God Really, Really Loves You
John 3:1-21,
Now 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 him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
I have prayed over this morning, this message, these verses because I believe some of you came in needing to feel loved by God again. I know some of you need to feel loved again. You don’t feel loved right now, at least not in your worst moments. You might know that you’re loved, but you struggle to know it — and even more to feel it. There’s something clouding God’s love for you — different clouds in different stories.
The cloud might be a relationship. Maybe a parent has been especially overbearing — or especially absent. Maybe a child has changed and started responding in ways that are confusing and painful. Maybe a spouse has grown distant, or distracted, or irritated, or worse. Maybe you’re a young family battling sickness — and I mean battling, going to absolute war with the flu or RSV for weeks on end. Maybe you’re in a job you hate, but you feel stuck. Maybe you’re in a job you love but might lose. Maybe you’d love to have any job at all. Maybe you feel stuck in a cycle of sin that you have tried to break, maybe for years. Maybe someone keeps sinning against you. I have my clouds this week. . . . I have needed to be reminded that the God of heaven, the Maker of mountains and oceans, sunsets and freezing temperatures, the final Judge of every human soul, the most powerful, most holy, most valuable being in this or any universe loves me (loves you). Do you know that? Not just in your mind, but in your heart — in every bone and muscle in your body. I want you to know this love like that.
I want you to feel how loved you are. And to do that, I’m going to take you to the most familiar verse in all the world:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
You know these words by heart, but I’ve prayed that you might have ears to hear them this morning as if you’ve never heard them before. I want the love of God to wash over you and give you strength to endure whatever makes you feel loved any less.
Four Loves in One Verse
With these next 30 minutes, I want to show you four loves in John 3:16 (and by extension, John 3:1–21). I see four loves in this one verse, and I think this verse can help us make some sense of the other 20 verses in this passage.
1. God Loves the Unlovely
Okay, so four loves in one verse. First love: God loves the unlovely.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son. . . .”
When you hear Jesus say that word “world,” I wonder what you hear. Do you hear “world,” and immediately think of places like Kenya, Japan, and Brazil? Or do you hear “world,” and think darkness, wickedness?
“For God so loved [sinners], that he gave his only Son. . . .”
The former is certainly and beautifully true — God does love and has redeemed people from all tribes, tongues, peoples, and languages (Revelation 5). And it was provocative, in Israel, for John to say that God loves the world, and not just Israel. But I don’t think that’s the main point here. No, the main point here is that God loves the unlovely. He loves sinners. He loves the world who despised and rejected him.
This “world” is the world immersed, drowning in sin, the entirety of humanity — today, 8.062 billion people, every single one of them perishing apart from faith in Jesus. And we see that when we keep reading, verse 17:
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world (sinners), but in order that the world (sinners) might be saved through him.
Why would Jesus have to clarify that: God didn’t send me to condemn the world? Because the world deserved condemnation. We deserved condemnation. Romans 3:23,
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
We all have sinned and do sin, and that sin deserves condemnation, punishment, death. The wages of sin are death (Romans 6:23) — and not just death, but a never-ending, always-dying death.
See how ugly this world really is, next verse — how ugly, unlovely we were apart from Christ:
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. . . .
We didn’t just do bad things; we loved bad things. That’s the world Jesus sought out. That’s the world God loved. We were evil people — plotting evil, doing evil, savoring evil, and hiding in shadows — and yet God loved us, even while we laid in the dark. He didn’t wait for us to come out of the darkness looking for him; no, he sent his Son, the Light of the world, into the awful, wicked shadows to find us and save us. God loves the unlovely.
We named our son “Sorin Pierce” because of verses like these. Sorin means “sun” in Romanian. I’m not Romanian (Faye’s certainly not Romanian), but we went looking for something that meant light (preferably two syllables, and starting with S). And we wanted to see that light pierce the darkness — the darkness in us, the darkness in our son and other children, and the darkness in the world. We named him Sorin Pierce because our God has a heart for those in darkness, because he loves the unlovely.
2. God Loves Believers
Second, God loves believers. Where do I see that in verse 16?
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Now, this verse would be enough to say that God loves believers simply because it says he saves us from perishing and gives us eternal life. Like I just said, we deserved death — the worst death, a death in which we die and die and die forever — and he gave us the opposite, the very best life imaginable, a life so good, for so long, we can hardly believe it’s true. God loves believers. But there’s more to this love in these verses.
How does God love believers? Does he send his Son into the world and then wait around for someone to believe? This is how I used to think about salvation. God sends his good news out into the world, the gospel, and then he loves those who choose to love and believe in him. There’s more to this love, though. And this gets us into the first fifteen verses of our passage. Verse 1:
“Now 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.’”
Jesus was turning water into wine, healing the blind and sick, seeing people’s minds, and the religious leaders were taking notice. Clearly something supernatural’s happening here, but it’s not happening in the ways they expected. So Nicodemus comes looking for an explanation.
He comes in secret, at night, and essentially says, “Help me understand what I’m seeing.” Jesus answers, verse 3:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Say what? . . . Nicodemus is even more confused and so he asks,
“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
Jesus has this pharisee so turned around that he asks if an adult man has to climb back into his mother’s womb. It sounds a little like the kinds of crazy questions a curious 5 or 6-year-old might ask. Jesus answers,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”
He’s not talking about a womb birth. We had two babies born into our community group in the last couple months, two different families — Ambrose and Annie. He’s not talking about that — but he’s using that to talk about something else. He’s talking about a spiritual birth, a birth of faith. He’s pointing to the miracle of physical birth to describe something even more miraculous that has to happen in us in order for us to believe.
Anyone can be amazed by a man healing blindness, or turning water to wine, or reading people’s minds — whoa that’s pretty cool. Something profound, something spiritual, has to happen in our eyes for someone to see those same signs and worship. Or, in the words of John 3, to see what Jesus was doing and saying and believe. Believe what? Believe that this man, born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, is the Son of God, the Messiah, and that he came to die in order to save sinners.
That’s where Jesus goes, verses 13–15:
“the Son of Man (must) be lifted up [we know now, lifted up on the cross], that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
So, for someone to believe in Jesus, they have to see the kingdom of God. And to see the kingdom of God, we must be born again by the Spirit. How does that happen? Jesus explains, verse 8:
“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Translation: We don’t know. How is someone born of the Spirit? We don’t know. You can’t predict, much less control, the Spirit. It’s like trying to herd the wind. No, God gives life to whoever he chooses, that’s the point. This love doesn’t wait for a response. This love goes into the darkness and brings sight to the blind. This love brings the dead to life, a new and second and greater birth.
So when I say, “God loves believers,” I don’t just mean he loves those who love him. I mean he actually gives the love we have for him.
If you know Faye and I’s story, you know that it took me a long time to convince her to date me. We met at a wedding. She lived in Los Angeles. So I called and called and called to try and win her. She actually came out to Minnesota to visit her family here. We hung out during her trip. I thought everything was going well, and so I told her how I felt and asked her to be my girlfriend.
She said (and I quote), “You’re a really nice human being. And I enjoy our conversations. But when I think about a relationship, my heart is cold.”
I said, “Like ice cold or lukewarm?”
She said, “Cold.”
She went back to California. And so I called and called and called and asked, and then called and called and called and asked. She was still colder than a Dairy Queen. Later that year, I was in LA for work, and she was willing to hang out again. I thought it was going well (you’re learning some things about your new pastor here), and so I told her how I felt (again), and asked her to be my girlfriend (again). She paused for a second, and then said (and I quote), “Sure.” I was obviously over the moon with sure. And here we are, ten years of marriage, and three beautiful children.
I share that story here because that’s not the picture of love we get in John 3:1–21. We might imagine a lovesick God who desperately calls and calls and calls and asks, and then calls and calls and calls and asks, just waiting, hoping, begging for a “Sure.” No, this love reaches into the darkness, into the grave, and he pulls his lifeless bride out, breathes life into her body; washes her from head to toe so that she is clean, radiant, beautiful; replaces her heart of stone with a beating heart of flesh; and then performs supernatural surgery on her eyes so that she can see — and when she does see him, in the face of Jesus Christ, she loves him. Of course she loves him! She can’t help but love him. We can’t help but love him, right? Because his love, by his Spirit, awakens love.
I think the whole conversation with Nicodemus is a window into who believes in verse 16. No one can see the kingdom of God — that is, see, believe, and worship — unless he is born again by the Spirit. This God not only loves sinners, but he sends his Spirit to awaken sinners. If you look at Jesus and see your Lord and Savior and Treasure, God’s done that in you. You are born again. You’re not the same person anymore.
God loves those who believe — everyone who believes — with a life-resurrecting, eyesight-restoring, love-awakening love.
3. God Loves His Son
Okay, God loves the unlovely (he loves sinners), and he loves believers (he awakens us and enables us to see). Now, the third love in John 3:16. I wonder if you see it. This third love is the love on which the others hang. There would be no love in this verse, in this Gospel, in the universe without this third love.
Third love, God loves his Son.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
The sentence doesn’t make sense unless the Father really, really, really loves his Son. This is how much God loved us — he gave the Son whom he loved. And this love (of the Father, for the Son) is going to come up again and again in this Gospel. Just a few verses later, Jesus says, verse 35:
“The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.”
In John 15, in his final words to his friends, his disciples, he says,
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.”
We have never seen nor experienced a love like this one. And this love — from eternity past, long before the foundation of the world — was so sweet, so intense, so pure, that it spilled over in a world, a universe. God made the world in order to share the love they enjoyed within the Godhead — Father, Son, and Spirit. That’s what Jesus prays in John 17:24:
“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. . . .26 I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
God has always loved his Son, and will always love his Son.
And yet to really show the height and width and depth and glory of this love, the Son had to die. If sinners were going to not perish but have eternal life, someone had to die for our sin. And that someone had to be perfect, infinitely lovely, spotless, blameless, pure, holy. That someone was the Son of God, the Son we meet in Jesus, fully God (God enough to make galaxies and move mountains) and fully man (man enough to sweat and bleed and die, really die).
In John 10:17, in maybe the most surprising verse of all about this love, Jesus says,
“For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again.”
We might think the Father would love the Son less because he sent him to die (we might think a father hates his son because he gave him up like this), but the Son himself says just the opposite. The Father loves the Son precisely because —“for this reason” — the Son laid down his life and then took it back up again. God loves his Son. He so loves his Son, more than we can put into words. Certainly more than I can put into a few hundred words in this sermon. And yet as much as he loved him — infinite, immeasurable love — he gave that Son, that Treasure, his very Heart, for you. And that brings me to the fourth love in John 3:16.
4. God Loves You
God loves the unlovely. God loves believers. God loves his Son. And finally, God loves you. And I don’t mean all of you; I mean each of you.
God so loved you that he gave his only Son, so that if you would just believe, you will not perish — you don’t have to die that death — but have eternal life.
As John relives this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, and as he hears Jesus say to this confused and curious pharisee, “. . . the Son of Man [must] be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life,” John can’t help but jump in and say, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” You can almost see him turning from Jesus and Nicodemus to us and asking, “So do you believe? Do you see? Will you relent from your sin and step under the waterfall of this love?”
Like Nicodemus, I suspect someone’s hiding in here this morning. He came at night, in secret. You’re here in broad daylight, but you’re still hiding. You’re going through your Sunday morning motions, because someone might ask questions or give you a hard time if you didn’t. But you’re not sure what to think about Jesus. You’re quietly anxious, you’re miserable, you’re looking for answers and you don’t want anyone to know. But you’re here hoping something might finally click and make sense of all your questions and longings and heartaches. And so I want to look you in the eye, or as many of you as I can anyway, and tell you: God loves you. God loves you. He really loves you.
If you believe, all four of these loves are yours.
Are you weighed down by your sin, wondering if anyone (much less God) could love someone like you? The holy God loves unholy people, he loves the unlovely and undeserving. He loves sinners, even you. Do you believe?
Do you look at Jesus and see the Son of God? Do you believe he is who he said he was, that he died for your sins so that you don’t have to and that he rose from the dead so that you might live with him forever? Do you love him? The love of God gave you those eyes, that heart, that love.
Do you see how much he loves his one and only Son? Do you see the holy, happy love that made the universe? God gave that precious Son for you, on the cross.
The Table
That’s what we rehearse each week at this table. Jesus’s body was broken for you. His blood was spilled for you. The wrath that was meant for you fell on him. What more does God have to do to prove his love for you?
Does he have to heal that sickness? Does he need to send a husband or a wife, or a child? Does he need to give you that job? Does he need to change your parent or child or spouse? Faye and I are praying all of those prayers for someone we love right now, and we want God to do all those things. We really do. But I want you to hear this morning (I want myself to hear this again): God doesn’t have to answer that prayer to prove he loves you. He doesn’t. In Jesus, he’s already proved it.
Behind all the clouds that keep you from feeling loved by God, there’s a blazing, irresistible, unstoppable love — bigger and hotter than the sun. He loves you. He loves you. He really loves you.