John 3:16 is perhaps the most well-known verse in the Bible.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
That’s the outrageous nature of God’s sacrificial love for me—even His own Son was not too high a price to pay to bring me back into the family.
God loves me!
A few weeks ago, Bob Goff highlighted 1 John 3:16, a companion verse that’s not quite so frequently mentioned.
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.
The picture’s pretty clear.
God shined this laser beam of intense, unimaginable love directly on me, but the point wasn’t simply for me to soak it up and feel special. The point was to reflect God’s love into a world that desperately needs it. In verse 18 the writer advises, “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”
You and I get to choose. We can absorb God’s love, or we can demonstrate it to the world. Black hole or prism.
The Message states our alternatives, and their consequences, pretty clearly:
This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.
I don’t want to make God’s love disappear. You?
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