John 3:16 is preached, studied, and cited more often than any other biblical passage, yet it never becomes yesterday’s news, never loses its majesty or its freshness, never loses one microvolt of emotional power. It is so inexhaustible that over a period of many years, one obsessive preacher compiled from it more than six hundred preaching outlines. Talk about a month of Sundays! That’s enough sermons to keep a church fed for almost twelve years.

It’s a truism among pastors that the young ones preach John 3:16 again and again because it’s so simple, so preachable. Yet the older ones hesitate to preach it because they’ve come to see the profundity and mystery of the verse, and they feel inadequate to do it justice. G. Campbell Morgan was one of the giants of preaching, yet he placed himself in the second category. He said, “There is a text that I have never attempted to preach on, though I have gone around it and around it—John 3:16. It is too big. When I have read it, there is nothing else to say. If we only knew how to read it, so as to produce a sense of it in the ears of people, there would be nothing to preach about.”3

I had been preaching fifteen years before I ever delivered one message from John 3:16. When I considered preaching it, I would read those words again and think, What is left to say? It’s simple; everybody knows it by heart. What could I possibly add?

In time, however, I changed my mind. I realized that it wasn’t my job to exclude from my preaching anything God had communicated in His Word, especially not this crucially important verse. It wasn’t my job to decide what people knew so well they no longer needed to hear. Nor was it my job to come to the pulpit loaded with theological zingers to delight and astound. I was just the messenger, and God had entrusted to me the greatest message of all time. It was not about me or what I could bring—it was about God and what He had done; it was about the most urgent message humanity could ever hear. How could I possibly justify failing to deliver it?

My entire mission in life is to say to the world, “God loves you, and here’s how much. Now what will you do about it?” It’s your job, too; and this is the verse that, more than any other, lays out what we have to say.

How Did John 3:16 Come to Be?