From: Pastor Bill Mugnolo HARP Pastoral Advisor
“A Word for this Week” 3/13-19/2017: “John 3:16: There Is So Much More to It!”
Out of all the 31,102 verses that make up the Holy Bible there is one that seems to pop up just about everywhere. When you to go into a hotel room and pick up the Gideon’s Bible out of the drawer you will find this verse, John 3:16, posted in the front in twenty-seven different languages. You see it on signs at sporting events, on ads in the Yellow Pages, on bumper stickers, and even on tattoos.
Truly, if any words in the Bible run the risk of turning into a cliché it would be that verse, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” But there’s so much more to John 3:16. So let’s “read it again for the first time” as I will now post this verse that Jesus once spoke to Nicodemus at night in its full extended meaning as translated out of the original Greek of the New Testament. So, here goes …
“For God indeed, in the deepest, self-sacrificial way, so loved the world in all
the ungodly mess that it had become that He gave to us to care for our
interests His one and only, one of a kind Son of whom there is no other that
whoever—each and every one—who is persuaded to confidently place their
trust in Him should not be cut off entirely and be fully destroyed, but have
the absolute fullness of life, one that is happy and full of every kind of
blessing, one that is unending.”
That is quite a bit to write and certainly a mouthful to say! It doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker and it would take up to an entire page in each of those twenty-seven languages to fit it into the Gideon’s Bible. It would also cover a full body tattoo’s worth of space! Yes, it is a mouthful! But may it become even more for you a “heart-full”—for there is so much more to John 3:16 and that “so much more” is none other than Jesus, the Christ Himself, who was given—for you!
