If you were asked what the most famous verse in the Bible is, what would you say?
If you’ve ever watched a football game, or heard someone give an acceptance speech, you may have guessed John 3:16.
Kids are taught it in Sunday school, songs are based on it, and believers and nonbelievers alike have most likely heard it at some point. Here’s what it says…
“For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
Let’s pause for one second. Don’t rush past that verse. If you did, go back and read it one more time.
Did you know that God loves you?
Now before you respond too quickly, let it sink in.
God loves YOU.
He loves the person next to you, yes. He loves the entire world, yes. But God loves YOU, too.
Jesus died for you so that you could experience God’s love and be adopted into His family. And Jesus couldn’t have died for the sins of the world without first being born into this world and living a sinless life for 33 years. The Christmas story is God’s love for you on display. That’s why we get so excited about it every year. Because God actually displayed His love in human form. The proof was in the pudding if you will.
The problem with thinking about God’s love personally (especially during Christmas) is that we have a warped view of what love is. Hollywood, Hallmark, and rom coms have royally screwed up our way of viewing love. Love for the people around us. Love for ourselves. And ultimately love for God and understanding His love for us.
We hold God to a hallmark standard of love and then are disappointed when He doesn’t look that way. We expect God to have a similar kind of generator like movies do where we do A,B,C and it guarantees that God is going to respond with X,Y, Z because that’s how love works according to our world full of Hallmark movies! And so we hear John 3:16 and we don’t let it sink in and take root in our hearts because at a head level we know, “yeah God loves the world blah blah blah”, but at a heart level we struggle to believe that God loves us because a lot of us are a little bit confused about how God’s love works.
The reality is, we don’t love the way that God loves, and we don’t experience love that way from other people. And so we attach the broken love that we give and we receive to God’s character and allow it to taint His image. This is why it’s sometimes easier to believe that God loves the world (John 3:16) but He doesn’t love me personally.
So… let’s tie this all together. If God loves us personally, but we have a messed up definition and picture of love, where do we go from here? How can the Christmas story course correct our picture of God’s love?
Well, put simply, the Christmas story is a really beautiful picture of God speaking for Himself and putting His love on display for the world.
Jesus came into this world because of our distorted love, to define what real love is, and to distribute love to the entire world trough His death and resurrection. Do you want to course correct your warped view of love? Look at Jesus. Be curious about how He lived and what He did. Become obsessive about the example that He left behind and then when you see love in the world that we live in ask yourself…
Is this how Jesus loved?
If yes, then lean in and get better at loving that way (and receiving love that way) but if no, then turn back to Jesus.
The answer, the example, the definition, and the way forward has always been Jesus. And the Christmas story is an incredible chance for us to remind ourselves what love really is, and begin to wonder what it could look like for us to love others the same way.
7 Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. 8 But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. 12 No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us. 13 And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. 14 Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 All who declare that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. 16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.
1 John 4:7-16
