By David ReayWednesday 26 Aug 2015LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read John 3:16
16 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. (NIV)
This most familiar of verses can actually blind us to a very important fact. Which is that in loving the ‘world’, God is loving each one of us. His love is not some generalised abstraction directed towards the world in totality. When we read that God loved the world, we are to understand that he loves individuals in that world. People like you and me.
The familiarity can also hinder us from a quite remarkable aspect of this love. When John uses the word ‘world’, he is not talking about sunsets and waterfalls and oceans and mountains. He is referring to human society opposed to God. Elsewhere he urges us not to love the ‘world’—not at all meaning that we despise creation but that we turn away from that which opposes God.
So we are faced with the remarkable reality that God loves those who hate him—enough to send Jesus on a rescue mission to save them. And we are faced with the other remarkable reality that God’s love is not doled out in bulk to humanity. It is directed to each and every individual, even those who have turned away from him.
May this love never become so familiar that it loses its freshness.
Blessings
David Reay