"The Beauty of John 3:16"

Hi, my name is George Sinclair. I'm the lead pastor of Church of the Messiah.

! It is wonderful that you would like to check out some of the sermons done by Church of the Messiah,

either by myself or some of the others. Listen, just a couple of things. First of all, would you pray for us

that we will open God's Word well to His glory and for the good of people like yourself?

The second thing is, if you aren't connected to a church and if you are a Christian,

we really, I would really like to encourage you to find a good local church where they believe the

Bible, they preach the gospel, and if you have some trouble finding that, send us an email. We will do

what we can to help connect you with a good local church wherever you are. And if you're a non-Christian,

checking us out, we're really, really, really glad you're doing that. Don't hesitate to send us

questions. It helps me actually to know, as I'm preaching, how to deal with the types of things

that you're really struggling with. So God bless.

And please bow your heads in prayer. Father, we ask that you would continue to be very kind to us,

that if there are those present or listening who have not yet come to believe your words in John 3 16,

that they will come, Father, that they will turn and believe in Christ. And Father, for us who have

believed in Christ, we ask in your kindness that you would engrave the words of John 3 16 on our hearts

and incline us to live in light of John 3 16 every day. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and our

Saviour. Amen. Please be seated.

So we're going to begin with something a little bit different and odd.

Claire, if you could begin to put up the comfortable words, that would be very handy.

There's this part of the service that most people aren't aware of. And if you're curious a little bit

about what Anglican roots are like, and when the Anglican Church got formed, got reformed out of

the Church of England, what was at the heart of it? In some ways, if you want to understand what was at

the heart of the English Reformation is this prayer that if you follow morning and evening prayer, you

would say it five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 times a day, glory be to the Father and to the Son and

to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end on men.

And that expresses the heart of the English Reformation in the Anglican way.

But the communion service, what the reformers did is that right after they had the invitation to

confess your sins, so you have the Bible, you have the songs and all of that, and the Bible read,

and you have a sermon, and then there's an invitation to confess your sins. You confess your sins.

The presbyter prays that people will know God's grace and forgiveness.

And then there's these things called the comfortable words. And after the comfortable

words, we go into the prayer of humble access and then communion. And we don't do that very often

here at our 10 o'clock service. But I mention all of this because what I'm going to be doing this

Sunday, next Sunday, and the Sunday after is every Sunday I'm going to preach on one of the three

comfortable words. There's four of them. I'm going to preach every Sunday on the first one,

and this Sunday is first and second, next Sunday the first and the third, and the Sunday after that,

Easter Sunday, the first and the fourth. And what I'd like us to do is just to sort of get

into understanding them. So we're going to recite them in the eight o'clock service. I just say it, but here

I'd like to do it as a responsive reading. So if it's up there, let's begin.

Hear what comfortable words our Savior Christ says unto all that truly turn to him. Come unto me,

all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.

Hear also what St. Paul says.

Hear what St. Paul says.

If any of us sins have you had it with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the

propitiation for our sins.

And this next part is just as important to respond to the comfortable words. I say, lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

And I say, let us give thanks unto our Lord God.

It is me, and Christ is up to you.

And if you're wondering what the word meat is there, it's a very old-fashioned word. It means that at the

level of creation and the level of the new creation, it fits. It's right. It's properly ordered. That's what

meat means. So today, I'm going to preach on John 3 16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only

begotten Son to the end that all that believe in him shall not perish but have eternal life. And one of

the things is, if you don't already have that text memorized, I hope by the end of the service, you've

begun to have it memorized. And my sermon's going to begin this week by sharing three stories. Now,

what you need to understand, and this is one of the things you can pray for me as I'm trying to

you know, open the Bible on Sunday morning and preach and teach from the Bible, explaining what

God's Word written has said. I mean, one of the things that you can pray for me is, and this is

going to be one of the things towards the end of the sermon, I hope I remember to say it, is that we

are to understand ourselves as heralds. Not a person by the name of Harold, but heralds with an E.

A herald is a person who heard a message from the king and then proclaims the king's message.

H-E-R-A-L-D. And that's in a sense what all Christians are to be, and I'll hopefully talk

about at the end of the sermon. And what my job is on a Sunday morning is I am to listen to a message

from the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, our blessed Savior, the friend of sinners, the great

Redeemer, and I am to try to listen to his Word carefully so that I understand what it says,

and then I proclaim it to you like a herald. That's in a sense what the minister's job is

on a Sunday morning. And so when I'm preparing for my sermon, the first thing I do is Monday morning,

most Monday mornings, I don't look at commentaries, I don't look at books or videos or anything else

to help me get insights about the text. I just spend some time in prayer with the text itself.

That's what I do on Monday morning. I want to get it, in a sense, try to get it really into my head.

I look at what goes before, I look at what happens after, and then I just, and obviously this week,

because it's just one verse, but it's a matter of prayerfully meditating and contemplating upon the

text, making sure that I'm going to have it in context, and then the rest of the next days,

you know, I work on commentaries and other types of resources. And then the other thing I do is that

I try to have my preaching text part of my devotions every day, so I read the text every day and it's

present in my mind, because I want to have the text in my mind to start to form me, and that comes to my

first story. And this is not a story that shows how wise I am, it's a story that shows that I am a sinner,

and I need prayer from you guys, because this is the story. So John, so on Sunday, on Monday morning,

I spent an hour or so meditating upon, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that

whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. That's what I've meditated upon for an hour.

Around four o'clock or so that Monday afternoon, I confessed that I was hungry, I hadn't brought

enough lunch, and I've discovered that I can go to the dollar store in Centertown and buy a small bag

of chips for 75 cents, only 200 calories. And I know it's not healthy, I probably should go to the metro

and get fruit or something like that, but I go to the dollar store to buy some potato chips.

And as I'm standing in line, there's this person comes around the side, and even from about eight

feet away, I can smell him. And he doesn't smell good. In fact, he smells absolutely terrible.

And he smells really, really bad, and he comes around, and he comes and lines up right behind me.

And in fact, not only does he line up behind me, and I can really smell him, he really stinks,

but he sort of almost invades my body space as well. He gets really close behind me.

And that's not just that he smells. He has a loud, obnoxious voice, and he felt like he had to comment,

and everything going on in the store with a loud, obnoxious voice. And he's right behind me.

And what goes through my mind is this. How could anyone love someone like that?

I'm not making that up. That's went through my mind. Maybe it's because on one hand,

God's Word wanted to convict me of sin. Remember, I've been meditating upon that. It's not normally

something I would think about somebody else. But on one hand, that's what I start to think. How could

anyone love someone like that? Now, I didn't want to look at the fellow because I didn't want to become

the center of his loud, obnoxious comments. But I did glance over, and I noticed then that he had

a girlfriend or a wife. I didn't look at ring fingers. But you could tell from the body language

that he, in fact, did have someone who loved him. And in my spirit, I was deeply rebuked.

I was deeply rebuked.

Because I realized that, what is it the Bible text says? For God so loved the world that he gave his

only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

That means that God offers his Son out of love for every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve without

respect. That there is no person so far gone that Christ did not love them and die for them out of

love. Now, I'll probably return to this again towards the end of the sermon, but there's two other stories

stories that helped me to understand the text this week. And I ended up thinking they were good to

share with the congregation. The next one is quite, quite, quite different. I've shared with you before

that I have about six different people who, between the six of them, all people who are outside the

Christian faith, who sometime on Friday or Saturday, and occasionally on a Monday, but they'll ask me,

well, what are you preaching on? Like on Friday or Saturday, they say, what are you going to preach on

tomorrow? Just making conversation all outside the Christian faith. And so that happened to me this

Saturday morning. And by the way, for this story in the next, if by chance I'm going to call them Bob

and Andy, and if Bob and Andy happen to be watching, a shout out to you. You're really great guys. And

whenever you ask me a question about what I'm going to preach on, it is tremendously helpful for me.

I hope it's helpful for you, but it's very helpful for me to be asked this question by somebody outside

the Christian faith. What are you going to preach on on Sunday morning? So I got asked this question

yesterday morning while I'm in a coffee shop working on my sermon. And I said to him, well,

that's interesting that you ask. There's some words of, I sort of put my hands back like that,

leaned back. I said, there's some words of Jesus that in one sentence, basically Jesus summarizes

beautifully what his entire life and ministry is all about. And this one sentence just doesn't

only describe what Jesus's whole life and ministry is all about. It describes what the whole Bible is

all about. And I said, it is for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes

in him should not perish but have eternal life. And he went, oh. And he said, you know, don't you think

all religions teach that God is love and loves the world? That's what he said to me. He hadn't heard

the part about the son or perishing, or maybe he did. He didn't want to ask me about that. But he said,

don't all religions teach something like that? So I said to him, he sort of leaned down on the

counter with his coffee and because he was going to be going out for a walk. And I said to him, well,

actually, you know, that's actually not true. I think it's really only Christianity that can truly

say that God is love. And he said, well, I don't think that's the case. I think that would be something

that all religions say. And I said, well, they might all say that. But if you think about it for a second,

to love, you need to have another. You need to have another person. There has to be an other to love.

And so for those who follow Islam, Allah cannot really be, Allah cannot be a God of love.

Because there is no one for Allah to love until he creates. And if he has to create to love,

that's like a type of needy love, which most of us recognize isn't real love.

So you can't really say that Allah is love because there's no other for him to love until he creates.

And I said, for our friends who come from, who like the more Eastern type of religions,

forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, they have the same problem. I said, like, if you think, you know what,

at a very deep or high level of those religions, they believe that like all is God, or God is one,

or God is in all. But there's just really this oneness. And if there's this oneness,

there can't really be love. There has to be others to love. And it's only in Christianity,

with the doctrine of the Trinity, that from all eternity, the God, the Father has loved the Son,

and the Son is love the Father, that you can really say that God is love.

And he looked at me and said, well, boy, I'd never thought about that.

Something to think about on my walk, he said with a smile, and off he went for his walk.

But that's very important for us to understand.

Look, you know, when you remember, this is how the text goes. It goes like this,

for God, how does it go again? John 3, 16, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son,

that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. What this text is saying

is that God is love. And it's because God is love, that he sends his Son, that he sends us for this,

so that those who are perishing will not perish, but have eternal life. And this word, so, that happens

there. Notice again, for God so, can you put it? Yeah, there you go. For God so loved the world. That

word so is very powerful. It has two different senses in the original language, and both of them

are intended. One of them means, this is how we know. This is the manner that God showed and proved that

he loves us. We know that God proves us, and we know that God loves us, not because we human beings

have had intuitions, not because we human beings have been able to look at how the world works and

discern that, therefore, God must be loved. No, none of those things will work. In fact, the great human

problem is, when you look at the world, you can't actually figure out, just by looking at the world,

that God would be loved, or that love would even be basic, because you have so much tragedy and terror

and massacres. And it's hard to say why you would pick one thing rather than the other thing as being

the most real. But the Bible here is saying with the word so, that this is how we know, this is how

God showed that he is loved. This is how God shows that not only that he is loved, but that he loves human

beings. He showed it, he showed it by giving his only son, so that whoever believes in him should

not perish, but have eternal life. But the word so has another sense as well in the original language,

and it's a word of intensity. It's saying that God so greatly loved, so strongly loved, so tenderly loved,

so beautifully loved, so intensely loved, so wonderfully loved, so fully loved, so purely loved,

so unfailingly loved. It's a word of intensity. It's a word that, when I start to raise my voice,

that's what it wants us to say. It wants us to say, when, for God so loved the world. It's a word,

not only of the manner through his son, but of intensity. And there's something really wonderful

about this. When you understand, when you come to, you know, a lot of times we Christians are afraid

of talking about the Trinity, but we need to pray that God will help us to enter into it more and

more and more, because it's absolutely, it's absolutely the most wonderful idea in the world,

one of the most wonderful ideas in the world, and it's completely and utterly unique. You see,

another thing about it is that when we think of love, we often think of passion. But I can tell you

right now, God does not love you with passion. Why? Well, here's the problem with passion.

Passion comes and goes. I mean, isn't that always one of the problems? You have passion,

passionate love, and then the passion starts to fade? No. God loves you in something better than

with passion. It is his nature to love. He cannot not love. He is only, well, he's not only love,

he's goodness and mercy and justice and beauty, but God is love. It is his nature to love.

And that leads me to my third story. This one happened to be on Friday, but I think in telling

the sermon, it's better to tell it to you in a different order. And once again, if you happen

to be watching, I really appreciate the conversation. It's been very, I, every time somebody asks me about

my sermon on a Friday or Saturday, somebody outside the Christian faith, I always find it tremendously

helpful. You can pray that more people ask me. So somebody on Friday. It's one of those times at the

coffee shop, I was in there. It was late in the afternoon, and there were hardly anybody coming in.

In fact, there was nobody lining up, just me. And the fellow said, well, what are you going to preach on

on Sunday? And I said, well, I said, you know, he'd be interested in this. I think it was Luther and

Augustine who said that John 3.16 summarizes all of Jesus's life and all of the Bible. I didn't think

this up myself. I'm not smart enough. I can't remember if it was both of them or just one of

them. I said, and this would be a guy who'd be interested in all things. I said, you know,

it was pointed out by Luther and, I think, Augustine a long time ago that these words of Jesus that he

said in a simple sentence perfectly capture what his whole life and person and ministry was all about

and perfectly summarize the Bible. And this fellow will call him and he said, oh, that's like, that's

interesting. What is it? And I said, well, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son

so that all that believe in him will not perish but have eternal life. Now, his response to me was a

little bit different. He said to me, well, that's sort of like a bit of a platitude, isn't it?

A bit of a platitude. I hadn't thought of that, by the way. A bit of a platitude. You know, love,

love, love. God is love. I said, it's a bit of a platitude. So I said to him, and this is because

some of you were praying for me, so keep praying for me because I need prayer. You know, one of the

things I read in the bottom of my notes is from an old hymn from, I think, the 400s that has the

line, he the source, he the ending be. And I know that everything that I might ever say that is good

has come from him and all the praise and glory should go to him. But I said to him, well,

I said to Andy, what do you think human beings' deepest needs are? Like, I'll answer you. Don't you

think that the deepest need for human beings is love? To love and to be loved, to be known and

loved. Don't you think that's human beings' deepest need? And he said, well, yeah, that's probably true.

I might want to add, you know, truth and so on. Yeah, yeah, we can add a couple of other things. But

you agree that love is the deepest human need. And so I said to him, where does this come from in

human beings? Like, don't you think it's a bit of a riddle, a bit of a mystery that human

beings' deepest need is love and to be loved? How do you account for it? Now, I know that this fellow

is a fellow who's had a completely secular background. He's, I think, a seeker. And I said,

you know, if you think about it from the, you know, the stories that we tell about how human beings came

to be in our culture, it can't be that love has any type of survival value. I mean, what are the most

successful creatures on the planet, according to evolutionary theory? Ants and cockroaches. And you

can maybe add a few other amoebas and stuff, and none of them love. None of them need love. So why is

it that love is something which is so important for human beings in such a deep need? And I said,

you know, the other problem is this, like, the way that we understand how life came to be in our

culture, how it's talked about in the media and the press and the elite institutions, I said, you know,

say that for the first half of that story, all there is is pure blind chance. And as a result of

all of this pure blind chance, all of a sudden life comes into being. And I said, you can't say

life is a result of blind chance, therefore love one another. That doesn't make any sense.

And I said, once life begins, how is it that we get to the life that we have today? Well, I said,

the stories that are told in our culture is that, well, the strong survive and the weak perish.

And in many cases, especially in the early millennium of evolutionary theory, of evolutionary

development, the strong survive and the weak perish because the strong eat the weak. And you cannot go,

the strong eat the weak, therefore love one another. And he smiled and said, well, I think those are a bit

reductionist. And because I'm not very smart, as I was walking home, I thought, no, I should have said

to him, they're not, I said something to him, I should have said, no, they're not reductionist. It's

called reductio ad absurdum, taking something to their logical. I said, no, those are the actual basic

things. I mean, you can't get away from that or around it. And then I said to him, you see, it's only

the gospel, it's only what I just said in John 3, 16, that explains why human beings need love,

why it's the most important thing, why we desire it. Because the Bible teaches, I said, in this,

if you listen to the text, it's saying that God is love. And we understand that because God is love,

when he created human beings, he created us out of love. And so we are meant to love and to be loved.

God wove it into us. Only the gospel explains it. At that point in time, about six or seven young

women came into the store, they had to be served, and I had to move on, so we didn't continue.

But we see here that, in fact, what the gospel is telling us is something which is profoundly

important for our culture. Listen to it 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. It all begins, everything to

know about Jesus, everything to know about the Bible is captured in this short little sentence

as the basic way to understand it. And it even says something here quite profound about human beings

and about us. Look again at what it says. It says that whoever believes in him should not perish,

but have eternal life. See, there's a mystery about human beings. There's a mystery about you and me.

Each of us is perishing. Every day we live, we live a day closer to the day that we will die.

We have lots of beautiful young children here in the church, and we can just see them growing and

growing and growing and growing and getting bigger, and we pray for their flourishing, and we will do

whatever we can to try to help them flourish. But for those of us who no longer grow, we know that

gravity wins. And that after you grow and grow and grow and grow, there's the process. I'm shorter than

I was a while ago, and things don't work as well. And of course, this message of the Bible is that

there's a perishing of human beings that continues on after death. It's in fact just a plain fact of

human existence that human beings perish. But put these things together, and if you could put up

the first point, that would be very helpful, Claire. To be human is to be perishing while in your heart

you long for the eternal. Isn't that a mystery? Can't you see that only the Bible explains that about

human existence? We all know that we're perishing, but why is it that human beings, well, first of all,

in our culture, of course, we want to try to pretend that we're not, that we'll never die, but once it comes

home to us, it's home to us. But why is it that we have, human beings have this longing for eternity

in their hearts, the eternal? Like, why is it that when we look out at the world and we see death and

destruction, we think in our hearts that love surely deserves to win, that love should be stronger than

death? Why is it that we have these intuitions and longings, even in the midst of perishing? And that

perishing that the Bible is talking about is saying that, in a sense, if you look at all of the perishing

of life, it should be a clue that your perishing will continue on into eternity unless God does

something to interrupt that process. And the wonder of the gospel is, is that God doesn't interrupt that

process only for the people, well, like you and me, who are, you know, maybe university educated and

good people and nice people, but that he interrupts that perishing. Well, even for that fellow who was

behind me, who I thought, in a sinful manner, how could anyone ever love a man like that?

But God, who is a God of love, loves that man and wants to interrupt and change the story of his life

from perishing to eternal life. Like, even if you think about it, when we think of, well, here's the other

thing. If you could put up the second point, because it's even more profound what this Bible text is,

in a sense, helping us to understand. To be human is to be perishing while in your heart you long

for eternal love. That's what human beings are. Only the gospel is the key that fits and unlocks this

riddle about what it means to be a human being. For God so loved the world that he gave his only

one and only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

God, in love, gives this free gift. That's why that he gives. It's a free gift. The implication,

even in the original language, it's something that God does. He does it on his own. He does it as a gift.

And he desires your true creational good on this side of the grave and your true eternal good.

And this is where, just briefly, I'll mention Matthew 11, because every Sunday I'm going to do

Matthew 11 and the text. And here's this text. Matthew 11, hear what comfortable words our Lord

and Savior Jesus Christ says to all who truly turn to him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy

burdened. And I will give you rest. There is no rest that does not involve love. You can't rest in hatred.

You can't rest in indifference. Love has to be an essential part of how our hearts rest.

And that's here what the Bible is telling us to. If God is the God of love, and he acts in the person of his son

to interrupt our perishing and instead to give us eternal life, it is eternal life is a life from him.

And it means that we are resting in this eternal love. We are resting in God himself, eternal love.

And here's where this part of me being a herald, and you and I being a herald, comes into it.

I have no authority in and of myself to tell you what God is like. All I can do is tell you what I

have learned from Jesus. I am one beggar telling another beggar where to find the gift of free bread,

the gift of free bread for eternal life. That's all I can do. And all I can do is say to you,

Jesus says, come unto me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.

I can proclaim that. You can proclaim that to a hurting world.

But some might say, just as we're coming to a closing, George, it doesn't sound, don't you think

it sounds odd that believing is just a matter of having certain ideas in your head, and if you have

certain ideas in your head, you have John 3.16 in your head, and therefore you're going to have this

life eternal, and if not, you're going to perish? No, no, that's not what believing means. You know,

believing it's a personal word. It's an interpersonal word. It's a word used here in connection of how

one person relates to another person, how a human being relates to the personal God, and obviously

there's going to be facts, and there are going to be words, but it's really a word of entrusting,

of committing, of entering into. If you think about it, if you meet somebody, you know, maybe in a coffee

shop, maybe in a bar, maybe at work, maybe one of your neighbors, and you make that first little

gesture to try to be their friend, and when you do that, when you introduce yourself and maybe have

some little bit of a conversation, you're obviously on one level opening yourself up to some type of risk

that they might just ignore you, or hate you, or to do whatever, but in a sense, you're, you know, opening

yourself up to them a tiny bit, and what friendship is, and what love is as well, is that the other

person responds and opens themselves up a little bit, and says something to you, and then if you open

yourself up to them by what they say, they, in a sense, you're opening yourself up to them, and then

as the conversation, the friendship, or in the case of romance of love, continues, it's this matter of

opening yourself up to the other person, and they come into you, and you come into them, and that's what

believing is, you see, that's one of the things that's so brilliant about the Bible, that's why

you can say that, like, mentally, like, mentally handicapped can enter into relationships with

people, like, you know, people who, with mental, like, all sorts, like, babies can, can enter into

relationships with people, like, it's this fundamental human thing of opening yourself up, and entering in,

and allowing the other person to come in, and that's what the word believe means, Jesus wants you to

say to him, Jesus, I hear from this, that you are a friend of sinners, that you love the loveless, that you

come to give eternal life, and I don't want to perish, and I turn to you, I open myself to you, will you

turn to me, and the wonder of the gospel is Jesus is already earlier saying, come unto me, he's in a sense

there, just rubbing his hands, clapping, just wanting to high-five, angels, yes, George turned to me,

Louise turned to me, Gloria turned to me, Andrea turned to me, I've been longing for that, I will come to

them, I will be his or her savior, just a couple of final points in closing, if you could put up the

the the the third point, one of the things to take from all of this, well the first one is this, if you

are here, and you have not yet given your life to Christ, there is no time better than right this

moment, to stop listening to anything other thing I say, and just say, Jesus, I heard what you said

in John 3 16, and I turn to you, please be my savior and Lord, and he he will accept you, and if you are

here, and you do that, if you are there, and do that, one of the best things you can do after you've

prayed that, and just said it to Jesus, that I want this eternal life, I want to be yours, will you be

mine, after you say it, whatever your words are, let somebody know that you've said it,

let us know, and we will pray for you, but here's the the third point, if you could put it up,

Lord, engrave John 3 16 on my heart, and incline my heart to live by it,

we will deal with those who smell really bad, far better, if John 3 16 forms how we live,

we will deal with enemies, we will deal with injustice, we will deal with love, with life,

so much better, if God in his kindness engraves John 3 16 on our heart, and inclines our hearts

to live each day by it, it's a, I urge you to pray that for yourself, and then just one final thing,

if you could put it up, that would be number four, just to remember that to love is to seek the

person's true good, where they are now, and into eternity, that's what love means, not just a passion,

not emotions, it's to seek that person's true good on this side of the grave, and into eternity,

it might be that if that fellow would be part of God's sense of humor, if sometime down over the next

couple of weeks, I was able to share the gospel with him, and he became a Christian, and I invite him

to church, and that's what I should do, I should share the gospel with him, shouldn't I, but part

of discipleship might be to encourage him to take a bath, or wash his clothes, you see there's this

old brilliant hymn that says, talks about how love to the loveless shown, that, and I've added the word,

but it says love to the loveless shown, that loved and lovely we may be, that's, that's why being formed

by John 3 16 is so important, because God not wants us to out of being loved by him, his love will make

you lovely, on this side of the grave, and into eternity, I invite you to stand, as we bring our

sermon to a close,

Father, we give you thanks and praise that Jesus did not let us guess about what he was doing in his life, or

what his life was all about, or what his mission was, or where he came from, or why he was doing what he was doing, that

he, we don't have to guess, that he told us, and we ask, Father, that you help us to believe what he said,

we ask, Father, that you would engrave these precious words of John 3 16 on the very center of who we are,

that day by day you would incline our hearts to live by John 3 16,

that you would make us people who are convicted when we do not love,

and to call out to you that you would help us to love,

that we would be people who would share the good news in

John 3 16 with those who do not yet know Jesus as Savior and Lord,

that you would have us pray that people come to know

Jesus as their Savior and Lord,

that they might know that gift of Jesus that stops

them from perishing and grants them eternal life.

So, Father, we ask that you would do these wonderful things in our lives

for our good and for your glory,

and all God's people said,

Amen.

Amen.