Commissioned: Real Love: Discovering God's Heart for YouSample

So Much Love

John 3:16 is the most popular verse in the Bible. It has been waved on signs at sporting events and printed on the bottom of fast-food paper cups. One football player even wrote it in his eye-black for a national championship game, leading to it being the most searched item on the internet for over 24 hours!

This verse deserves its popularity because it is such a clear and compelling statement of how much God loves us. Let’s look carefully at what it tells us.

God is a Father. The Bible reveals that God is personal, not just an impersonal force or substance. In fact, the Bible speaks of God the Father AND of God the Son. It also speaks of God the Holy Spirit, who is the love between the Father and the Son. The greatest mystery of the Christian faith is that God is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit—three persons of the same substance, an eternal community of love. Love is at the center of the universe.

God the Father GAVE God the Son. He gave the Son by sending Him into the world in human flesh to teach God’s ways to a sinful world. He gave the Son up to death on the cross at the hands of sinful people.

The Father gave the Son because of His love for the world. We cannot fathom a love so great that a Father would give His Son to rescue a world that had rejected Him! This is how much God loves you and me. The Father gave the Son; the Son obeyed the Father even unto death, and the Holy Spirit transformed Jesus’s suffering into redemptive love. God is for us!

God did this so that people would not perish spiritually but would have eternal life. God wants us back! All of us! He wants to give us life with Him that will last forever. In other places, the Bible tells us that “the world” is not to be loved—the world in the sense of the forces organized to keep people from God. It is people that God loves. He sent Jesus into the world on a mission of love to save the people of the world. Now, He is sending us to others because of that same love.

God’s did this for everyone. Because of God’s love, every person in the world is now free to come back to Him—"everyone who believes” can begin a new life with God. It doesn’t matter what we have done. It doesn’t matter how great or how small we are, how successful or how unsuccessful we are, how esteemed or how rejected we are. God’s love reaches to each one of us.

Believing is an ongoing action that results in eternal life. Our response to God is not just mental assent to His existence or even to His love. It is a response of the heart, a process that leads to a life of obedience and to eternal life with God. We give ourselves to Him in loving trust because we see the depth of the love He has for us. We are assured of eternal life because we remain in an ongoing love relationship with the God who sought us and saved us.

John 3:16 is such a powerful summary of the Good News because is centers on the most important elements of the story. All the words on all the pages of all the thickest books of catechesis and theology are summed up right here: God loves us…God gave His Son…we are all invited home.

Stop, think and pray:

God loves us so much He sent His Son to die for us. Spend some time letting that sink in and thanking God for His great love. Let’s think of someone in our world who needs to know that God loves them. What simple thing could I do to show that person that God loves them?