I’m willing to bet that almost all of you who read this could quote John 3:16 by heart, or at least get pretty darn close. But far fewer of us have taken the time to memorize or think deeply about the whole thought that John 3:16 is a small part of. Here’s the section in its entirety:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”
John 3:16-21(ESV)
A couple weeks ago the DNA group I’m in spent most of our time together discussing these verses, and our discussion brought to light how off base my understanding of the message of John 3:16-21 was for most of my life.
I’ve always read John 3:19-21 to read something like, “Evil people stay in the dark because they love the darkness want to keep doing bad things. Good people come into the light and do good things that prove that they are God’s people.” Not quite a works-based Gospel, but also not quite what John is saying here.
The rest of John’s Gospel and the whole of scripture make it clear that, as the Apostle Paul states in Romans 3:10-12, quoting from Psalm 14, “None is righteous, no, not one”. John himself has just stated, “People loved darkness rather than light.” That’s all people, not just some particularly wicked segment. There’s not a category of good people who choose to come into the light and do good things and they a category of bad people who stay in the dark.
So what then does John mean in these verses? I want to propose that his words here are simultaneously far more freeing and beautiful and terrifying than my long-set reading based on doing the right things could ever be.
Whoever lives by the truth
The ESV renders the first portion of verse 21 as “whoever does what is true comes to the light.” The NIV puts it as, “whoever lives by the truth” and the Message as, “But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light.” People who live by the truth come into the light. So what does it mean to do what is true or live in the truth in a fallen, broken, sinful world? It certainly can’t mean living a morally perfect, good life. If it did, why would John have taken pains to make it clear that Jesus came out of love, not to condemn but to save?
Here’s the terrible, beautiful reality: living by the truth means being utterly open and honest about who we are in the sight of God. It means setting aside our pathetic attempts at covering our sin with “righteous” religious deeds and our impossible striving to hide what is true about us in the dark and instead come into light and let God see us for who we really are.
God’s goal for us isn’t perfection – Jesus took care of that piece. Instead his desire is that we believe in the Son, know Him and be known by Him. Living by the truth and doing what is true is about taking down any barriers and setting aside any hiding, coming openly before Jesus and the Father with brutal honesty.
Comes into the light
Rather than hiding the things we hate most about ourselves behind the fig leaves of religious performance or hiding, we come into the light of God’s presence and discover, like Isaiah and the angel with the burning coal, that the terror of God’s holiness reveals our sin and simultaneously offers cleansing rather than condemnation. After all, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
In the sight of God
My friends, we need to shift our goal out of the moralistic mode of “I need to do the right things and keep all God’s rules” to instead being that “it may be seen plainly that what [we] have done has been done in the sight of God.” For a thing to be done in the sight of God doesn’t mean moral perfection, though a consciousness of God’s gaze will certainly cultivate moral improvement, instead it means that all that we do and are is open to the Lord of all.
Let me be clear here. I am in no way stating that we do away with intentionally obeying God’s commands. Instead, as Luther so adamantly insists in his Treatise on the Liberty of the Christian,
“to a Christian man his faith suffices for everything, and that he has no need of works for justification. But if he has no need of works, neither has he need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, he is certainly free from the law, and the saying is true, “The law is not made for a righteous man” (1 Tim. i. 9). This is that Christian liberty, our faith, the effect of which is, not that we should be careless or lead a bad life, but that no one should need the law or works for justification and salvation.
Luther, Martin. The Collected Works of Martin Luther: Theological Writings, Sermons & Hymns: The Ninety-five Theses, The Bondage of the Will, The Catechism. Kindle Edition
Faith suffices for everything. Simply come into the sight of God in the faith that the work of the Son is enough. The amazing thing is that when we live in the sight of God we aren’t condemned. God so loved the world that he sent Jesus to make it possible that we can be seen, known, and deeply loved, even in the midst of our failure to do what is good and right. To paraphrase a statement I heard somewhere, our brokenness is a bridge to connection with the one who created us and loved us even when we rejected him.
That’s a radical thought. The Christian religious system has been largely (if unintentionally) built in such a way that it pushes us to hide our failures and sins out of fear of condemnation. That’s the opposite of what God intended for the followers of his Son. In Jesus all condemnation was done away with. God so loved the world that he determined to send Jesus so that we could live in the light, in the sight of God without condemnation and shame regardless of what we’ve done, haven’t done, or will do.
Breathe deep of this incredible freedom. Listen to the words of John. Quit your trying to impress God by how hard you work at keeping his rules. Quit evaluating yourself according to the law (see 1 Corinthians 4:3 and the entire book of Galatians if that statement seems sketchy to you). Stop running on the performance treadmill. Step out of the dark and into the light of God’s sight. Take the risk of revealing your entire self – shit and all – to Him. When you do you’ll be amazed at the ways you experience the reality that “God so loved”.
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