God Wants To Give Eternal Life To You! Series

God Wants to Give Eternal Life to You!

The Gospel of John

John 3:1-18

Sermon by Rick Crandall

Grayson Baptist Church - November 15, 2015

(Revised July 2, 2019)

BACKGROUND:

*Please open your Bibles to John Chapter 3. Lord willing, over the next few weeks we will take a close look at this beloved passage of Scripture. Let's start with the great truth that God wants to give His eternal life to us all! Remember that 1 Timothy 2:3-6 tells us that "God our Savior desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." Please keep that in mind as we read John 3:1-18.

MESSAGE:

*Think for a moment about the value of time. Someone wrote, "To realize the value of one month ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby. To realize the value of one hour, ask the sweethearts who are waiting to meet. To realize the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed their plane. To realize the value of one second, ask the person who barely avoided the wreck. (1)

*If one second can have that much value, then how much must eternal life be worth? And God wants to give it to all of us! The expressions "eternal life," "life eternal," "everlasting life," and "life everlasting" come from the same two original Greek words. And these specific expressions are found 44 times in the New Testament.

*We see these expressions here in vs. 15 and 16, but also in Scriptures like John 10:27-28, where Jesus said:

27. "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.

28. And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand."

*Another example is 1 John 5:13, where the Apostle John spoke to Christians and said: "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God."

*God wants to give you eternal life, and He wants you to know for sure that you have it forever. Charles Ryrie said, "If we could lose eternal life, then it has the wrong name. Eternal life is eternal." And God wants to give you! (2)

*In today's Scripture, God shows us four truths everybody needs to know about eternal life.

1. FIRST: WE MUST KNOW THAT ETERNAL LIFE IS OUR BIGGEST NEED.

*Getting eternal life from God is our most pressing need. Life in this world is very short. What good would it do for me to live a hundred years, if that's all there was to it? What good would it do for me to even live a thousand years, if after that I would spend eternity suffering in hell?

*Please don't be deceived to think that you will simply fade away into oblivion when you die. There are only two possibilities: It's either going to be Heaven or hell for us all. It's either eternal life, or eternal death with eternal suffering in hell.

*Eternal life is our most important need in life. That's why Jesus stressed it first and foremost when He spoke with Nicodemus.

*In vs. 1-3, God's Word says:

1. There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

2. This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.''

3. Jesus answered and said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.''

*Then in vs. 17-18, Jesus said:

17. . . "God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

18. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."

*Receiving the gift of God's eternal life is everyone's most urgent need.

*Have you ever been up close when someone was about to drown, or thought they were. I have a couple of times. The first time was in Daytona Beach. We lived there for two years when I was a kid, and most of that time we lived a block away from the ocean.

*I was in the 5th grade and my brother Jon was in the 3rd grade. We went by ourselves down to the beach or over to the river all the time. (You have to understand that this was in the early 1960's, and parents didn't watch over their children like we do today.)