its own and losing connection with its proper source’.

If the gospel is to be clear and central in our minds and actions, then it will play out not only in taking the initiative (as Neil suggests) to speak of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus regularly and as we find opportunity; it will also shape the way we speak about other subjects as implications of the gospel. That is, we will not hide the gospel connection, or seek to make our arguments from some other supposedly neutral standpoint. In fact, we will keep bringing gospel connections and themes to bear in a way that will draw the conversation towards Christ—not as an artificial debating tactic, but because of the gravitational pull of the gospel that is the solid centre of our hearts and minds.