For God So Loved The World

John 3:16 is both the easiest verse in the Bible to preach on and it is the hardest verse to preach on. Of the 31,102 verses in the Bible, John 3:16 captures the very essence of the message of the Gospel. If we were to remove every verse from Genesis to Revelation, leaving only John 3:16, I still believe that souls would be saved. I one sentence, Christ established why He had come to this earth and what the world stood to gain by believing in Him.

This is also one of the hardest verses to preach on, because who doesn’t know this verse? It’s on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and billboards. We see it flashed on stadium screens during sporting events. John 3:16 is everywhere. We know what the verse says. It is perhaps the most well-known Bible verse in the whole world. And everyone thinks they know what it is talking about.

I feel like John 3:16 is like a photograph in that sense. One single verse cherry picked out of wonderful passage of Scripture that tells a much grander story. I must admit, even in preparation for this sermon, I was tempted to just focus on the single verse instead of the passage. Like a photo, you get an image, but not the whole scene.

Here is the setting for this passage: Nicodemas, a teacher of the Law, comes to Jesus secretly at night, to question Him. He desires to know more about the things that Christ has been teaching. This is the setting where we first hear Jesus use the phrase, “A man must be born again.” Nicodemas just can’t wrap his head around what Jesus is saying. Jesus ask of Nicodemas, “You’re a teacher of the Law, and you don’t know about these things?”

Jesus then teaches on the scope of God’s love for mankind. In this passage, Christ reveals why He has come and what that means for mankind. Jesus teaches the Gospel message in just a few sentences.

During the Christmas season, the theme of God’s love for us comes to the forefront of our thinking. God sent His Son, because He loved us. Christ came to this earth to be the willing sacrifice for our sins, because He loved us. This is revealed to us in John 3:16. Yet, there is so much more that Christ has to teach us here. So much more insight into the love that God has for all mankind.

I. We Learn the Object of God’s Love

A. “For God so loved the world” is how the famous verse begins and reveals to us who God loves.

- Miraculously, it is us. The whole of the human race.

- From Adam in the Garden to the newest baby born today, God has loved all of us.

- And because He loves us, He determined to make a way for us.

- God did not wait for the world to turn to Him before He loved the world.

- God gave us His only begotten Son when the world was still unworthy of such an awesome gift.

B. This idea that God loved the whole world, is a purely Christian idea.

- The Jew of Jesus’ day rarely thought that God the whole world. Many of them thought that God only loved Israel.

- This universal offer of salvation in Jesus Christ was revolutionary.

- That is the scope of God’s love for mankind. That salvation would

- be offered not just to a singular group of people, to all the people of the world.

- That message has been spread to the whole world. It did not stay within the borders of Israel, but has touched every continent, been translated to every language, and declared from shore to shore.

• The message of the Gospel has even made its way into outer space! Neil Armstrong famously read from the account of creation as Apollo 11 orbited the earth.

C. Knowing that God’s love is for all men, the whole world, reveals to us the very nature of God.

- 1 Timothy 2:4 tells us that God desires all people to be saved and come into the knowledge of truth.

- God loves us so deeply, that He made a way for us, so that we could pass from life to death.

- God gave us the most precious gift in His Son, Jesus Christ, so that we can have salvation from our sins. So that we might know the Father and the Father might be revealed to us.

- What John 3:16 reveals to us is that God is love.

- There is no sin He will not forgive, no trespass He will not redeem, and no life He will not restore.

- The resounding, echoing message of John 3:16 is that God loves you.