What could be done to make our sins right? The Bible says there was ONE answer to that: if a perfect Man died to pay for our sins. He can’t just say “Oh don’t worry about those sins.” They had to be punished. So what could He do? God is a perfect and just judge. You don’t want someone you love to go to hell. Romans 6:23 says: “The wages of sin is death.” And not just physical death, but eternal death, separated from God forever in Hell, the place of punishment that Matthew 25:41 says was reserved for the devil and his angels. What did God do? The Bible says, “He gave His only begotten Son.” What does it mean, that He “gave” Him?īecause we had sinned and disobeyed God, we all deserved punishment for our sins. So what did He DO? Love acts love always does something. Understand God’s greatest motivation: “For God so LOVED …”. He loves you, and wants you to spend eternity with Him in heaven, loving Him, and being loved by Him. That’s why He did all He did in the gospel. I hope you can really grasp ahold of that this morning: God. He loves YOU! The Apostle Paul said in Galatians 2:20 “He loved ME, and gave Himself for ME”! I think this can be one of the hardest things for us to really grasp: with all our sins, all our failures, all our shortcomings - God is not angry with you God’s not waiting to strike you down with a lightning bolt GOD LOVES YOU. “For God so LOVED.”Īnd you need to realize this morning that God not only loves “the world.” He loves YOU, personally. He didn’t carry out the gospel plan just to outsmart the devil. He didn’t have Him die on the cross out of disgust for what we’d done. God didn’t send Jesus to earth to show how powerful He is. He really DOES (love them)”! That demon had it right. In it, the demon Screwtape tells his “apprentice” demon Wormwood, “One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men … is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters together for Discipleship this Fall. Many of you know that we are reading C.S. Over and over, the Bible says God responded to us with LOVE. Titus 3:4 “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His LOVE for mankind appeared, He saved us …” Ephesians 5:2 “as Christ also LOVED you, and gave Himself up for us” Ephesians 2 says that when God saw us “dead” in our trespasses and sins, :4 says: “But God, being rich in mercy, BECAUSE OF HIS GREAT LOVE with which He loved …” sent Christ for us. “For God SO LOVED.” It’s an amazing thought - but we see this taught all through scripture: And we would have deserved whatever He did to us! But instead the Bible says He responded with love. Theoretically, He could have responded in a number of different ways. He could have immediately wiped us out with a lightning bolt from the sky! He could have responded to us with contempt or spite or anger. Ephesians 2 says “we all lived in the lusts of the flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” None of us are an exception to that: Romans 3:23 says, “ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That’s what God saw in us. From the very beginning God made us to know Him and love Him, but from the Garden of Eden on, all mankind has sinned against God and turned away from Him in disobedience. The words “God so loved” here are important because they tell us how God responded to mankind. John 3:16 may possibly the greatest verse in all the Bible because it shows us: Is it really the greatest verse? Well, greatness, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder, but I think you can certainly make a case that it could be the greatest verse. What might be the greatest verse in the Bible? What would you say that it is? Poll after poll, survey after survey, consistently say that ONE verse is considered to be the “the greatest verse of scripture” in the Bible: John 3:16. A new acronym has arisen in light of that: “GOAT,” which stands for “Greatest of All Time.” The first time I saw that, it was attributed to Tom Brady, who has continued to play into his mid-40s, and has won more Super Bowls than any other quarterback in history, so he has been labeled “The GOAT”: “The greatest of all time.” And others have been called “the greatest” of this or that, in many different fields.īut what about the Bible? We are reading through the Bible together this year. People often enjoy discussing who or what “the greatest” is in different areas of life.
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