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Christmas 3:16 – part 1 – For God so LOVED

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For the rest of the month of December, I want to take some time and look at the story of Christmas in a different way. Over three weeks, I want to, look at 26 words in the book of John that tell one of the greatest stories ever told. If you haven't figured it out yet, we are going to be looking at John 3:16. For this series of posts, I have divided the verse into three sections that we will be looking at each of the weeks. Take a moment and read the verse below:

“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.”
John 3:16 NIV

The first section that we are going to look at is "For God so loved the world".

God - The Greatest Being1
God is the greatest being in the universe. We can see evidence of Him when see all that was created. Everything that we see had to have been created by someone. This all didn't just all of a sudden exist. For example, the phone that you are reading this post on has a creator. There is someone who thought of the idea for the phone, someone who made the interworking parts, and someone who assembled it. The parts and pieces of the phone did not just come together one day. The phone did not just become a phone. It had to be created. The same goes with everything we see here on earth. People had to be created. Animals had to be created. Earth had to be created. The universe had to be created. Everything we see is evidence of God the Creator.

We can see evidence of God from the words of the Bible. All the words in the Bible are written by God through man (2 Timothy 3:16, NIV). God tells us about Himself in His word.

So Loved - The Greatest Motive1
We all love people. We love our parents. We loves our siblings. We love our kids. We love our spouses. We love our friends. We love our pets.

When I tell my wife that I love her, and I do very much, it’s not the same kind of love that God has for us. We can have moments where our human love wavers and is sometimes conditional. God's love, however, cannot be like ours. God's love is unending, unconditional and unfailing. No matter what we do, how far away we wander or the messes that we get into, God is there to welcome us back with wide open arms. God's love for us is the same yesterday, today and forever because He never changes.

One other note about this: I love how Jesus uses the word "so" before love. I feel it adds a different feeling to the word love. God doesn't just love the world, He loves the world more than we can understand.

The world - The Greatest Mess(1)
Oh, what a mess indeed. But it wasn't always a mess. The world we know now was not God's original design for the world. The world that God created was perfect and so were the people. After God had created everything, He said "It is very good." (Genesis 1:31, NIV) God had a perfect creation. But it wasn't that way for long.

God gave one rule to Adam and Eve. He told them that they could do what they wanted and eat what they wanted, but they could not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden or they would die. But along came a snake and tricked Eve into eating the fruit of the tree and she gave it to Adam. In the moment, God's perfect world was broken and would never be the same again.

We don't have to look very far to see that the world is broken. We have no idea what the world was like, and we won't until Jesus comes back and establishes His kingdom.

This part of the verse tells us that God is still madly in love with the world that He created. He loves the people of the world. Every single one of us. He loves us all the same. He loves the person who goes to church every Sunday. He loves the criminal who was in the news yesterday.

God loves the world and everyone in it with an unfailing love.
____________
Questions or comments... please email breathequestions@gmail.com

 Edited by Kay Beam

1The outline in bold was taken from Harvest Bible Chapel in Granger, In. All other content in this post are my original words.



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