Verse 16 of John chapter 3 is so famous that we can easily forget the verse which follows. But verse 17 underlines for many sceptical about the Christian faith what God is really like. 

The best-known verse in the Bible includes, of course, a word that is much contested and which many do not wish to consider. The flipside to eternal life is of course to perish. 

When it comes to this famous verse, perhaps the major misunderstanding comes with those two words ‘eternal life’. These have typically been understood to be life after death, but in the Gospel of John it refers to the life of God experienced in the here and now which we enter into through faith in Jesus, and this is a life that will go beyond the grave .

Throughout the 1980s, Rollen Stewart travelled 60,000 miles a year as a full-time spectator, living out of his car, and using TV’s obsession with sport to promote his faith. In doing so, he made John 3:16 a fixture of professional sporting events. 

What is the very first spiritual gift mentioned in the Bible? We might think prophecy or teaching or maybe performing miracles? You may not think of Bezalel, who is given the gift of craftsmanship to build the tabernacle! 

There is a church in Newport, Isle of Wight which was built by the direction of a man who read these verses and took them to heart. He had just finished work on his own home and came across these verses in Haggai and realised his church needed updating. 

Devotion is an action. It requires movement towards its object. Where once the Temple stood in Jerusalem and housed the presence of God, today we are ourselves each a temple of God’s presence (1 Cor. 6:19–20). The temple now moves with us for we are God’s tabernacle. 

Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ People are too materialistic to recognise something’s true value.* Writing at the height of ‘The Age of Materialism’, Wilde challenged the belief that nothing can exist beyond matter, something tangible rather than spiritual. 

Devotion means both to worship and to serve. Moses presents God’s demand to Pharoah that the Israelites be permitted to go to worship God. Pharoah refuses but neither he nor Moses and the Israelites are aware of the consequences. 

What is God’s will? A question that can easily be misunderstood. For example, ‘Deus vult’ (‘God wills it’) was first chanted during the First Crusade in 1096 as a rallying cry, but on reflection the Crusades do not present a positive expression of God’s will.* Clearly the entire Bible sets out what pleases God, addressing both unseen attitudes and visible actions.