- DIVINE LOVE INCARNATE

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)
If we were to judge John 3:16 on the basis of its value to the human race, we would have to say that it is probably the most precious cluster of words ever assembled by the mind of an intelligent man; a twenty five word compendium in which is contained the eternal Christian evangel, the message of genuine good news!
When we begin to grasp the radiance and significance of this text, we sense that it is as though God has compressed all of the deepest and richest meaning of the Scriptures into one brief, glorious segment of truth.
We learn in school that diamonds are made from native carbon which has been placed under tremendous pressure which in time brings about the process of crystallization.
If we will just let our imaginations soar a bit, we can properly say that the Holy Ghost has taken the redemptive evangel and has placed it under the emotional pressure of the triune God, so unbelievably strong and powerful that it has been crystallized into this shining diamond of truth.
Using our imaginations again, I believe that if we could place this John 3:16 text on one side of some vast eternal scale held in space by some holy one to measure its value to mankind, it would prove to be more precious than all of the books that have ever been written by men.
There have been unusual men of great intellect and learning and understanding in the history of mankind. We immediately think back to Plato and Aristotle and that cluster of great minds several hundred years before the coming of Jesus into the world. Yet I would seriously say and would contend that if everything all of them had written could be placed in one side of a measure and John 3:16 in the other, they would all prove to be as light as air by comparison.
I have had a lifetime of reading and thinking and praying—yes, and trusting, too, but I am willing to say seriously that if we could test the true value of all the works of Shakespeare, the sonorous compositions of Milton, and everything produced by Scott and Victor Hugo and Emerson and Bacon, and all the rest—all of them put together could not compare in value to what these 25 words mean to the human race.
That is how highly I value the declaration of John 3:16.
I have heard that John 3:16 is a favorite preaching text for young preachers, but I confess that as far as I can recall, I have never had the courage to prepare and preach a sermon with John 3:16 as my text. I suppose I have quoted it as many as 15,000 or 20,000 times in prayer and in testimony, in writing and in preaching, but never as a sermon text.
One of the noble old commentators of the nineteenth century, Allicott, said something like this when he came to John 3:16 in his textual comments: “I do not intend to say very much about this text. It is a favorite of younger preachers, but old men feel it is better felt than talked about.”
Profound appreciation
I think my own hesitation to preach from John 3:16 comes down to this: I appreciate it so profoundly that I am frightened by it—I am overwhelmed by John 3:16 to the point of inadequacy, almost of despair. Along with this is my knowledge that if a minister is to try to preach John 3:16 he must be endowed with great sympathy and a genuine love for God and man.
However, this time I am engaged in a continuing series in the Gospel of John and this burning bush is before us in the way. I cannot go around it and I dare not flee from it!
So, I approach it. I approach it as one who is filled with great fear and yet great fascination. I take off my shoes, my heart shoes, at least, as I come to this declaration that God so loved the world.
This is more than a thought—it is a divine message, worthy of enunciation by an archangel. It can be restated and that is all that I can hope to do with it.
I can restate it in a more personal application, for it has this significance to me: it tells me that I mean something to God. It tells me that I am precious to Him. God wants to reveal Himself to us in personal terms. He wants to show us that in loving the world He loves each one of us individually because we mean something to Him. We matter to Him. God himself is emotionally concerned about each of us.
If I told you only those three things about God and His love and you have been listening with your heart as well as your ears, I could send you off with a benediction knowing it would have been well worth your trip, no matter how far you had come.
The fact that God so loved the world, restated in personal terms, means that God is emotionally concerned about you!
It means that you matter to God. It is a statement that you mean something to God.
This brings us to a strange contradiction in human nature: the fact that a person can reek with pride, display a swollen ego and strut like a peacock—and still be the loneliest and most miserable person in the world.
These people are all around us, pretending and playing a game. Deep within their beings they are almost overwhelmed by their great loneliness, by that heavy sense of being actually an orphan in the final scheme of things.
Such an individual is well aware that he is alone in spite of being busy and active—for in the things that matter, he is an orphan. In the sense in which we speak, he has no father to whom he can run. There is no mother to whom he can go for comfort.
His inward feeling tells him that there is no one anywhere who is emotionally concerned about him.
Any concern of his own narrow little family is not the answer to his need for they will all die along with him.
The result of this strange, aching sense of loneliness and cosmic orphanage for a human being may be summed up like this:
“What good is it to be a human being? No one cares about me.
“I matter to no one except the little mortal circle around me and when they go, I will matter to no one!”
This complex is one of the bitter results of sin, for the same devil that once came and said to Eve, Did God really say . . . ? was saying, in effect: “You don’t really matter to God. God has lied to you!”
We have to say that Eve believed Satan’s lie, the lie that God was not concerned about her and that God had no emotional connection with her life and being. Thus sin came into the world with all of its woes and its ugly trail of death along with it.
God made us as we are
The truth is that God has made us as we are: so vast, so complex and with such tremendous intellectual and spiritual capacities. It is only sin and defeat and death that can bring us to this sense of orphanage, this sense of having been put out of our father’s house and the feeling that follows when the house is burned down and the father is dead.
This is where the unregenerated person is in today’s world. This is why the Napoleons and the Hitlers and the Stalins rise up in their efforts to conquer and prevail and immortalize themselves. They try to arrange it so that when they are gone the world will remember, and they mistakenly think that someone will care!
This explains, also, the story of the poet who looked back on his life after many years, remembering that as a small boy, he “wrote on high a name I deemed would never die.”
But when he went back to the scene of his boyhood when he was eighty and saw his name carved there in crude, boyish lettering, he smiled—but he was ashamed. He was a human being and he recalled that craving in his once-youthful life, the craving to matter to someone, to mean something to someone.
Now, there is something in this context that we must seriously consider, for the hour in which we live happens to be the hour of a great humanistic tide.
In this humanistic approach, the individual is no longer the concern. The individual really does not matter anymore in the kind of society in which we live.
We are pressed to think of the human race in a lump.
We are schooled to think of the human race in terms of statistics.
We are taught to think of the human race as we might think of a breed of hens; the populace, all related intrinsically, but the individual does not count.
This is the curse of statism. That is the curse of dictatorship philosophy and the weapon of the totalitarian governments back to the days of the old Roman Empire and down through the more modern Nazi and Fascist and Communist ideologies.
The state is made to be everything. The party or the organization means everything but the individual means nothing at all.
God deals with individuals
Into the very face and strength of this kind of humanism in our day comes the Christian evangel, wondrously alight, with the assurance for everyone who will listen:
“You are an individual and you matter to God. His concern is not for genus and species but with the individuals He has created.”
When the eternal Son of God became the Son of Man and walked on the earth, He always called individuals to His side.
He did not preach to the multitudes as though they were a faceless crowd. He preached to them as individuals and with a knowledge of the burdens and the needs of each one.
The individuals mattered to Him. He was emotionally concerned with the individual beings.
The woman whose accusers said she was taken in the act of adultery was lying in the dust ready to be stoned to death, but the Son of Man raised her gently to her feet. He assured her of God’s forgiveness for the individual as He told her to go and sin no more.
It was not easy for women as individuals on this earth two thousand years ago. The gospel record is plain, however, that Jesus selected mothers from the crowds and touched and blessed their infants and assured them individually that “the kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mark 10:14 b).
Oh, my brethren, Jesus did not come into our world to deal with statistics!
He deals with individuals and that is why the Christian message is and always has been: God loves the world.
It is not that God just loves the masses. He loves the masses and the throngs only because they are made up of individuals. He loves every individual person in the world.
Now, it seems that the world does not know that individual factor in the love of God.
I think I am beginning to understand what Dwight Moody said at one time about the effect of God’s love. He is quoted as having said, “If I could get everybody in the world to believe God loves them, I would get everybody in the world converted!”
That may have been an overstatement but at least I think I agree with him that too many individuals think of God’s love just being for the world in a lump—and the individual is not involved.
You have only to look around you with a serious kind of observation to confirm the fact that the devil has been successful in planting his lie that no one cares about the individual person.
Even in nature around us, there appears to be very little individualistic concern. The burden of concern is always for the species.
The poet Tennyson said of nature: “So careful of the type she seems; so careless of the single light.”
Nature has planted within every normal human being the tremendous urge for self-propagation and that urge guarantees the perpetuation of the race.
Yet, when the individual has perpetuated his kind he dies and goes back to the dust. All of the tribes that walk the earth today are but a handful compared to those that slumber in its bosom.
Since the long flight of years began, matron and maid and soldier and kings, learned men and fools, men in the great bloom of their old age, all lie down together.
Who really cares about the past generation?
Nature seems to confirm the idea that you and I matter very little in the great scheme of the vast universe. Fallen nature seems to confirm the notion held by so many weary and dying men and women: “Few there are that care when we live and fewer still when we die.”
We will eternally thank God for the Christian message and the Christian hope and the miracle of transformed human lives that assures us that God cares and that He loves us individually.
We will eternally thank God also that His care and concern are not tailored for the nice people and the respectable people and those who have some means of helping themselves.
No one stops to think very much about the old tramp who shuffles into the mission hall. Sure, he is a bum. His old clothes fit him as if he had been born in them. His old, tired body seems to smell of every place he has been in during the past 10 years.
When he is sober enough, he still has those thoughts and memories of his boyhood and of those who loved him and nurtured him. Now he is only told to “Move on, buddy”; turned away even from the places where tramps find some refuge.
He feels only the solitude of a vast and gusty universe. Blown about like the grains of dust or the leaves of autumn, he knows only the deep sense of sadness and complete orphanage, as though all that had meant anything had died.
In the past and to this moment, the Christian evangel continues to confront all of the hopeless and the helpless in every culture and in every land, insisting:
“Wait a minute, you! You with the dirt and the whiskers and smell and hollow sunken cheeks, wait a minute.
“Some One is emotionally concerned about you!
“Some One who matters is not happy because you are the way you are. He is One who knows your name. He remembers you and loves you where you are and as you are. You mean something to Him!”
Then some smiling person, happy and blest in the grace and mercy of the caring Savior, whispers to that needy one, “God so loved you that He gave His one and only Son that whoever—and that includes you—whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life!”
He knows very well that he does not matter to the mayor of the city. He knows that he does not matter to the chief of police. He knows that he is not in the heart of the governor or the president or the members of the president’s cabinet.
But the shining beauty and the radiance of the message finally get through to him:
“You matter to the living and loving God of all creation. Above everyone else in the whole universe, He cares for you and calls to you and has gracious plans for you!”
The diamond of truth
That is the high compression. That is the dazzling facet of the diamond of truth which God has thrown almost with a happy carelessness out to the world, saying, “Take it!”
What a message for the sinner! What a message for the failure. What a message for the loneliest of the lonely. What a message for men and women who have drifted far from God after learning the important Bible verses in a godly home and in Sunday school!
What about the boys who have gone to the wars? What about the helpless men and women in hospitals and institutions? What about those who find themselves lying in the wreckage and debris of some tragic accident? What about those who have come to their senses but are still bound by chains of habits and abuse and self-gratification?
How many have turned their eyes upward to the God above and said, “Oh God, when I was a child they often told me that I mattered to You. Is it any different now? Have You changed Your mind, God?”
The records are not all in yet, but in many places and in many instances, the ancient but gracious voice of God has stirred into memory the promises of God to those who will believe and trust:
“No, child, nothing with God has changed. The promises are still available. Grace and mercy are still flowing. I am not happy about your condition for I love you so that I have given my one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
Now, I am going to say something here that I do not establish as anyone’s official doctrine, but I am quite certain that there are Christian mothers who grieve over boys who they feel are in hell today.
Some of those children will greet us in that happy day of everlasting reunion.
Do you not think that the thief on the cross had a mother?
And do you not think the thief on the cross was in the tender heart of his mother as he faced death?
Do you not suppose that the mother thought within herself: “I have failed him and society has failed him and he has failed society. He is dying the death of a criminal. My boy, my boy!”
What that mother did not know was that the One who loves and cares was within touching distance. What she did not know was that the young rebel and traitor turned his eyes to the One who cared and with faith said, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42).
Our dying Lord Jesus answered him with the reassurance: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
The mother only knew that her boy had died by execution, and her hair was grayer and her face more tired and her gloom heavier when that day was over and she knew he was dead.
What she did not know was that someone else in the universe loved and cared and forgave to an extent far beyond a mother’s love. She did not know that an eternal One who had come to save His people from their sins was emotionally involved—her son mattered in God’s sight.
Men had taken her son from a cell. They had taken him to the execution. But now he matters. Suddenly he becomes significant in his confession of faith and there is not an angel in the winged choir above more significant than he. His name as one of the redeemed sounds yonder in God’s promised heaven because the Christian message says, God so loved!
Thankfully, brethren, that love is not the love for a species but a love for individuals.
We are right when we sing the words, “Jesus, lover of my soul.” We are wrong if we sing, “Jesus, lover of the human race.”
In the strictest sense, there is no human race. The race is composed of individuals and if you take away the individuals you have no human race.
There is such a thing as a crowd and sometimes evangelists love to preach to a crowd. But the crowd is simply a congregation of individuals.
Each individual has eternal significance
In the light of His love, let us always remember that every individual has eternal significance and meaning in the heart of God and that He is emotionally concerned with the individual.
This is still God’s day of grace and mercy and willingness to forgive, and there is not a human being anywhere who has been written off and cast out as being “no good and absolutely hopeless.”
God says plainly that there is none righteous and that we must be saved and that we will perish if we do not repent. But in the sense of being hopeless and beyond forgiveness and impossible of conversion—there is not one.
I advise you not to listen to any would-be interpreters of truth who insist that God has chosen some to be saved and has given up on the rest and that those He has not chosen are no good, vessels of wrath fitted to destruction and created by God for the fun of damning them.
Do not listen to those who teach what Wesley called “a horrible decree.”
I have never said that there is good in everybody, but I say there is Someone who loves and cares for them whether they are good or not. I say that there is a loving God who is emotionally concerned about them.
We often go away from church talking carelessly about a lot of things, but I want you to be saying to one another: “The One who was with the Father and who came down and reported what He saw, says plainly that we matter to God as individuals; and that He came down from above not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved and live.”
I have counseled people who have said to me, “Dr. Tozer, I want to believe what God says but I have sinned, I have lied, I have failed. I have made vows and broken them. I have made promises and failed to keep them. I am just no good!”
And amazing, also, that all of that recrimination takes place after God himself has gone to the trouble of proclaiming His love and assuring us that we do matter to Him.
God has never indicated that He is waiting for us to make ourselves morally good. He has indicated, however, that we have a potential that He well knows and He is waiting to make us over to bring glory to Him and to prove the wisdom of His mercy and grace throughout eternity.
Now, I can only point out that faith cometh by hearing the Word and that it begins to work as soon as we begin to affirm it.
Our part is to turn to God in faith, confessing our great need, and thanking Him for revealing His love and concern for us through Jesus Christ, the eternal Son.
Faith cometh by hearing and faith becomes perfect as you pray and talk with God, your heavenly Father. He longs to hear you confide in Him: “Oh God, I do believe I matter to you and I do believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord.”
Perhaps this sounds too simple: frankly, it is simple and easy to come into the arms of God by faith!
Come to Him for the first time as a sinner, for forgiveness and salvation.
Come back to God if you have wandered away. Come back home if you have strayed.
Every one of us must come with full confidence that it is a personal word God has spoken to us in this greatest of all proclamations, that “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.”