A brief sermon on John 3:16-18

Joshua D. Leavitt
Tonight, we will begin with the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16. It is in this
one verse that Christians have for centuries found the summary of the Gospel. It
has become almost like a rallying cry for the Church. You will never meet a pastor or
a missionary who cannot quote it: For God so loved the world that He gave His only
Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish, but have eternal life.
We'll begin tonight by dissecting this verse, opening up this package of profound
divine revelation.
"For God so loved the world..." I believe I mentioned to you during a previous class
that 1 John 4:16 says that God is love. And then I led you to 1 Corinthians 13:4-8,
another one of the most famous biblical passages. And in it we found a description
of the fundamental character of God. We found a God of selflessness, forgiveness,
inexhaustible determination, kindness, humility, truth, hope, and perseverance a
God who always protects, and a God who never ever fails. (By the way, some of you
might have read that passage and wondered, well, why then does God give us
commands to follow and sometimes seem to get in our way? It is only because of
His love for us. The Christian God gives commands because He wants to protect us
and to help us. His commands are an expression of kindness on His part. In fact,
even His acts of punishment are because of His love for us. In Revelation 3:19, Jesus
says, "I punish those I love.")
Whenever God interacts with any of His creatures, it is out of love a love deeper
and more selfless than even the love of a mother for her child. It is a love that wants
to protect, a love that wants to rescue. And so, when God looked upon this world
and saw it in its fallen state, He decided to act because of His love for it. He acted
out of compassion for you, for me, and for everyone else. It was not out of anger
toward you or hatred for you that He sent His Son Jesus Christ. It was because He
loved you. It was because of a love far greater than anyone else might have for you
that God came to help you.
I don't know how your parents treated you as you were growing up, or how they
treat you now. Perhaps they were wonderful parents to you, and never beat you,
and always told you that they believed in you, and that they were proud to have you
as their children. Or, perhaps you weren't so fortunate. Either way, long ago, your
true Father, God, who loves you with a kindness and selflessness that surpasses any
affection anyone from this world could ever have for you, reached down from
Heaven to take your hand, to lovingly embrace you, and to help you up to Heaven
to be with Him forever.
The next part: "...that He gave His only Son..." This is something else I think I've
already said to you, but it bears repeating. There is only one person who is God's
begotten Son, and that is Jesus Christ. As our Nicene Creed says, He was "born of
the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were
made." What does that make us? We who are Christians are creatures made by God
in His image and adopted by Him as sons and daughters, and His Spirit within us is
busy conforming us to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29; 2 Corinthians 3:18).

How much does God love you? It was not just another wise man that He sent to
save you. It was not an angel or any other heavenly being that He sent. For all we
know, God might have created angels of incomprehensible power and authority, but
He did not send them. No, He loved you so much that He sent His only Son to
rescue you. The King did not send His soldiers to rescue His Son's kidnapped Bride;
His Son Himself came to save her, and to bring her back to His Father's castle
Himself. I'll put it another way: you were so precious to God, so valuable to Him, that
He sent no one less than His only Son to die to set you free. Indeed, Jesus was
willing to humbly empty Himself of His majesty and to descend from the Throne of
Heaven to the dirty streets of earth, and from there to suffer humiliation by dying a
horrific death, because He loved you, His bride. Incidentally, Paul says in Ephesians
5 that Christian husbands are supposed to love their wives just as Christ loved us. In
an authentic Christian marriage, the husband is both his wife's leader, and her
servant, who is willing to suffer greatly on her behalf.
"...everyone who..." In the words "everyone who" we find an invitation to everyone.
The strong and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the beautiful and the ugly, the
young and the old, the wise and the foolish, the males and the females, the wealthy
and the poor, the popular and the invisible, the heroes and the villains, the virtuous
and the wicked, the patriarchs and the black sheep, the bosses and the workers, the
Jews and the Gentiles, the masters and the slaves; all are invited, and all are loved.
The arms of Love are reaching out to them all.
"... believes in Him..." Hebrews 11:6 says that it is impossible to please God without
faith. We do not serve a lifeless idol made of stone or wood that is standing on a
shelf a figurine that we can see and touch but which has no life in itself and
neither sees nor hears nor feels. No, we serve the invisible God of Life whose
presence is everywhere the God who sees and hears and feels everything but
whom we usually cannot see or hear or touch outside of the heavenly realm. Even
here tonight Jesus is standing among us, says Matthew 18:20, yet only our hearts
have any chance at all of perceiving His -presence. "Faith is the assurance of things
hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," Hebrews 11:1 says. How can you even
try to do anything nice for the invisible and intangible God if you cannot even bring
yourself to believe that He is truly there? And so it is that faith is necessary for our
salvation. As Paul and Silas told a soldier in Acts 16:31, "Believe in the Lord Jesus,
and you will be saved."
And, as Ephesians 2:8 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith." And
finally, per Romans 10:9, "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe
in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
shall not perish, but have eternal life All wise people who have lived lengthy
periods of their life as both non-Christians and as Christians will surely testify that
they had been dead prior to accepting Jesus. And, there is a reason for that. Jesus is
Life. If you do not have Him within you, you cannot be truly alive. You are merely
existing in a state of spiritual decay like a zombie, if you will. Perhaps the
temporary pleasures and crises of this temporary world distract you from that
realization. But, deep down inside, especially if you are a remarkably perceptive and
introverted person, you know that at your core you are dying inside. You know that
every day of your life so far has just been one attempt after another to remain

distracted from that truth, and to seek out temporary pleasures. But eventually,
everyone becomes deaf to the distractions, and numb to the pleasures. And then,
all that is left is the unsettling feeling that time is slipping by, and you are dying.
And then you will die, having missed the point of life, having never found anything
of eternal value in your miserable existence on this tiny little perishing planet.
Houses, companies, kingdoms, countries, and empires rise and fall, and eventually
disappear into a desert sands of time forever. For, this is a world of death and
decay, a world hopelessly damaged by the Fall. Jesus, the sole Giver of Eternal Life,
has entered into our fallen world and is offering us everything that this world cannot
provide: eternal meaning, eternal life, and eternal fulfillment. He says in John 10:10
that He has come to give Life and to give it abundantly. The world that He will
eventually bring contains pleasures so great that those of this world cannot
compare to them. And He puts the first glimpse of that new world, the Bible says,
into the eyes of each of us who believe in Him. The first taste of the Water of Life is
on our tongues. It is a world of Life and Light and Love. In the Gospel, God is inviting
zombies to newness and eternal life in a new and eternal world. Those who reject
the invitation continue to cling to death and decay and to a vanishing world. With
every passing hour, they die a little more until at last they depart from their bodies
and sullenly realize the great mistake they have made, the opportunity that they
had wasted. They choose bondage over freedom, death over life, and accursedness
over redemption. A greater world than this one beckons to us; an imperishable
kingdom of peace invites us; an eternal life of true personal fulfillment is being
offered to us.
Such is John 3:16, the most popular verse in the Bible.
In John 3:17, we see that the mission of Jesus Christ was not one of condemnation,
but one of mercy and compassion. The Father was lowering His Hand to us who live
on earth, not to strike us for our sinfulness, but to caress our tear-stained cheeks
and to beckon us to go with Him to Heaven. Despite what some people might think,
God prefers to demonstrate mercy, not wrath. Supremely wise and loving, He
prefers to compel us toward repentance not with shouts of anger, but with soothing
words of kindness. Romans 2:4 testifies to this. We further hear God say in Ezekiel
33:11, "As I live, says the LORD God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,
but that the wicked turn from their ways and live." Whenever you encounter
passages in the Bible wherein God really is demonstrating wrath, please understand
that He prefers not to use wrath, and secondly that He disciplines those He loves
(Revelation 3:19). Wrath is a tool that He sometimes uses, but it is not actually part
of His core character. By the way, I speak from experience when I say that,
whenever I know that I am being punished by God, it is actually comforting. It lets
me know that He is watching me, and that He loves me.
So then, rather than come to condemn the world, our Lord came to save it. Jesus'
mission was not one of condemnation, but of salvation.
In the next verse, verse 18, we see a common theme in the New Testament: there is
no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But, those who are not yet in
Him remain in a state of condemnation. There are two ways in which salvation must
be understood. In the first sense, our salvation is like a medical issue. We are
infected with the virus of sin, and must be cured by God. In the other sense, it is a

legal issue. In the judicial court of Heaven, sin is a legal crime, a crime of which we
are all guilty in a legal sense. And, the punishment for that crime is eternal death.
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit begins the process of curing us of sinfulness, and
Jesus death on the cross atones for our own legal crimes, canceling out our debt in
Heavens court. To be acquitted of the guilt, we must believe in the Son of God.
According to Romans 8:1, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ
Jesus. But, those who do not believe remain legally condemned, and if they do not
believe in the Son of God they will eventually pay for their own crimes.
Well pause here tonight, and briefly review what weve covered:

John 3:16 contains a summary of the Gospel.

God is perfectly loving and filled with compassion, and it was out of that love
that He sent Jesus into the world.
Jesus' mission was a rescue mission characterized by a compassionate
message of hope and forgiveness.
Absolutely anyone and everyone is invited to receive salvation and to
become a child of God.
The salvation that God offers us is eternal life. Those who have not yet
received salvation are slowly dying not only in their bodies, but also in their
hearts.
Faith is necessary for salvation.
God prefers to be merciful, though He will use wrath as a tool if He feels He
must.
There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, but those who are
not yet in Him reside in a state of condemnation.