Trinity Sunday was observed this week. The Gospel reading for the day included a well-known and well-loved passage from Scripture, John 3:16. I’ll share here a message based on John 3:16, pondering the actions of the Triune God on our behalf.
For additional thoughts for Trinity Sunday and season, see also the post, “We trust in a God who goes beyond our understanding.”
God Loves You
In the town where I grew up, it was not uncommon to be stopped on the street and asked, “Are you saved?” (The questioners were students from a small Bible college in the town.) You won’t find the question, “Are you saved?” as a mission strategy used by any of God’s witnesses or apostles in the Bible. You will find them, time and again, telling and retelling the simple, straightforward message of why we needed Jesus and what Jesus did for us. God’s message is not a question, “Are you saved?” but a declaration: “You are saved!” God doesn’t interrogate us, pressuring us to make decisions we don’t have the spiritual power to make. Instead, he tells us where we stand when we are standing outside of his grace, and he tells us how we are rescued by his amazing grace.
The message God speaks to you again and again in Scripture is that he loves you. The most famous such Bible statement is John 3:16. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
That one sentence is the Word of God in a nutshell. It holds within it a complete story of how much we needed God and how much his love has done for us. God loves us so much that he, the Father, gave up his Son. God, the Son, gave up his life. God the Holy Spirit gives us life when he brings us to believe in what God has done in Jesus. God—the Father, Son and Spirit—in threefold fashion is our Savior from the sin and desperation in which otherwise we would perish.
Let’s look at the love of the Father first. God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son. Amazing. Simply amazing. For one thing, we marvel at the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit who exist in one Being. We stand awestruck at that thought. We never fully fathom how God can be how he is—but he is! And then we’re amazed at the grace of God, that he would give up his Son, who is one with the Father, letting his eternal Son die in order to rescue us. We did not live to please God; we live to please ourselves. We are people who are ruled by our desires—desires that fight against God so that we do not and cannot obey God’s laws (see Romans 8:5-7). And yet God loves us! What grace! It is undeserved and unappreciated, but God loves us anyway. Like a father of runaway children who left home to live in the streets, God loved us even though we made ourselves unlovable. He kept his arms open to receive us even though we told him not to wait up, that we weren’t coming home. God loves us like a Father who never gives up on his children—and gave his most beloved Child, his own eternal Son—so that we could be his children and included in his family. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1).
And Jesus, God’s own Son, was a willing participant in this plan. Jesus did not object to his role in our redemption. He looked straight ahead and hoisted the cross on his shoulder and began to drag it to the place where he would be executed as the ultimate act of God’s love for sinners. Even before it happened, Jesus matter-of-factly told his disciples, “The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him” (Mark 10:33-34). When one of his disciples said, “No! Never, Lord!” Jesus scolded him for thinking that way, for not having God’s plan in mind (cf. Matthew 16:21-22). “Christ loved us and gave himself for us,” is how Scripture tells the story (Ephesians 5:2). No one took his life from him; he laid it down of his own accord (John 10:18). The apostle Paul pondered on the magnitude of what Jesus did, saying, “Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8). That’s an amazing amount of love—God the Son gave up his life to make us sons and daughters of God with him, when there was nothing inherently in us that made us worthy of such a gift.
And there’s still more. God, who sent his Son from heaven, who gave his life on the cross, is not content to leave it at that and then let it up to us from there. He brings his love to us personally. He pours out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he gives to us (Romans 5:5). The Holy Spirit gives us life from God. Notice something in the familiar words of John 3:16, that whoever believes in God’s Son (Jesus) shall have eternal life. Believing in Christ is not something we, of ourselves, have the power to do. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). We were dead in our spirits, but God made us alive with the Spirit’s message of Christ. The Bible says it quite plainly: A person “without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14 NIV). We needed the Spirit to take the blindness from our eyes so we could see God, to lift the veil of deadness from our hearts so we could believe in God.
The Father loved us and gave up his Son. The Son loved us and gave up his life. The Spirit loved us and gave us the gift of faith, so that all the love of God would be revealed to us and believed by us. God loves us through and through, from start to finish—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As I said at the outset, there’s no question about whether or not you are saved; there is a definitive answer, a declarative statement. God loves you and has saved you in Christ and has convinced you of that truth by his Spirit. God’s love is not a question; it is a fact, a certainty.
Still, even though we know this, our fragile hearts find ways to question God, to question whether God really loves us. You know how it goes, something like this: God, you say you love me … but then why, God, is my life so difficult? How come people who don’t seem to care about you get all the breaks in life and I get nothing? How come I have to struggle and scrape to get by? You say you love me, God, but I have a hard time seeing it. If you love me so much, why don’t you make my life better?”
Why do we ask such questions? Why do we make such accusations against God? Why do we find ourselves doubting his love? Because we look for evidence of his love in the wrong places. We look for evidence of the wrong sort. We look for evidence in terms of earthly things and earthly advantages and earthly successes. That typically isn’t the sort of evidence of his love that God gives.
Let me ask you this: Would you say that God the Father loved his Son, Jesus? Yes, of course. He even said so for people to hear when Jesus was on this earth. When Jesus was baptized, God’s voice was heard from heaven, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love” (Matthew 3:17). There were two other occasions later in Jesus’ time on earth when the same thing happened—God spoke from heaven and said, “This is my Son, whom I love.” God loved Jesus; we’ll take that as an undeniable fact.
Yet Jesus said of his own life on earth, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Jesus had no mansion, no castle, not even a house. He went from place to place all the time. At the end of his life, Jesus’ wardrobe consisted of the clothes on his back. And those clothes were stripped off of him and divided up by soldiers who crucified him. Jesus was stripped naked and nailed to a cross and hung up to die.
God loved Jesus. How could God allow his own Son whom he loved to be treated like that? Because God had a higher, better, bigger goal in mind. Jesus would die without a thing in this world to his name, but would rise again to life and have us as his own. He and we look forward to eternal pleasures in the kingdom of heaven (cf. Psalm 16:11).
God isn’t so much concerned about how nice your house might be on this planet, or how much luxury you can afford, or how many clothing choices you have when you look in your closet. Oh, he will give you enough to get by—you can thank him for that. But all that stuff is surely not the main way in which God wishes to show love to you. His love to you is mainly in Jesus. His love for you is intended to connect you to him for eternity. His love to you is most concerned with preparing a place for you in the mansions of heaven, not making sure you’re comfortable in some suburban subdivision here below. If you look for God’s love in terms of what kind of house you can afford and what kind of car you drive and what kind of friends you have in your neighborhood, you’re bound to be disappointed. Look to God, instead, for the best of what he has to give you:
- Love that is constant in Jesus even when persons in this world seem not to love you.
- Life that is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit even when what you experience in this world seems to be one failed promise after another.
- A relationship that is solid with the Father in heaven even when relationships on earth with family and friends are cracked and strained and unstable.
Don’t look for evidence of God’s love merely in people and things—see the evidence of God’s love in God himself, in what he has done. God so loved the world (and God so loved you) that he gave his precious Son, Jesus Christ, to secure eternal life for you.
God loves you. If you ever have any doubt about that, look at what the Father did. Look at what Jesus did. Look at what the Holy Spirit has done and is doing. Salvation is not a question; it’s the deepest, greatest truth in the universe. God loves you in Christ and has made you his own by his Spirit, and you will live forever in him. Hang onto that love—the best love there is, no question about it.
Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
