Thomas J Parlette
“The Gospel in Miniature”
John 3:1-17
3/08/20
According to the Christian History Institute, a man named George Bennard was struggling with personal problems that were causing him a great deal of trouble and anguish. In his suffering, his mind returned again and again to Christ’s anguish on the cross. This, he thought, was the heart of the gospel! The cross he pictured was not ornate, or pretty, or gold or silver. It was “a rough, splintery thing, stained with gore.”
George Bennard was under the influence of one of our verses for today, John 3:16. “I saw the Christ of the Cross,” he said later, “ as if I were seeing John 3:16 leave the printed page, take form and act out the meaning of redemption.” We all know John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
And so, in a room in Albion, Michigan, Bennard sat down and wrote a tune. But he struggled with the lyrics. In fact, he could only come up with one line… He struggled for weeks to set words to the melody he had written.
Then Bennard, a Methodist evangelist, was scheduled to preach a series of messages in New York. He found himself focusing on the cross. The theme of the cross grew increasingly more urgent to him. He struggled once more with the words to his hymn. This time the words came. He later told a friend, “I sat down and immediately was able to rewrite the stanzas of the song without so much as one word failing to fall into place. I called in my wife, took out my guitar, and sang the completed song to her. She was thrilled!”
On June 7th, 1913, George Bennard introduced the new hymn in a revival meeting he was conducting in Pokagon, Michigan. The words went like this: “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame; and I love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain. So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, till my trophies at last I lay down; I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown…”
The Old Rugged Cross went on to become one of the most popular hymns of the twentieth century. Bennard described his feelings as he struggled to put words to the printed page: “I saw the Christ of the Cross as if I were seeing John 3:16 leave the printed page, take form and act out the meaning of redemption.”(1)
John 3:16 has had that effect on many people. That is why, even though our full passage is the story of Nicodemus’ night time visit to Jesus where he struggles with what it means to be born again, we’re going to focus on probably the most well-known verse in the Bible. Martin Luther once called John 3:16, “the Gospel in Miniature.” If all you had of the New Testament was this one verse, it would be enough to save your soul.
We’ve heard this beautiful verse so often it’s tempting to take it for granted. But have you ever considered what it would mean if you just changed one or two key words John 3:16. For instance, let’s change one verb: For God so rejected the world. Makes a big difference doesn’t it. It nearly happened in the story of Noah, when God regretted creating the world. God rejected creation and sought to destroy it the waters of flood. But then God had a change a heart, and put a rainbow in the sky as symbol of the promise that humanity would never again be wiped out by the flood. But that’s how it could have read: God so rejected the world…
Or we could change the first noun. It could read: For God so loved Israel. That’s what many Israelites at the time thought. They believed because they were God’s chosen people that meant that God loved them more than any other people on Earth. The prophets had to remind them that they were chosen to be a light to the other nations – not that God loved them more. Some may think the verse reads: For God so loved America. But it doesn’t. Or it could read: For God so loved nice people. Nope, it reads For God so loved the World. Everybody – the rich, the poor, the beautiful, the not so beautiful, the saints and the sinners alike.
Or, we might tinker with the second half of the verse: For God so loved the world that He gave it a stern warning. God did give many stern warnings in the Old Testament, but people still went on their way. Nothing made much of a difference until, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…”
How about if we just changed the last few words of the last half of the sentence? For God so loved the world that he gave his only son to tell us how to be happy and comfortable in life. That one sounds great. A lot more people would probably become Christians if we made that our motto. But that’s not how it reads either.
Listen again to this verse and consider what a world of difference it would make if we changed just one world -
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Last week we kicked off the season of Lent by focusing on the goodness of God. If you understand God’s goodness, you will trust in God.
This week we’re focusing on another aspect of God’s character – God’s love. There’s nothing in this universe that can compare with God’s love.
Our verses for today begin by telling us the story of Nicodemus and his question about being born again. Which leads into Jesus announcing that God loves us, all of us, even before we loved him. It would be nice if it said that we first loved God. But, truth be told, human beings are not all that good at this love business. We are well meaning, but if there is one lesson from human history, it is that we can hate just as easily as we can love.
It always amazes me, and depresses me to discover how often people have hated in the name of God. Not just in the Christian faith, but in any religion, hating in the name of God has been justified. But a close reading of scripture shows that just can’t be done. In 1st John we read “Whoever does not love, does not know God, because God is love… This is love; not that we loved God, but that God loved us.”
God loved us before we were even capable of loving him in return. Being the first one to express love is always risky. As Jerry Seinfeld once said to his good friend George Costanza after George told his girlfriend he loved her – “That’s a pretty big matza ball hanging out there, my friend.” It’s risky to put your heart out there and hope the other person feels the same way. But God didn’t wait for us to love him. God loved us knowing full well that we would never be able to return his love. God’s love is truly unconditional.
There was once a very compassionate woman named Rene Denfield who adopted a little girl from the foster care system in her city. Three years later, a case worker called and said she had another child Rene might be interested in. He was a toddler, but he’d already suffered a great deal in his short life. The little boy named Tony had bounced from one foster home to another. His rage and his acting out were too much for other families to handle. But the caseworker believed that Rene, who had grown up in an abusive home herself, had the love and toughness to get through to this angry, scared little boy.
As Rene wrote in an article for the New York Times, “When he raged, I told him I loved him. I told him over and over.” Rene reports that it took years before Tony’s rages subsided. But one day, he was in the middle of playing on the floor when he looked up at Rene and said, “You brought me home. I love you too.”(2)
Notice that John 3:16 doesn’t say “For God loved good people who loved God back.” No. For God so loved the world… No limitations, no exclusions, no maybe, no fine print. God loved us first.
Here’s another thing we can take from this well-known verse – how much God loves us. God so loved us that He gave us his most precious gift – His son. It’s easy, relatively, to say I love you, but it’s a much different thing to love into action.
John Robert Fox was an African-American artillery officer who served in the U.S. Army in World War II. In December 1944, he and his unit were assigned to patrol an area of Tuscany in Italy that had been overrun by Nazi soldiers. Fox and a handful of men joined a small troop of Italian soldiers in a small Tuscan village. All the residents of the village had already fled and Fox and his men hid in an abandoned house and reported back to base camp on the movement of Nazi troops through town.
Imagine the surprise at base camp when Fox radioed in a set of bombing coordinates ordered them to begin shelling a certain neighborhood in the village. Here’s why they were surprised: the coordinates were very close to where Fox and his men were hiding. The gunner who received the order deliberately changed the coordinates slightly to protect the American soldiers.
A second time, Fox radioed in and ordered the gunner to bomb the coordinates he had sent. The gunner argued with Fox – it was too close to his hiding place, he was putting himself and his men in danger.
Fox radioed back a third time. He made it clear that he knew what he was doing. The house they were hiding in was surrounded by Nazis. Fox’s last words were, “Fire it. There’s more of them than there are of us.” Fox and his men were laying down their lives to defeat Nazi troops. The gunner ordered the bombing strike. More than 100 Nazi soldiers were killed, along with Fox and his men. Their sacrifice gave the American troops time to re-group and launch a successful counterattack, The Allied troops regained the village and drove out the Nazi forces. In 1997, John Robert Fox was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his “gallant and courageous actions, at the supreme sacrifice of his own life.”(3)
It’s easy to say,”I love you,”- it’s another thing to put love into action.
Alfred Vanderbilt was the great grandson of billionaire businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt. There was nothing praiseworthy about how Alfred lived his life. He used his massive inheritance to invest in real estate and horses, and to throw lavish parties. But in 1915, Alfred Vanderbilt did something we remember him by.
In 1915, he set sail on the British ocean liner the Luisitania heading toward London. At the time, Europe was embroiled in World War 1, but nobody thought that enemy troops would attack a civilian ship. Sadly, they were wrong. German U-boats attacked the Luisitania as it sailed off the coast of Ireland.
As a First Class passenger, Vanderbilt was guaranteed a lifejacket and a seat on one of the first lifeboats leaving the ship. However, Alfred Vanderbilt refused his rights. He gave away his life jacket and his seat on the lifeboat. As the ship slowly sank, Vanderbilt focused on getting as many children into the lifeboats as possible. He died saving others. A New York Times journalist described his last moments as “gallantry which no words of mine can describe.”(4)
How do you describe a love that is unearned, undeserved, given freely and generously and sacrificially for the sake of everyone, whether they can ever return that love or not? That’s God’s love. God had a million reasons to condemn the world. But God didn’t do that. God saved the world by giving the greatest gift that could be given. And God made us a promise that whoever believes in God’s Son, Jesus Christ, will not perish but have eternal life.
And for that, May God be praised. Amen.
1. Dynamic Preaching, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, p56.
2. Ibid… p58.
3. Ibid… p59.
4. Ibid… p59-60.
