Tim Tebow famously placed the reference on his eye black (the tape strip beneath a football player’s eyes) before a national championship game in college, and the broadcasters frequently identified it as his favorite verse. Immediately afterward, Google received more than ninety million hits from people looking up John 3:16. And that was only the beginning. Three years later, after leading the Denver Broncos to a rousing play-off victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, someone noticed he had thrown for precisely 316 yards. The Associated Press reported that he also averaged 31.6 yards per completion. Those who didn’t “get it” again went to the Internet, and by Monday afternoon, John 3:16 was once more the most searched item on the Internet.2

It’s often been said that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Some may think that finding significance in a quarterback’s passing yardage borders on superstition, but it may show us that God will use almost any means to tell us how deeply He loves us. When was the last time any of our efforts succeeded in getting ninety million people to hurry to the Internet and look up the Gospel?

Throughout history, millions of words have been written about John 3:16. Yet none of them are necessary to grasp the meaning of the verse. God communicated the heart and meaning of the Gospel—the most profound, far-reaching message of all time—in only twenty-five simple words of English text. When translated into any language, this verse is supremely easy to understand.

All we need in life is packed into those twenty-five words. Your Bible is the essential library of life, and every verse is profitable for wise living. But if worse came to worst, and we could retain only one of its 31,103 verses, this would be the one we could not let slip from our grasp.

When I was growing up, I heard a sermon on John 3:16 that really grabbed hold of me. The evangelist pointed out that not only was the entire Gospel contained in the message of the verse, but the word gospel was embedded in the verse itself.

For God so loved the world

that He gave His Only

begotten Son, that whoever believes

in Him should not Perish

but have Everlasting

Life.

How well I remember grabbing my pen and scratching that formula beneath the words in my Bible so I would never forget how thoroughly and essentially John 3:16 is the Gospel. This simple little device is just one more aid, helping us to see this sentence for what it is—a statement of the Gospel so simple that a child can understand it and so profound that a scholar could never fathom its depths. It needs to be inscribed permanently on every heart.