What Wondrous Love Is This?                                                 3/29/09         

You see the sign at almost any ball game:  John 3:16.  I once even saw someone who had it painted on his chest and would flash it whenever a camera drew near.  It is the very essence of our faith:  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

We know the passage so well that we forget how fundamental it is.  We begin to take it for granted, yet I'm sure there are people in the tv viewing audience who wonder who this John is and what those numbers mean.

So let's take a new, deeper look into what this passage means to us as Christians and how it can change our lives until finally we are willing to risk it all, our wealth, our family, our very lives, for our faith in Christ.

It begins with one fundamental fact:  God loves this world -- and even more important -- God loves you, not in some abstract impersonal way.  He did not create us and then disappear from sight forever.  No.  His love is an active love, a love that gets involved in the details of our lives from the big to the small.

It is a love that watches over us and guides us through dark and perilous times and it is a love that shares our joys and our laughter --- a love that will never give up on us no matter what we do or say.  His love is a soft place to land when life becomes hard.

The other night I was talking with a person from AA, and he said the most important thing He learned in AA was that God loved him, not just after he sobered up and started to put the pieces of his life back together again, but God had loved him even while he was still a drunk.  To God, he was never a loser, a deadbeat, a homeless statistic, God saw Him instead as a precious child worthy of the greatest gift of all.

Perhaps that would become clearer if you paused for a moment and put your own name within this verse:  For God so loved Patricia Ann that He gave His only Son.  God so loved David, Sara, Ruth, the list could go on and on for God loves each of us as if we were the only one in all the world who mattered.

And that matters, for God so loved the world --- not just a select few -- but all the world.  He doesn't just love Presbyterians or Baptists or Jews or Muslims.  God loves us all - our enemies as well as our friends.  He loves the person who cut you off in traffic.  He loves the checkout girl whose lack of English frustrates you.  He loves the terrorist who would kill you.

Such love is incomprehensible to us.  Left up to our own devices we would categorize people as good or bad, loved or unlovable, forgiven or unforgivable, but God says "no, each one of you matters".

No where do we see that more clearly than at the cross of Jesus.  As the very nails tore into His flesh, He was saying "Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing."

Christ forgave us before any one said "No I can't do this.'  "No I will not murder an innocent man."  He forgave us before our "I'm sorry's".

So how much does God love us?  He loves us the height and breadth of a nail, for the verse goes on:  For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son."

God would do anything to save us, to turn our face back toward home, back to His forgiving grace.  Time after time God sent messengers to tell us of this Good News.  Time after time He waited for us to repent, but we failed to listen.  Until, finally, in desperation, He sent His Son, God Himself, to show us His love.

Christ was God's greatest gift to our world, and what did we do?  We crucified Him ---crucified Him for the high crime of loving us.  And yet God keeps on loving us and forgiving us.  And what does He ask of us in return?  That we believe in His Son and all His Son has taught us.

If we do this, our reward will be great, for we will have the gift of everlasting life - life here and life in the world to come.  You see, this isn't just the promise of heaven - although there is that - but it is also a promise for life in the here and now.

Our lives will be better when we strive to love others as God loves us.  We will find a strength in times of our greatest trials that is beyond our understanding.  Our joy in every day miracles like budding trees and blooming forsythia will increase and we will have a joy in life that others envy.

I often hear people say that they don't know how those without God in their lives manage to do it.  And the reality is often they don't.  They give into the despair and the grief.

That's not to mean that those of us who believe are never touched by the tragedies of life.  We are.  But we know we are not in it alone.  We do not have to rely only on our own strength.  We have strength greater than ourselves.

So there it is.  The good news of Jesus Christ all wrapped up in love, waiting for us to open it and claim the new life - the everlasting life -- that is ours for the taking.  Don't wait another moment, open it up and receive the gift that God has in store for you.