John 3:16 (The Assurance of God's Love)

Over the last several weeks, we've seen Jesus not in the meek and mild version that we're used to seeing him.

We've seen him make war with false religion and false worship. And a picture has begun to emerge in these passages on what real religion really is, what relationship is, what real faith and real belief and real salvation is.

And it begins, as we've seen, with a thorough understanding of our inability to save ourselves.

Men and women in their own right have no ability to save themselves because we are totally lost. The gospel begins that way.

John 1 10 says, he came into the world he made and no one knew him.

Wow. Verse 11 says, he came to his own people but they did not receive him.

Nowhere is this more explicit for the human inability piece than in John 2, when

Jesus comes to his own house, the house that was built in his name, and the

Jewish leaders rejected him. And then Jesus preaches in the streets of Jerusalem and the people rejected him for a different reason.

See, the Jewish leaders rejected him for worldly means because he was shutting down their money changing tables and he was shutting down their business.

The people rejected him out of experience. They raised their hands, they clapped, they cheered, they believed in his miracles, but Jesus would not entrust himself to that kind of superficial belief.

They didn't have real faith. Again, they clapped, they cheered, they applauded, but Jesus knew their hearts.

And in their hearts, they did not love him. And the picture that we see that is emerging here is that no human being unaided by God can know

God. They're either going to miss them from worldly means, like the Jewish leaders, or they're going to miss him from religious means, like the crowds.

But the fact is that everyone without God's help will miss him. No one will see him.

All of us have corrupted hearts. There's no one righteous, no, not even one. And Jesus does not entrust himself to that.

Now that begs the question, how can anyone be saved? Jesus will not entrust himself to false faith.

How in the world can any of us know God, given that human beings are incapable? Well, John 3 answers this question very deliberately.

The first thing that it says is a person must be born again. We see that in Nicodemus.

Nicodemus is a man among the people. He's the very best man of his entire generation. He's an example. He's a representative.

And yet he's left confused by Jesus because he has not yet been born again. Now, later in Nicodemus's life, we learn that he has been born again.

And that's a wonderful story of redemption. But in this moment in John 3, Nicodemus has not been born again.

He has not been born from above. Heaven has not invaded Nicodemus's brain. And he is confused by the things of God.

This man had worshiped God all of his life. He had served

God all of his life. He had learned about God. He had sacrificed to God.

He had read the scriptures. And yet when he was sitting across the table from God in the flesh, he didn't recognize him. That's striking.

He thought Jesus was special because Jesus had been sent from God. Jesus was special because he was

God and he is God. And I find this fascinating, right? That Nicodemus comes in the middle of the night because the night sky wasn't the only thing dark that day.

The sky was dark for sure, but his soul was also darkened and he could not understand who the light of the world was when he was sitting right in front of him.

I think that is what Jesus meant when he said, you must be born again. You must be born from above because God's thoughts and God's understanding has to invade our hearts before we can truly know him.

You see, our brains are really adept at understanding earthly things. You can teach a man to build a rocket and send it into outer space.

You know, we just had the Mars thing that just happened with 4K video. That was pretty cool. You can teach that.

We just had, I mean, you can have a woman who's taught to be a neurosurgeon or a heart surgeon. She can perform open heart surgeries and save people.

You can teach that. You can't teach someone how to get to heaven. You can't teach them, take a left at this street and then go a little bit down and then you'll end up there.

There's no GPS to heaven. There's no map to get you there. When you close your eyes at the end of your life, you're entirely in the mercy and in the hands of God.

See, the very first step in salvation is that we can't do it. We can't manufacture it and we can't make it happen on our own.

God must choose a person. God must give them new birth. God must open their eyes, awaken their hearts, and allow them to see who

Christ is. That is what John 3 is saying. The new birth must happen before you look to the lifted

Christ. Now, according to this passage, that's the one way that you become saved, is that God gives you new birth.

But there's three ways to being lost in this passage, and I think that these will be helpful and instructive.

You can be lost like Nicodemus. You can be someone who's seeking for the truth, but you're thoroughly confused, and you're not going to understand unless God awakens you.

You can be lost experientially, like the crowds that wanted to go to the next big thing. They wanted to go to the show.

They wanted to go to the concert. They wanted to see Jesus preach another message, and they were totally captivated by the energy of the moment, but they did not know

Christ. Or you can be lost in worldly ways, where you're just doing your life and you don't care about what

Christ has done. There's multiple ways to be lost. There's only one way to be found. That's the point.

Now, you and I have this innate ability within us to try to manufacture all kinds of faith.

Human beings are made in the image of God, and we want to know God, but because we're blind, we build religions.

We build moral philosophies. We build philosophies. We build anthropologies. We build psychologies.

We build all these things to try to justify ourselves and make ourselves understand how to find the right path, and yet none of them will be the right path if God doesn't give you sight.

You see, when you're born from above, it's not a genie in a bottle. God is not sitting in a bottle waiting for us to pray a magic prayer, and then all of a sudden, he's unleashed on you.

Salvation is God bringing heaven into you. It's God's power unleashed in your life.

It's God awakening you and opening your eyes, and that is what we're going to see. That's what we saw last week, and that's again what we'll see this week is what extravagant links

God has done in order to save us because we couldn't save ourselves, so yet God had to go to extravagant links in order to save us.

He had to come down. He had to condescend here in order for us to know him.

He had to descend down, and he had to die the death that none of us could have died, and he had to raise to life and sit at the throne of the

Father and send the Holy Spirit into us. God has done everything that it takes in order for us to be saved.

You and I have just received the gift, so today, as we look at John 3 .16,

one of the most famous passages in all of the Bible, and this is going to be a little bit of a shorter message than what most of the people at the

Shepherd Church are used to. It's normally around 50 minutes, maybe 49 today.

I know it's pretty funny, but today, we're going to look at John 3 .16,

and we're going to look at what extravagant links God has gone to in order to save his people.

Now, a little bit of the background on John 3 .16. John 3 .13 through 15 is the story of Jesus with Nicodemus telling him how a person is going to be saved.

In the Old Testament, if you remember Numbers 21, there's this weird scene where Moses builds this snake, and he lifts it up in the middle of the camp, and all of the people who've been bitten by snakes are going to look to this pole, and then they're going to be healed, and they're going to be saved.

And if you remember last week, we talked about the fact that Jesus is saying that he has become that curse, that Jesus has lifted up in the middle of Jerusalem.

He took our curse on the cross so that if we will just look to him, and if we will just worship him, and if we will just stare at him and believe in him, then we will receive the healing, that we will receive life.

So Jesus has already told us in John 3 .13 through 15 how to be saved.

So now, as we get to John 3 .16, we're going to learn about our assurance in our salvation.

So let's read the text together. The text says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Now, today, we're going to learn about one thing, and we're going to learn about it in three ways. The first one is the most important. We can have assurance in our salvation.

That is the thing that I want us to get across more than anything today, is that if you are in Christ, if you are saved, you can have assurance in your salvation.

The second thing I want us to learn is who can have assurance. The third thing I want us to learn is what does that insurance and assurance entail?

So how can we have assurance? The first thing John tells us in chapter three, verse 16 is the word for he says for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

All of the critical elements of salvation are here, but that word for is actually really important because you don't begin a sentence with the word for unless you're connecting it back to a former thought.

You don't start a sentence with four because four is a connecting word for is an explanatory word for is a purpose word.

I wouldn't say to you that for Duke is the greatest basketball team.

I would say I love Duke basketball for they are the greatest team on earth, right? Four is my evidence for what

I'm saying in the same way. John 3 16 is the evidence for what he's already told us in john three through 15.

The messiah lifted up for our sins. The one that we look to is going to save us for God.

So love the world. Do you see that this what Jesus Christ has done is because of the love of God, that's what it's saying.

And I understand we we hear john 3 16 a lot as the verse that's all about salvation, that that's what preachers preach when it's the salvation night and they're going to do the altar call and they're going to turn the air conditioner off.

So everybody feels like they're in hell. I've heard people do that. We don't do that. It's just hot in here. We don't do that.

Billboards advertise this verse turned to Jesus and that's good.

This verse is an awesome verse in this verse. If I could preach any verse about salvation, this one would be one of the top 10 verses that I would preach.

But in the context of john, this verse is not teaching us how to be saved. This verse is to teach us that we can have assurance that we're saved.

Versus three through 15 again have taught us how to be saved, how to be saved as you must be born again and you must look to Jesus.

That's it. This verse is telling us that we are saved. We can have assurance again.

You don't begin a sentence with four unless you're trying to connect back to something that you just said. Let's look at these verses again.

No one has ascended into heaven. We can't be saved on our own.

But he who descended from heaven, that's christ. Christ came down as moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.

Even so, the son of man must be lifted up. Jesus is going to be lifted up for our sins. He's going to take the curse on him that we deserve so that whoever believes in him we'll have eternal life for God.

So loved the world. He gave his only begotten son. Do you see what

I'm saying? I hope I hope that the nuance is making sense here. We're not just talking about how to be saved.

We talked about that last week. We're talking about now that if you were saved, you can have the most glorious assurance.

You can have confidence in your salvation. You can have joy in your salvation. You can have excitement in your salvation because God loves you.

He's the one who descended. He was the one who was lifted up. He was the one who did everything for us in order to save us.

We did nothing and yet he loved us. Think about the assurance of that because it wasn't based on our ability.

So therefore we can't lose it. If you and I and our own ability decided to save ourselves, then you and I and our inability one day would decide to lose it.

But if it's based on God's ability, then it's totally firm and it's totally secure because it's in his unchanging love that you and I are who we are says that God is the same yesterday, today and forever.

And if God's love is the same yesterday and forever, then the fact that he decided to love you on one day means that he's going to love you every day and you are secure.

It's the greatest news in the world. If we can wrap our minds around it, that us people who are broken, who are sinful, who are rebellious can be loved by God.

It's the greatest news in all the world. This God who we've broken covenant with millions and millions of times.

This God who we've forgotten even more times than that. This God who's holy and perfect.

And yet we are not holy and perfect. Our sin should have separated us from God.

I say this verse a lot, but in Genesis three, Genesis two, God says the day you eat of the fruit, you will surely die.

The day that you sin, you will surely die. And yet, by God's grace, here we are.

We're still alive. Every time that we sin, we go deeper and deeper and deeper into the grace or into the debt of God says in Romans 6 23 for the wages of sin is death.

That's the just wages for the effort that we've put in. We sin and we deserve death.

But the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Let's not overlook these these truths.

Let's not just move past them too quickly. Us in all of our sin have been loved by God.

It's unbelievable. It's all grace. His holiness is dangerous to us, and yet he loved us.

His righteousness was set against us, and yet he loved us. His wrath pointing squarely at us, and yet he loved us.

It's God's love, actually, that withholds his justice from giving us our penalty that we deserve.

I think about it this way every single time that I've sent and I send this morning. I was frustrated because I was running late to church, and in my mind,

I was I was not happy. Every time we send, we deserve death every time.

And how many deaths have we avoided? You know, we think about it like a cat has nine lives.

How many times has God shown us grace in our life? How many times have we cheated death?

And it's not just because we're good at avoiding it. We're all gonna die. But yet God and his infinite mercy has shown us so much grace.

If you're not a Christian, he's shown you so much grace. If you are a Christian, he's shown you so much grace.

Jonathan Edwards once said Jonathan Edwards, one of the most famous pastors in New England, and he said it very vividly.

If you have never read the centers in the hands of an angry God sermon, it is well worth listening to.

If you can find an audio copy, it's well worth eating. If you can't look at the vivid language here, we're enemies of God in our sin, and this is what

Jonathan Edwards says. The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow has been made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow right at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God and that of an angry

God who's angry at our sin without any promise or obligation that keeps that arrow from one moment being drunk with your blood.

Now, that is a vivid illustration, but it's true.

If it were not for the pleasure and the love of God, what would we become?

You and I deserve hell. Now you're like, Why are we talking about hell in a sermon on love?

Well, I think you have to understand this. If you're gonna really know how much God loves you, if God just loves you because you're so awesome and you're so wonderful, then it's not really it's not really biblical love.

But if you are a object of his wrath and because of grace and grace alone, he has reached down and he has rescued you.

Think about the love of God and what that means for us. If one single sin could send us to hell, and yet we've heaped upon ourselves so many, how much more does that magnify the grace and the mercy and the love of God?

God's love is so abundant, it's incomprehensible. We stored up a lifetime of sins against this

God, and yet he loves us anyway. He's extravagantly loved us. If you're a

Christian, though, it's even more glorious than that. Because if you're a Christian, and I struggle even fathoming this, he gave his one and only son.

That's what John 3 16 says. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, his one and only son.

His love not only restrains him from executing the justice upon us, he executed the justice we deserved on Christ by crushing his son.

Instead of you and I dying, God put to death his son because he loves us.

We can't even fathom a love like that. I love that so great that it was offered to us when we were not even lovable.

I love so great that it rescued us when we didn't deserve to be rescued. And I love so great that would offer up the innocent in order to save the guilty.

He did all of that, and you and I did nothing by his power.

He came by his power. He died by his power. He resurrected by his power. He ascended by his power.

He sent the Holy Spirit. All of that is God's work. What did we do? We received a gift, a gift of love.

God unimaginably loves you, and I'm gonna bring this full circle now. If God loves you like that, there's nothing at all that can stop him from continuing to love you and for you living in that love.

I didn't take you down the paths of of sin and down the paths of wrath to leave you there.

I'm taking you down those past so that we can boast in what Christ has done. If God loved you there, he's gonna love you where you're at right now, and he's gonna continue to love you.

His love never ends, and it never fails, and it cannot be exhausted. Salvation was based on God's unending love.

Could it ever run out? Salvation was based on our fickle behavior.

How quickly could we lose it? This God is not an eternal version of Santa Claus, where he checks our list twice, and if we're good, then he blesses us.

If we're naughty, we get spiritual coal. He's not like that. God loved us when we were at our very worst.

He still decided to save you. If you're a Christian, I want to tell you this.

Your most wicked days are over. The days where you were rebelling against God and you were a hater of God, you were a hater of righteousness.

Those days are over. You're not perfect, but you've been indwelled by the Holy Spirit.

So why would God turn his back on you now? Why would God choose to walk away from you now?

And I'll tell you just from my heart, the reason that I'm hitting these verses so hard and assurance so hard is because as I talk to Christians, the thing that I have found that most people struggle with is that they don't know whether God really loves them.

The reason that we're doing this sermon a little bit of a different way than we normally do it is because I want to speak right to the heart.

And I want to say that that's just not true. We believe we have enough faith to believe that a dead man could rise from the dead, but we don't believe that God could love us.

That doesn't make any sense. Jesus Christ died and he rose from the dead because God loves us.

Those two are totally connected together. And if you're a Christian and if you're struggling with the love of God, I just want to tell you to stop to look to the text, to look to the word of God and to let his love for you warm your heart, to pray and ask him to help you with your doubts, to pray and ask him to help you with your fears.

But God most definitely loves you for God so loved the world that he gave his son.

If you're a Christian, you are deeply loved. And if you're a

Christian, I want you to cherish these truths. I want you to enjoy these truths. These truths are not meant to make stiff religious people.

These truths are meant to make people who revel in Christ. These truths are meant to make people who sing the praises of Christ.

These truths are meant to make us humble because we know we didn't do anything and yet overwhelmingly overjoyed because Christ did everything.

My hope and my prayer for all of us as we look at truths like this is that we would never feel abandoned, we would never feel forsaken, we would never feel orphaned, that we would feel the love of God as real and true and that that love would cause us to understand that he who began a good work in us will see it through to the day of completion.

I know I'm beating a drum here. I tell my wife don't beat a dead horse sometimes when

I feel like she's doing such a thing. But I want us to understand the love of God more than anything because that's what's going to hold you when life kicks you in the teeth.

That's what's going to hold you when 2020 is the worst year in recent memory. Knowing that God loves you, knowing that he has a plan for you, knowing that he cares for you, knowing that that's totally irrevocable is what keeps you and what holds you.

I'd share with you a few verses that support this. Paul says in Romans 5, 8, that God shows his love for us that while we were still sinners,

Christ died for us. While we were yet sinners, God showed his love. Again in Romans 8, we read from Romans 8 earlier, this is a different passage, who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

I love that verse because it doesn't say who shall separate us from Christ. It says even more than that.

It says who shall separate us from the love of Christ and from the experience of Christ's love? Shall tribulation or distress separate us from the love of Christ?

No. Shall persecution or famine separate us from the love of Christ? No. Or nakedness or danger or sword as it's written, for your sake we're being killed all day long.

We're regarded as sheep to the slaughter. No. In all of these things, we're more than conquerors through him because he loved us.

For I'm sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of Christ.

Nothing. So if you're a Christian, I just want to reiterate this point to you that you are secure in Christ.

You are loved in Christ. Because of what God has done through Jesus Christ, you are deeply, deeply loved.

I read a couple more verses about our security. Jesus says, my sheep hear my voice and I know them.

I will give them eternal life. They will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand. You're safe in Christ.

All that the Father gives me will come to me and whoever comes to me will never be cast out. You're safe in Christ. Truly, truly,

I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.

That's a promise. Paul says in Romans 11, the gift of God is irrevocable.

Irrevocable. It's a gift you can't take back. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten

Son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

That's the first point that I want us to see today. That you can't be lost. You can't be unloved. You can't be abandoned.

You are safe in the love of Christ. The second point I want us to see in this text is who can have that assurance?

And I want to just say to you that this verse has been a controversial verse in some theological debates because some will say that it's everyone in the world who can be saved.

Some actually say that. It's called Christian universalism. And then some will say, no, it's whoever believes.

Well, John 3 is already defined for us who this verse applies to. It's the ones who are born again. It's the one who

God saves and he redeems and he puts the Holy Spirit inside of them. And it's the one who looked at Jesus and believed.

So this verse is assurance for the believers. This verse is not talking about that we're all equally capable of praying a magic prayer.

This verse is talking about that we're all equally incapable of knowing God unless God first does the work.

No one ascends to God. We needed Christ. So again, this passage supports that truth and it means that for you as a

Christian, you can know the love of God and you can have security in that. But if you're not in Christ, you have no security.

You have no ultimate hope. You're living on borrowed time. Jonathan Edwards, again, he says it like this, you're walking over the pit of hell on a rotten canvas.

Any day now, any one of us can go, can perish. We live in coronavirus time.

If coronavirus is going to take me out, it can take me out. You know, a greyhound bus could hit one of us.

I don't know why we always use greyhound buses when we're talking about death. You ever wondered that? But I mean, it could.

I haven't even seen a greyhound bus in a decade, but it could. Any moment.

We could get a disease and die. We could get hit by a car and die. We could not even wake up in the morning.

You have no security. You have no hope. And that's going to lead us into point three.

What will salvation assure the believer of? It assures that we are loved by God.

It will assure us that he gave his one and only son for us. Why? So that we'll never perish.

So that we'll live forever with Christ in his eternal kingdom. Now, I want to conclude.

I didn't want this to be a long message. I think I made it shorter than 49. I want to conclude by just saying, if you're a

Christian, these truths are glorious. And if you're struggling, because we all go through seasons where we struggle, right?

We go through seasons where we feel like we're in the desert, where we feel like that our faith is dry.

We read the Bible and it just feels like it bounces right off our forehead and we have no idea what it's saying. We have seasons where it feels like that we just can't get a break and we're discouraged.

Take some time right now and pray to the Lord and ask him that these truths would be encouraging to you.

That these truths would wake up your heart and cause it to soar out of your chest. And that you would feel loved.

And that you would walk out of here confident. That you would walk out of here with your head held high knowing that you are a child of God.

And that you're deeply loved. If you're not a Christian, there's two things that I want to say. If you are not feeling, and this is for both the podcast listeners and for people who are here today, if you're not feeling anything at all from this message, just know that it's because God is not stirring your heart.

And I'm not going to be the preacher that tells you to raise your hand or do something that you're not feeling led to do.

But I am going to pray. I'm going to pray that the Lord would awaken people in this region. That the

Lord would awaken our hearts. That we would see these truths. But if you're not a Christian and you're listening to this message and you want to come to know

Christ, I want you to know that that's because God is working in you. That God is moving in you.

That God is stirring you. And that if God is doing that, he'll give you the power. He'll give you the power to come to him.

So, let's pray. And let's sing one or two final songs declaring the

God who loves us so much. Lord Jesus, I thank you so much for John 3, 16.

I thank you, Lord, so much for what it means. I thank you so much that all of us who are in Christ here can know and experience the love of God.

Lord, I pray that we would live like loved children. Lord, I pray that we would love others as you have so perfectly and wonderfully loved us.

Lord, I pray that we would worship you and praise you for what you've done. And Lord God, I pray that even though I'm not a perfect preacher, not a perfect communicator,

Lord, I pray that you would use the message, you'd use the words of your word to accomplish its intended purpose.

Lord, I do pray that there would be someone who's listening to this who would hear about the great love of God and who would turn to you and find it in Jesus Christ.