John 3:11-21
Notes
Transcript
We have come in our journey as a church and our journey through the Gospel of John to the most well known verse in the Bible, today.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
It has been called the greatest sentence ever written. The Gospel in its most compact form.
The Bible as the whole, Old Testament and New Testament, is our greatest unpacking of the Gospel.
It’s the Good News of God’s plan, the accomplishing of His plan, the applying of His plan, and the Salvation of His people.
If you want to know the Gospel in its fullest then you must read the Bible in its entirety.
If you want to see the Gospel in a much shorter, but still very in depth, you can look at Romans Chapters 1-11
Perhaps you want to share the Gospel with a co-worker, family, or neighbor. Ephesians 2:1-10 is a great compact presentation of the Gospel.
But, maybe you need it in one sentence.
That is where John 3:16 comes in.
This most beloved verse has brought comfort and hope to generation after generation and may have played a vital part in your story to knowing God.
But there is a slight problem and a slight concern.
Not with this Bible verse, but with how it has been used and presented.
When you try to take something so vast and complex and take it all the way down to one sentence that is removed from its context, you often get something that is not as powerful and often confused and even misunderstood.
I believe that has happened with this incredible verse.
My goal today is try and bring back clarity to this verse, fullness to this verse, and my hope is that we will see the glory of God and His incredible Gospel in this verse as it was intended to be.
In the process I may challenge some of your beliefs about this verse.
I may share it in a way that you haven’t heard before.
But, my goal is not to be revolutionary or ground breaking.
My goal isn’t to show you something that has never been seen before.
My goal is to be consistent and faithful to Scripture and share in context.
My goal is to share what Jesus truly meant when He shared these famous words.
My goal is to show you the incredible wonders of this verse.
While these are my goals, my prayer today is that this verse, and the surrounding verses, will cause you to behold the wonder and majesty of our Lord and Savior.
My prayer is that you will fall more in love with Jesus, and be more captivated by His Word.
Let’s look at the section in its entirety.
- The Gospel of John. Chapter 3, verses 11-21.
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. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 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. 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. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 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.”
We really cannot separate last week’s message and this week.
They must go together because Jesus is continuing his conversation with Nicodemus.
Briefly, Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a group who’s zeal for God’s law was well known.
He was also a teacher and one that taught the people God’s Word.
During the Night Nicodemus goes to see Jesus to find out who He is.
It was Passover when Nicodemus witnessed the signs and miracles that Jesus performed and knew He was from God, but not sure anything else.
Instead of Jesus answering about who He is, Jesus tells Nicodemus about what he needs.
He needs to be born again, or born from above.
Thus last week we discovered the doctrine of regeneration.
But what does it mean to be born again?
Well its best to watch or rewatch last week, but to quickly summarize, it is this:
Being born again is the work or act of God imparting new spiritual life in us.
It is only once God has done this that we are able to respond in belief.
This is why before talking about our need to believe, Jesus talks about our need of rebirth.
Nicodemus, being a Pharisee, only knew that it was by works of the law that you were considered good, holy, and worthy.
Thus everything you have you must earn.
When Jesus said it isn’t anything you do but it must be what God does, Nicodemus was confused and didn’t understand.
Jesus rebukes Nicodemus by reminding him that as a teacher of Israel He should know these things.
We were reminded of the clear teaching in Ezekiel that spoke of God’s work in regeneration.
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
This rebuke was to show Nicodemus that it isn’t his good works that can earn him salvation but it was the mercy, grace, and power of God.
The rebuke continues with the start of this weeks verse: Let’s jump in.
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.
Nicodemus was not accepting John the Baptist, remember it was the Pharisees that sent the Levites and the Priests to see what was going on.
Nicodemus was not accepting the disciples who witnessed the same signs and believed, and
Nicodemus was not accepting Jesus’s testimony.
If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
The rebuke is two fold:
First as a teacher, Jesus is like, you should know these things and if you cannot understand earthly illustrations of birth, then how will you understand heavenly things.
Secondly, Jesus is showing that unless he is born again, he simply cannot understand heavenly things.
So then what is the answer? We shared two last week. Prayer, and the Gospel.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
The gospel is the means in which God works through to regenerate His children.
Guess what Jesus is about to do?
You got it, He is about to lay out the Gospel for Nicodemus.
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The Gospel consists of 4 parts. 2 parts from God, 2 parts from us.
1st, God, or what I like to call the greatness of God.
We need to know who God is before we can understand why we need Salvation in the first place.
In this situation Nicodemus is well aware of the greatness of God and how He is a Holy and just God.
Therefore, Jesus is not going to focus on this part as it is already understood by Nicodemus.
2nd, Sin, Our separation to God because of our Sins.
Remember sin is anything that goes against the will of God.
Have you ever done anything that went against God’s will? Then you have sinned against God.
Sin separates us from God and incurs condemnation.
You’ve heard me quote Jonathon Edwards before. “The only thing we bring to our Salvation is the sin that made it necessary.”
3rd, Jesus, The Son of God and Son of Man.
Jesus ransoms, reconciles, redeems, and restores us to God through his life, death, and resurrection.
4th, Response, which is repentance, belief, and action.
This is not what saves us, but is the result of what saves us.
The result of God’s regenerating work in our lives to be born again.
The result of God opening our eyes and hearts to hear the Gospel and embrace the Gospel we thus live the Gospel.
This is what Jesus now moves into, however Jesus approaches it in a different order. The order does not matter, it is the content that matters. But the order I laid out is how Paul lays it out and how we mostly do our evangelism today. Therefore, I’m going to tackle these verses in that order as I believe it may be easier for us to follow, since we are not the teacher of Israel!
So let’s do that together by starting in John 3:19 and 20
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.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
The second most important aspect of Christianity that we need to understand is our sin.
Yes we need to know God but we also need to know ourselves.
Nicodemus would have considered himself to be righteous and one who follows God’s law.
But what does Jesus, who knows the heart, say about the Pharisees?
He calls them hypocrites.
In Matthew 23 Jesus says But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.
Later in the chapter hear what Jesus says:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.
And here is probably the greatest issue of our day as well.
We think of sinners as those we see breaking the law on news.
We think of sinners as those who are caught in scandals and lies and theft.
We don’t think of the most loving, caring, serving, individuals as sinners.
Romans tells us that all have sinned and fallen short. Every one of us has broken God’s law even if we have never broken the government’s law.
Though reality all of us have broken the government’s law many times we probably just haven’t been caught.
But all of us are caught by the all knowing, all seeing, all present God.
So here is our issue, Jesus has come into the world to be our Savior yet the world has rejected Him because they would rather be their own king than to submit to the true King.
And that is what it comes down to more than anything in our day.
In modern America we don’t want anyone telling us what we can or cannot do. Thus instead of turning to the light, we continue to run in darkness.
Thus we see our judgement. It is not because we are a fairly good person, it is not that our good outweighs our bad, no, it is that we have sinned against God and we have rejected our Savior.
But, who is our Savior? Let’s jump back to verse 13.
No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.
The Son of God, the Son of Man, Jesus.
Jesus, the eternal, all powerful, creator God, who was with God, and is God, descended from heaven.
This Son of Man, this Jesus, this is the light.
Nicodemus wants to know who Jesus is? Well he’s going to get his answer.
And Jesus is going to use Old Testament scene that Nicodemus should be very familiar with.
Let’s take a look.
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
Jesus points Nicodemus and points us today to the event that foreshadows His crucifixion and resurrection.
Numbers 21:4-9 tell us the story of how the people of Israel became impatient and spoke out against Moses and God.
So God sent fiery serpents to bite them and many died.
Upon realizing their sin they repented and came to Moses and Moses prayed.
God told Moses to create a fiery serpent and put it on a staff and raise it up and all who looked upon it would be saved.
While this was a temporary rescue for the people of Israel, Jesus is now the permanent rescue for all who look to Him for Salvation.
Let’s jump now to John 3:18
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.
If you do not believe, well it is not that you become condemned by your unbelief, it is that you were already condemned.
Jesus is your only hope.
You are already condemned for rejecting God’s law and now you will be judged for rejecting Jesus.
Even though we are condemned already, here is the beauty of the Gospel
Whoever believes in Jesus, being our Salvation, we are justified.
Being justified is a legal status with God. We went from being guilty to being innocent.
Not because we are innocent, but because Jesus stands in our place.
Jesus is our Salvation.
Let’s look at the verse right before this, verse 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.
The reason Jesus is not coming to condemn is because the world is already condemned.
Jesus is not here to tell you what a bad person you are, you already know this!
Jesus is not here to rub your face in the dirt further.
Jesus is not here to tell you what a failure you are.
Jesus is here to save you, rescue you, redeem you, and restore you.
This is what Jesus is here for!
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
How beautiful is this verse when we have it in the context of the surrounding verses!
This verse brings all of the surrounding verses into its climax.
We see God’s plan and attribute of love on full display.
We see Jesus given to accomplish this plan, and
We see the role of the Spirit through being born again to believe.
While the Holy Spirit isn’t named in this verse, we see the verses before in being Born again, the clear Spirit’s involvement in the phrase whoever believes.
Do you see the Gospel here in 3:16?
We see the greatness of God in His creation of the world and then the plan to Rescue the World.
We see our sin and rebellion against God as that is why we would perish.
We see the Son, Jesus, accomplishing the plan of redemption so that one may believe unto Him for eternal life.
We also see that we now have life for those who believe to now go and be what we were created to be!
This verse is absolutely amazing.
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I hope this verse astounds you and encourages you.
I hope this verse helps you behold our God and bring you to greater levels of worship.
To see the beauty and the power of this verse, requires us to see it in the context that Jesus put it in and that John recorded it in.
Most of us hear this verse and just sit in awe of its realities.
But, perhaps maybe you are like me and this verse has actually troubled you.
How can you be troubled by a verse like this? You may ask?
Because I’ve heard this verse, ripped out of its context so many times and have spent most of my life confused.
Confused to the point that I even avoided this verse for many years.
Not because this verse isn’t incredible, but because of all of the times I’ve heard it misused.
Let me give you an example and maybe you will see what I’m talking about.
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Most of the time I hear this verse talked about and preached and what I shared is God’s Love.
Which makes sense, for God so loved the world right?
Why wouldn’t we talk about God’s love.
Matter of fact 1 John 4:8 says God is love.
But here is what bothered me.
This verse would be shared about God’s unending never ceasing love to everyone no matter what.
And in a sense, yes, everyone is made in the image of God, God gives the breath to everyone, opportunity to everyone, the sun rises and falls on everyone, God in his love has given great gifts to us all.
But in another sense, I always struggled with this because is there a point that God’s love ends?
Does God put aside His love at judgement?
We know a Father punishes his children because he loves them, but eternal damnation is not something that a father does to their son out of love.
This bothered me because it didn’t logically flow. Maybe it has bothered you.
But it isn’t just this, what about this famous saying.
God hates the sin but loves the sinner.
By the way you won’t find that in the Bible.
What’s worse is that saying contradicts two Bible verses.
For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.
God doesn’t just hate the sin, he hates the sinner.
The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
God hates the wicked and we just saw earlier that is us! Hold on! How does this work.
I spent many a sleepless night wrestling with this contradiction of what I had always been taught and what I see in the Scripture.
Then I thought I discovered the answer.
Maybe the focus shouldn’t be on love but should be on world and since it isn’t everyone who God loves, because there are those he hates, maybe the focus should be on what World means. Maybe world means His elect.
God loves His elect. Those whom Ephesians said he chose before the foundations of the earth.
Those last week we saw that He regenerates and causes their eyes to be open and their ears to hear.
The incredible work of God to rescue the lost and find the wanderer.
Maybe that is the answer I have been searching for all along!
But there is one problem with this.
While in a sense, yes, this is true. Very true, incredibly true, wonderfully true.
In another since it isn’t true in its fullness because God is love, and this makes God’s love conditional to the elect.
So, it is true, but there has to be something more, something that doesn’t sacrifice God’s attribute of love, while also being consistent with all of Scripture.
What I found was that I was looking in the wrong place the whole time.
I was focusing on the wrong word.
There were two letters that were a whole lot bigger than I had anticipated.
Let’s look at the verse again:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
So, so that is what I was missing.
In the greek this is also translated “in this manner” and that was the key to bringing everything together.
For God so, or in this manner, loved the world.
Hold on, this changes how we approach it.
GOD DISPLAYS HIS LOVE TO THE WORLD BY GIVING AND SENDING HIS ONLY SON.
So it isn’t going up to everyone and saying hey, God loves you.
It is going up to everyone and saying hey, God loves you in this way, that He sent His Son to if you believe you will have everlasting life.
This is how God displays his attribute of love, fully and completely.
And also why it isn’t counter to God’s love to bring for his just and holy wrath upon those who reject.
So who is the whoever?
Well Jesus showed us it is those who are born again. Those who are elect, regenerated, and respond with belief.
But guess what? We don’t know who those are so we go and tell everyone.
It isn’t for us to judge, or to decide, that is God’s weight not our weight. So we freely go and spread the good news far and wide.
We pray for our family, our loved ones, our neighbors, our friends, and we share this Gospel.
How do we know then if they have accepted Jesus? Let’s look at our final verse.
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.”
The result is our actions and we come to Jesus.
Yet, John still is abundantly clear, it isn’t your work, it is God’s work carried out by you.
This is why God gets the glory and why He is the one worthy of praise, not us.
Ok, I know this was a lot. But here is my hope today, here is what I pray that I have accomplished.
1.) That after last week and today you find yourself in awe of God and His rescue plan.
In awe of how His wisdom and power.
2.) My hope is that you rest in God for yourself, your family, and everyone else that you witness to.
It is God who changes the hearts and the minds.
You are not smart enough, wise enough, smooth enough, and engaging enough, to change someone’s heart of stone, into a heart of flesh.
You cannot bring someone spiritually dead to spiritual life.
But I know someone who can.
Stop holding the weight on your shoulder and be freed today of the burden, guilty, frustration, that comes from those who continue to reject the Gospel.
Let it go!
And pray. Pray without ceasing, love them, serve them, care for them, and share the Gospel to them.
Stop trying to be God and be what God has called us to be.
So, 1: Find God all the more wonderful and Beautiful 2: Trust in God all the more and Finally 3:
May this inspire you to be on mission for the Kingdom of God, to the Glory of God, and for the purpose of God.
Listen to me, we will not fail in our evangelism! God’s purpose will be accomplished.
Either God will harden their hearts further in their rebellion, or God will soften it unto Salvation.
And just because their hearts are hard now, doesn’t mean God doesn’t have the perfect time in which to reach down and pull us up.
God waited until Coty and I were in our 30’s before God rescued us. Some He rescues as a kid, and others on their death bed.
God’s plan will not be thwarted and thus we are invited to participate.
God will not ask you whether or not you were successful, God will ask you if you were faithful.
May that be our story.
Let’s pray.
