I heard about a preacher who studied John 3:16 for all of his whole ministry and intensely studied it so that when he was about to retire, he had produced 600 unique outlines on John 3:16. No verse of scripture has been explained as much as John 3:16. And there is no verse of scripture that defies explanation as does that verse.
I’ve noticed that a lot of times when young men begin to start preaching, they grab hold of John 3:16 and they preach it a lot. But if you’ve been preaching for very long, you discover that’s not what you do. G. Campbell Morgan said that this was a verse of scripture he had never attempted to preach on in all the years of his great preaching.
He said, “I’ve gone around it and around it, but it has always been too big for me to tackle. When I read it, there’s nothing else to say. If we only knew how to read it, we would produce a sense in the ears of our people so that there would be nothing left to preach about. And I need to confess that I think it was about at the 15-year mark when I started preaching.
I preached on John 3:16 for the first time. I remember thinking, what in the world would I say about this verse? I mean, it’s so simple and everybody knows it by heart. What am I going to add to this truth? And then it was almost as if God was reminding me that my job is not to come up with something great and cute and creative.
But my job is to stand up and repeat the simple truth once again so that everyone hears it and understands it. Whenever you hear the story of God’s love, it strikes a resounding note in your heart because there’s something that’s in each of us. It’s the fact that we’ve been created in the image of God. There’s something that’s in each of us that somehow maybe it’s in the distant recesses of our mind, but we know that God loves us.
