Extravagance (John 3:16-21)

John's Gospel, New Testament, Sermons

Questions (John 3:16-21)

“The very nature of God is extravagance. Lavish extravagance to an extraordinary degree is the characteristic of God, never economy. Grace is the over­flowing favor of God. Imagine a man who is in love being economical” Oswald Chambers.

“Now, here in a twenty-five-word compendium (John 3:16), we have the Christian evangel. The message, the good news, is as though God had compressed all of the meaning of the Scriptures, into this twenty-five-word text.” A. W. Tozer.

John 3:16 is one of the most famous and cherished verses in the Bible, often called the “Gospel in miniature” or “Bible in a nutshell.” It’s widely considered the most popular, well-known, and quoted verse about God’s love. It summarizes the gospel message by highlighting God’s love for humanity through the sacrifice of His Son.

Familiar as Jn 3:16 is to us, they were uttered to Nicodemus for the 1st time. They’re the revelation of the nature of God, and the ground of our love to God and man.

Interestingly, love is a very ambiguous word in English. Saying “Luv ya” could be about parental love, friendship love, sibling love, Christian fellowship love, romantic love, sexual love as in making love, or even affection for an object, a car, for a song, or a favorite food. Using the word love never explains the type of love, expecting the context to explain it.

“John 3:16 means that God gave Himself absolutely. In our abandonment we give ourselves over to God just as God gave Himself for us, without any calculation. We will never understand how to abandon ourselves to God until we understand how God abandoned himself to us. When God gave His Son in love to the world, He didn’t give just a part of himself. He gave all of Himself, absolutely and entirely. He gave with total abandon, holding nothing back. Salvation is not merely deliverance from sin, nor the experience of personal holiness; the salvation of God is deliverance out of self entirely into union with Himself.” Oswald Chambers. My Utmost for His Highest, March 13. God’s Total Surrender to Us / The Abandonment of God.

The Dimensions of God’s Love (John 3:16). “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ…” (Eph 3:18).

  1. Breadth: …the world…
  2. Length: He gave his only Son…
  3. Depth: …whoever…
  4. Height: …have eternal life.

4 Expressions of God’s Love

  1. Incarnation (Jn 1:14): The Word Made Weak.
  2. Identification (2 Cor 5:21): The Son Made Sin.
  3. Invasion (Gal 2:20): The Sinner Made Saint.
  4. Renunciation (2 Cor 8:9): The Ruined Restored.

Jn 3:16. God, the Father, gave his best, his unique and beloved Son (Rom 8:32). Both the verb ‘to love’ (agapao) and the noun ‘love’ (agape) are used for God’s spontaneous, gracious, love for men, and also for the response of the disciple to God–moved not by our own initiative or free unmerited favor to God (which is impossible), but by a sense of God’s favor to him. As applied to people, the love of God is NOT the consequence of our loveliness but of the sublime truth that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16).

God’s love is to be admired not because the world is so big and includes so many people, but because the world is so bad: that’s the connotation of kosmos [‘world’ (Jn 1:9)]. The world is so wicked that Christians are never to love the world with the selfish love of participation (1 Jn 2:15-17), while God loves the world with the self-less costly love of redemption. Thus, God pronounces terrifying condemnation on the grounds of the world’s sin, while still loving the world so much that the priceless gift he gave to the world–the gift of his Son–remains the world’s only hope.

God’s wrath/anger/ire is “against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Rom 1:18) and “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), yet “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). Christians are not born Christians, but “were by nature deserving/objects of wrath” (Eph 2:3). Yet “because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved“ (Eph 2:4-5).

God’s love (Jn 3:16) is sandwitched between his incarnation (Jn 3:17) and his death (Jn 3:14-15). The mission of the Son and his ultimate purpose is the salvation of those who believe/have faith in him. Whoever believes in him:

      • experiences new birth (Jn 3:3, 5),
      • has eternal life (Jn 15, 16), and
      • is saved (Jn 3:17).

The alternative is:

      • to perish (Jn 10:28),
      • to lose one’s life (Jn 12:25),
      • to be doomed to destruction (Jn 17:12).

There is no 3rd option.

Jn 3:17; 5:24, 27. The theme of the mission of th Son is common in the Synoptics (Mt 9:13; 15:24; Mk 1:38; Lk 4:18, 43).

Jn 3:18, 36. Already in need of a Savior before God’s Son comes on his saving mission, a person compounds his or her guilt by not believing in the name of that Son. As with the arrogant critic who mocks a masterpiece, it is not the masterpiece that is condemned, but the critic.

Jn 3:19-21. God’s objective is salvation, NOT judgment or condemnation (Jn 3:17), but the separation of the good involves the judgment of the evil. The light makes the darkness visible. That they chose darkness was the act of their own will, and this act of the will was determined by the evil of their deeds.

The self-incurred condemnation is pictured in the metaphorical terms of light and darkness. The light that has come into the world shines in the darkness (Jn 1:5), even more brightly than at the creation (Gen 1:2-3). As the light of the world (Jn 8:12), Jesus is the revelation of God and the objectification of divine holiness and purity. But when men loved darkness, the reason was fundamentally moral: their deeds were evil.

The alternative is to “do the truth” [lives by the truth, NIV], which means “to act faithfully,” or “to act honorably” (Gen 47:29; Ne 9:33). People must do all they may do through him — in short, that they will turn to the “lifted up” Son of Man with the same simple, desperate, unqualified faith as the Israelites displayed who turned to the bronze snake in the desert (Jn 3:13-15). By such faith and such faith alone can anyone experience the new birth (Jn 3:3, 5) and thereby gain eternal life (Jn 3:15-16).

Reference: The Gospel according to John (The Pillar New Testament Commentary (PNTC). D. A. Carson. December 20, 1990.

Quotes:

“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…. 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.” AW Tozer.

“This is a favorite of young preachers. But older preachers feel that it’s better felt than talked about.” Charles Ellicott, 1819-1905.

“To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God.” C.S. Lewis.

“But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God’s love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.” Thomas Merton.

“Think of God in Creation! Think of the number of trees and blades of grass and flowers, the extravagant wealth of beauty no one ever sees! Think of the sunrises and sunsets we never look at! God is lavish in every degree. For God’s sake, don’t be economical, be God’s child.” Oswald Chambers. Our Portrait in Genesis. 975.

“The reason Jesus called Mary’s act a “beautiful thing” (Mk 14:6) was because it was wrought out of spontaneous love to Himself. It was neither useful nor her duty; it was an extravagant act for which no one else saw any occasion. “But Jesus said, Leave her alone. Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.” Oswald Chambers. The Place of Help. 1028, 1241.

Economy vs. Extragavance [Relying on worldly security vs. embracing spiritual adventure]: “Economy is doing without what you want just now in case a time may come when you will want what you don’t want now. It’s possible to be so economical that you venture nothing. We’ve deified economy, placed insurance and economy on the throne, consequently we’ll do nothing for adventure or extravagance. To use the word “economy” in connection with God is to belittle and misunderstand Him. Where is the economy of God in His sunsets and sunrises, in the grass and flowers and trees? God has made a superabounding number of things that are of no use to anyone. How many of us bother our heads about the sunrises and sunsets? Yet they go on just the same. Lavish extravagance to an extraordinary degree is the characteristic of God, never economy. Grace is the over­flowing favor of God. Imagine a man who is in love being economical! The characteristic of a man when he is awake is never that he is calculating and sensible.

Common sense is all very well in the shallow things, but it can never be made the basis of life, it is marked by timidities. We may say wise and subtle things, but if we rely on common sense and rationalism we’ll be too timid to do anything. To­day we are so afraid of poverty that we never dream of doing anything that might make us poor, [unlike] the mediaeval monks who took on the vow of poverty. Many are poor, but none of us chooses to be. These men chose to be poor, they believed it was the only way they could perfect their own inner life. Our attitude is that if we are extravagant a rainy day will come for which we have not laid up. You cannot lay up for a rainy day and justify it in the light of Christ’s teaching. We are not Christians at heart, we don’t believe in the wisdom of God, but only in our own. We go in for insurance and economy and speculation, everything that makes us secure in our own wisdom.” Oswald Chambers.

“A twenty-six word parade of hope: beginning with God, ending with life, and urging us to do the same. Brief enough to write on a napkin or memorize in a moment, yet solid enough to weather two thousand years of storms and questions. If you know nothing of the Bible, start here. If you know everything in the Bible, return here. We all need the reminder. The heart of the human problem is the heart of the human. And God’s treatment is prescribed in John 3:16.” Max Lucado. 3:16 the Numbers of Hope, 2007.

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