John 3:16 (1)

The following comes from a recent message i preached on John 3:16. I was dependent for outline and inspiration on Ray Ortland Jr's excellent book, The Gospel, which you should go and buy.

I was reading the other day that more than 75% of car wrecks take place less than 10 minutes from where the people involved in the wrecks live. Most of the wrecks you get into will be within walking distance fo your own front door, or the front door of the other person in the wreck. This was because when we get close to home, and on familiar roads, we pay less attention that in a place that we don’t know very well. I think we have the same danger with tonight’s Bible verse. We are so familiar with John 3:16 we could probably quote it in our sleep. But this is the most famous verse in the Bible for a reason, and it’s a reason worth paying attention to.

It’s the most succinct, meaning short and accurate, presentation of the Gospel. John 3:16 is about the Gospel and you, so let’s walk thru it one phrase at a time and see what truth we can unpack from it. And as we do, let’s be praying that the Lord would speak to our hearts, and help us understand the truth of the Gospel in this verse.

For God so loved the world. What we think about when we think about God is the most important thing about us. If we think God is a cat, or an ice cream, that’s going to impact the way we live. If we don’t think there is any God at all, that’s going to impact the way we live. A lot of people think God is just a friendly old man in the sky. He wishes we’d do better, love more and sin less, but he loves us anyway. He’s a bit lonely, a bit boring, and just loves it when we come and visit with him. That’s the view that a lot of people, even in the church, have of God.

But that’s not who God is at all. In Genesis 17:1 God says, ‘I am God almighty.’ He is almighty! There’s no one that compares with Him, there’s no one who can approach Him in power and control and might. He needs to tell us that He is almighty because we so often forget. We need to remember, when we’re hopeless, when all the odd seem against us, when we seem to have no future, that God is almighty! We don’t have to dream or expect small things from God, we can do dream big and attempt great things fo us. This is who God is! Almighty!

And, we’re told, God loves the world. This is a surprise, or at least it should be. The world is not lovely. You and I are not lovely, our culture is not lovely. We are not lovable. But God is. God is lovely, and His love overflows onto and into you and me! God is light, but you and I love darkness. We’d rather have things our own way all the time in the darkness of sin that step out into the love of God. This is how we’re born. In John 3:19 we’re told that ‘light came into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.’ We reject God, the light, and so does our culture, because our deeds are evil. Remember when Jesus was fishing with the disciples, and because of Him they pulled in so many fish that their nets broke? Peter told Jesus to get away from Him because he was a sinful man. Our sin can not bear to be near the holiness of God. Isaiah cried out ‘woe is me,’ when he saw the light of God in Isaiah 6.

There’s a great movement in our culture at the moment that the most important thing is self esteem. The most important thing is that we feel good about ourselves. The great sin of 2014 is making someone feel bad about themselves. The Bible tells us that our problem is we don’t feel bad enough about ourselves. We don’t realize how deadly our sin is, we don’t realize how evil our rebellion against God is. When we do realize that, we realize all the more how extraordinary God’s love for us is. God would be perfectly just if He cast us off into the hopeless, cold, dark world we’ve created for ourselves. But He doesn’t...