Time for a New Slogan

This past Wednesday, while recording our Bible study podcast, we started talking about the gospel, and eventually the idea was distilled down to this: “Jesus loves you. Period.”

Something about that didn’t sit right with me at the time, though I understood exactly what was meant and agree with the sentiment. But after sitting with it for a while, I think I’m finally finding words for the tension I feel.

I think it’s time for a new slogan. “Jesus loves you” isn’t as all-encompassing as we sometimes pretend it is. Honestly, there are moments in life where that phrase falls painfully short.

Your loved one has cancer.
Your marriage is falling apart.
You’re anxious all the time.
You can’t pay the bills.
You’re grieving someone you thought would still be here.

And into that, someone says: “But Jesus loves you.” True? I think so. But when your life is collapsing, you’re often not sitting there thinking: “What I really need right now is reassurance of divine affection.”

And yet, I believe the gospel has to have something to say to those things. Otherwise it stops feeling like good news at all.

Reducing the gospel to “Jesus loves you” feels emotionally dishonest to me. It skips over the reality that human beings are complicated, embodied creatures who don’t experience suffering as abstract ideas. Love, by itself, is not always emotionally persuasive in moments of devastation.

Maybe that’s why the Christianity is not about escaping pain through comforting ideas. It’s about a God who enters suffering rather than avoiding it. A God who does not stand at a distance explaining pain, but experiences grief, abandonment, violence, and death firsthand.

The gospel is probably bigger than any one sentence can hold, which may be why we reduce it into slogans that eventually stop feeling true. At its core, the gospel is the good news of what God is doing in and through Jesus — not just “you are loved,” but the announcement that another way of being human is breaking into the world. A world shaped by fear, violence, exclusion, shame, and death is not ultimate. The outsider belongs. Mercy outruns shame. Human worth is not earned. Love refuses to abandon the world.

Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. But perhaps the gospel is not just information to believe, but an invitation into a different way of living. It does not promise easy answers, protection from suffering, or emotional certainty. The Christian story itself contains grief, doubt, betrayal, and unresolved tension.

Maybe the gospel is not that life stops hurting. Maybe it’s that suffering does not get to decide the final meaning of our lives.

So here’s my proposal for a new slogan: Love refuses to abandon the world. Let me know what you think.