For God so Loved the World (John 3:16-21) || 02/22/26
Sermon Manuscript
Today we get to probably the most famous verse in the Bible: John 3:16. A beautiful verse about God’s love toward humanity. John is wrapping up his introduction and this passage is a sort of segway into the next part. Probably, John is the one speaking here, not Jesus which is why some of your Bibles don’t use the red letters. If that’s the case, John is likely still quoting something he heard Jesus say. Either way, though, it doesn’t matter because the Holy Spirit is the One who put this together.
What is more often missed, though, in this verse about God’s love toward humanity is that it sits in a passage that says a lot about God’s wrath as well. There is a growing sentiment in the attractional Evangelical world that preaching needs to be centered on God’s love and absent God’s wrath. The fear is that God’s wrath will turn people away so they just want to focus on love. Last century in more fundamentalist revivalist church culture, there was a heavy focus on God’s wrath as a fear tactic to get people to convert.
But, John doesn’t choose between the two. He actually doesn’t allow us to choose between the two either. If you remove either one, you don’t get a better or more attractive God, you get a lesser and altogether different god. And this is important because your concept of God is not academic or theoretical, it actually forms who you are and how you live and enjoy your life. It shapes our conscience, our courage, our compassion, our view of ourselves, and how we respond to all the events that transpire in our lives.
There is something we have to understand here before we dive in. God is loving. That’s who He is. His wrath toward sin is a response from His love. Dane Ortlund describes it like this. Imagine if you know someone who has cancer. You feel bad for them and probably lament the existence of cancer. But, if it’s your wife or husband or child who has cancer, you really hate that cancer because you love the person suffering so much! The love and the wrath go together. You can’t separate them. And that’s what I want to see. I want us to look at the failures of the extremes and then see how a right view of God shapes us. First extreme…
- If God is only love, then nothing is really wrong 16
“For God so loved the world…” We love this verse…and we should. But, when John writes this, he doesn’t use the word for dirt or soil or even merely the word for planet. He uses the word ‘kosmos.’ That is the ordered human world in its beauty and rebellions. In context, this word ‘kosmos’ is not neutral. It’s the world that did not recognize its Maker, the world that loved darkness rather than light, the world that stands opposed to God. And that is precisely the world God loves. John is not emphasizing geography, but grace. He’s not telling us that God loved a large place, he’s telling us that God loved a resistant people.
This is why John is so clear in his gospel that the world rejected God in chapter one and that the world hates the light in our passage today. So the love that John is describing is not some kind of sentimental love, it is a costly love toward rebels. And here is where we get to the problem of a ‘love-only’ God.
Now, most of you know that I am pro-therapy. I see a counselor, my wife is a counselor, and there are many counselors in this room who I deeply respect. So please don’t hear this as anti-therapy. But, in the modern, therapeutic sense, if God is only love, then sin is not treason, it’s brokenness. Judgement is not real, it’s metaphorical. And the cross is not necessary, it’s symbolic. We develop this idea that God is looking at humanity and saying, “You’re fine as you are.” And we then develop tropes like ‘You do you’ which assumes authenticity is more important than obedience. That self-expression is more valuable than repentance. And that our desires are our moral guides. Another trope is ‘God knows my heart.’ This negates the need for repentance, actively avoids confession, and justifies ongoing sin.
There are so many of these tropes, but the pattern behind all of them is a love-only god who affirms, but never confronts. Comforts, but never convicts. Approves, but never purifies. Who rescues us from shame, but not from sin. We reduce God to some safe, therapeutic, non-threatening, non-judging, non-demanding being. And when we do this, we are trading a holy God for something else made in our image. But a God who only affirms you cannot ever save you. If God can only affirm you, He isn’t God. You are.
If we hold to a love-only God, it doesn’t just affect our minds, it subtly, but surely affects our souls. If nothing is truly wrong, then nothing needs to be deeply healed. If sin is only brokenness, then repentance becomes optional. If God is never confronting, then conviction feels intrusive. And slowly, we become fragile people allergic to discomfort in our lives. A love-only God creates fragile, isolated people. We build our identities around affirmation instead of transformation and cut ourselves off from anyone who challenges us in any helpful and healthy way.
I had a good friend in my 20’s…really one of my closest friends at that time…and he wanted to marry a woman who really was a nice, beautiful woman, but I had some concerns that I communicated to him and he cut me out of his life completely. Not just me, but anyone who challenged him on anything at all. And years later that marriage fell apart, and maybe he has some great new friends…I hope he does, but he is completely isolated from anyone he used to know. These types of people isolate not because they are bold, but because they are afraid of rejection and they hide.
I think this is a huge piece of the atomization of our society. That’s the term sociologists use today to talk about the fragmenting and tribalism in our society. We build tribes around affinity groups who affirm what we value the most. We have little ability to agree to disagree and to see nuance in complex issues. And we want a God who will validate us, not fix us. You can recognize this kind of person because they don’t confess, they explain. They don’t repent, they reframe. And they don’t die to themselves, they curate a form of self that they think will make them most happy.
Seeing God as love-only makes us think love means unconditional affirmation. And that is going to make disagreements feel like rejection and the idea of holiness feels oppressive. If nothing is truly wrong, then grace becomes shallow, forgiveness becomes cheap, and the gospel becomes flat.
And, again, John isn’t giving us this option. John says that whoever does not believe is condemned already… - John 3:18b He’s saying the problem isn’t just that people might be condemned one day, he’s saying that apart from Christ, they, in some sense, already stand under judgement. And if that’s true, then something IS truly wrong! Not just kind of off. Not just misaligned. Something is wrong in a cosmic sense. And if you let go of this cosmic condemnation, you also let go of the cosmic cure…effectively taking all the love and beauty out of John 3:16.
John gives us a holy God whose wrath toward sin is as real as His love for sinners. But, what if we go to the other extreme and hold to a god who is only wrath? Then there is no hope for us.
- If God is only wrath, then there is no hope 17,18
Some of you might have grown up in a wrath-heavy God church culture. Your pastors may have made God seem always angry, always watching, and always disappointed. I’ve used this illustration before, but during Covid, I would take my kids to Disney and Disney doesn’t do anything half way. They were serious about everyone wearing masks and the moment you took yours off, some cast member jumped out of nowhere to tell you to get it back on. That’s how some of us imagine God. Always standing behind the scenes waiting for us to mess up and then He pounces.
And if that is how you view God, then wrath isn’t righteousness, it is disgust. Judgment is not holy justice, but looming humiliation. And the cross is not a rescue, it is the bare minimum to keep God from destroying us. In a wrath-only framework, the primary emotional atmosphere of the universe is danger. God isn’t grieved, he’s angry. He isn’t patient, He’s perpetually disappointed. He isn’t holy love, He’s cosmic surveillance.
A love-only God creates fragile people, but a wrath only God creates anxious people. A constant low-grade fear that never leaves you. It creates performative obedience, not joyful obedience. You live every moment believing that your standing before God fluctuates with your last thought or your last failure. Then we begin to overcompensate by managing our appearances, hiding our weaknesses, minimizing our confession, and performing for those around us.
Vulnerability will feel unsafe and that always leads to a fragile, lonely, isolated life void of joy and rest. And when we do fail or bad things happen, we are never going to run to God, we are going to run from Him. We are going to become the self-righteous older brother in Luke 15 on one hand or give up like the younger brother. Neither able to rest in the secure love of their father. We will just live a life constantly hiding, not from other people, but from our Father just like Adam and Eve did when they sinned.
But that isn’t how John describes God. Look at verse 17: God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Do you see yourself as a liability or a beloved child? Do you see God as tolerating you or pursuing you? Do you feel like God is managing you or transforming you? John cares greatly how we answer those questions? Jesus is not a prosecuting attorney, He’s a loving rescuer. A love-only God makes you hide in comfort and a wrath only God makes you hide in fear. But, the true God brings you into the light. And He does this at the place where love and wrath perfectly meet and refuse to compete: the cross.
- The cross: where love and wrath perfectly meet 19-21
This is what makes the Christian worldview so unique and the gospel so beautiful. God doesn’t balance righteousness and wrath like two kids at either end of a see-saw. He brings them brilliantly together. At the cross, wrath is not ignored, justice is not relaxed, and sin is not minimized. It is judged.
But, the One judged is the Son. “God so loved the world that He gave his only Son.” What did He give His son to? To condemnation. To darkness. To death. The very things we deserve. This is why belief is so important to John in this passage. Belief is not agreeing that God is loving. It’s entrusting yourself to the place where love absorbed the wrath we deserve.
If you remove the wrath, the cross becomes pointless. If you remove the love, the cross becomes cruelty. But, with both, the cross becomes glory. And the light that John is talking about reveals what we actually believe. Verse 19: This is the judgement: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light…
Here is where your concept of God becomes visible. If you believe God is mainly wrath, you hide from the light. You fear what the light might expose. But, if you believe that God is mainly love, you minimize and rationalize your sin. Which is really just another way of avoiding the light. But, if we see both at the cross, we see a God who is holy enough to judge, but loving enough to bear that judgment for us.
And when that happens, something deep inside us changes. Verse 21 Whoever does what is true comes to the light… You come into the light not because you are fearless, but because you trust the character of the One who is Light. You know your exposure will not destroy you because Jesus was destroyed for you.
And it’s no coincidence that John puts these words here. What has just happened before this passage? Nicodemus had just come… at night. Nicodemas was religious, he was moral, and he was respected, but he came in the dark. This is not about one Pharisee, it’s about the human condition. Nicodemus represents the person who believes in a God of law without love. The culture John is writing to represents those who want love without judgment. But, John is clearly saying we need both. We need a God who is both. And only in Jesus do you get that God.
And it’s worth saying that for many of us, the way we instinctively picture God has less to do with theology and more to do with the families we grew up in. If you grew up with a distant or emotionally unavailable parent, you may feel like God is detached. If you grew up with a harsh, unpredictable parent, you may imagine God as easily angered and hard to please. If you grew up with a permissive parent who never corrected you, you may assume love means affirmation without confrontation. This is one of the reasons it is so important to process your own story and be curious about why you feel the way you feel.
And John three speaks directly to that distortion. John says, “For God so loved the world…” He did not say God loved the worthy. He did not say God loved the obedient. God loved the rebellious Kosmos. And in verse 17, we are told the Father sent the son not to condemn, but to save. Whatever your earthly father was like, Jesus is revealing the true heart of your heavenly Father. John’s whole gospel is built on this idea. John 1:18 says, “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” If you want to know what the Father is really like, don’t look to your past, look at the Son.
Can you see how your view of God is not academic or abstract theology? It determines how you handle failure. How you confront justice. How you confess sin. How you raise your children. And how you engage those around you. If God is only love, you will become morally soft. If God is only wrath, you will become brittle and fearful. You will becoe highly critical of yourself and judgmental of others. But, if God is blazing holiness and relentless love, you become humble (because wrath was real), confident (because love absorbed it), serious about sin, gentle with sinners, and you will live courageously in the light.
You will live in the light because the worst things about you have already been exposed by the most loving Being in the universe. The God you believe in will shape the person you become.
