Seeing the World

     Just about everyone knows John 3:16.  And, rightfully, we focus often on the phrase "whosoever believes on Him."  But to me the most amazing phrase in that oft quoted verse is "For God so loved the world."  What kind of world was it that God looked at and loved?  It was a world filled with men who hated other men.  It was a world filled with corruption and violence.  It was a world where kings would murder innocent children if they thought it would secure their throne.  It was a world where religious conservatives had substituted their own ideas for God's truth and had even twisted God's Word in order to fulfill their own lusts and desires.  It was a world filled with demonic activity.  It was a world filled with blindness, sickness--some of them incurable--disappointment, sorrow, and death.  It was a world filled with religious liberals who denied a God of miracles and a resurrection.  It was a world filled with people just like me:  stubborn, prideful, lonely, manipulative, self-centered, hostile to what God wanted to do with them and for them, apathetic, insensitive to and inconvenienced by the hurts of others around them--and the list goes on.
     And God looked at that rebellious, sin-marred, condemned and dying world and felt--love.  His heart was filled with unconditional love for that world.  And for the people in it just like me.  And what did He do?  He said,

     "I'm going to go and live in that world with all its ignorance, obstinacy, religious coldness, broken-heartedness, sorrow, and sin.  I'm going to clothe myself in humanity and experience that life and love those who are struggling in it--feel their sorrow, their pain, their disappointment, their happiness, their joy, and be an object of their hatred and their misunderstanding.  I know that once I take on mortality that the only way back to immortality is through the door of death as a payment for the sin that mars that world.  But I will go.  I must go.  I love that world so much.  And with my death I can give them life eternal, life eternal free of all the consequences of sin that so devastates that world I love."

     Next time you look at the world and see it as it is--and feel the sorrow that God felt, remember that God has called you to respond as He responded--"For God so loved the world that He gave . . ."  May the Spirit of God enable us to love the world and its people as He did--walking among them, touched by their joys and sorrows, anxious for any opportunity to serve them, saturating them with God's love.
"Till death do us part."