The Mission: The Father’s Love
Notes prepared by: Paul Barker
John 3:16
For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
Summary
Mission originates in God's heart, where he actively works to reconcile and restore creation to himself. This reflects God's character as a sending God, as seen in the sending of the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Spirit to fulfill his redemptive plan.
Key Idea
God’s love for the world is the driving force of missions.
This single verse captures the heart of the gospel and lays the groundwork for the church’s missionary impulse.
The Greatest Love
The Greatest Gift
The Greatest Invitation
The Greatest Escape
The Greatest Destiny
Intro
John 3:16 was a cornerstone of numerous mission movements. For example:
John R. Mott, the most influential leader of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), frequently quoted or alluded to John 3:16 in his writings and speeches.
In his classic work The Evangelization of the World in This Generation (1900), Mott builds his appeal on the universal love of God:
“God so loved the world — not merely a part of it or certain races or favored classes, but the world.”
This emphasis echoed in countless SVM publications, student addresses, and training materials, where John 3:16 was treated not merely as an evangelistic slogan but as a theological foundation for the global missionary mandate.
Reports from SVM conferences show how John 3:16 was often highlighted in sermons, Bible studies, and calls for commitment.
For example, the 1891 Cleveland convention and the 1898 Detroit convention featured keynote messages that framed God’s sending love (John 3:16) as the basis for students’ sacrificial commitment to missions.
In many testimonies preserved in The Student Volunteer magazine, students wrote that they were stirred to surrender their lives to missions after hearing John 3:16 expounded as a personal calling to reflect God’s love to the unreached.
William Carey (1761–1834), known as the “father of modern missions,” was profoundly shaped by John 3:16’s universal scope.
In his influential 1792 booklet, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, Carey confronts the false belief that the Great Commission was only for the apostles.
He argues instead that because God so loved the world, every Christian is obligated to care about the salvation of every person, regardless of nation or culture.
He wrote: “If the whole of the human race are equally objects of the divine regard, and under the same obligation to obey the divine commands, are they not all equally bound to love God with all their hearts and to promote his glory?”
The London Missionary Society (LMS), founded just a few years after Carey’s pamphlet, explicitly built its missionary philosophy on the universality of God’s love.
In their founding documents and early appeals, John 3:16 was repeatedly cited as the warrant and fuel for cross-cultural missions.
In an 1804 LMS report, they wrote: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son. . . . That world still lies in darkness, and how shall they believe on Him of whom they have not heard?”
This connection made John 3:16 the heartbeat behind their missions to the Pacific Islands, Africa, and Asia.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) sent and supported missionaries like Adoniram and Ann Judson.
ABCFM’s commissioning sermons and fundraising materials were saturated with John 3:16.
For example, in Samuel Worcester’s 1811 sermon The Kingdom of Christ, preached before the ABCFM, he argued: “The love of God for the world . . . demands the labors and the sacrifices of those who know Him, that those who know Him not may believe and live.”
This language, anchored in John 3:16, became a consistent feature in missionary appeals throughout the 19th century.
The Greatest Love
“God so loved the world . . .”
God’s love is not limited to one nation or people; it embraces all humanity.
That global love fuels the church’s mission.
If God’s love reaches everyone, then our mission must aim to reach everyone.
John insists that the Son’s mission was the consequence of God’s love.
The Greek construction behind “so loved that he gave his one and only Son” emphasizes the intensity of the love.
The words “his one and only Son” stress the greatness of the gift.
The Father gave his best, his unique, and beloved Son.
It is atypical for John to speak of God’s love for the world.
This makes the truth stand out as even more wonderful.
Jews knew that God loved the children of Israel; here God’s love is not restricted by race.
Even so, God’s love is to be admired not because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.
The world is so wicked that John elsewhere forbids Christians to love it or anything in it (1 John 2:15–17).
Christians are not to love the world with the selfish love of participation; God loves the world with the selfless, costly love of redemption. 5
The Greatest Gift
“. . . that he gave his only Son . . .”
God’s love produced the action of giving Jesus.
God moved toward us before we moved toward him.
God “gave” his Son when he sent Jesus into the world.
This pattern—God sending—becomes the model for the church’s mission.
Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus explicitly ties this to the missionary calling: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21).
God’s sending of Jesus becomes the model for the church’s mission.
The word “gave” points us to both Jesus’ birth and his death—he was sent to die.
Love always costs, and God paid the highest price.
His mission is rooted in giving, not in taking.
“For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
The love of God is a wonderful thing, especially when we see it set on a lost, ruined, guilty world.
What was there in the world that God should love it?
There was nothing lovable in it.
No fragrant flower grew in that arid desert.
Enmity to him, hatred to his truth, disregard of his law, rebellion against his commandments—those were the thorns and briars that covered the wasteland, but no desirable thing blossomed there.
Where did this love come from?
Not from anything outside of God himself.
God’s love springs from himself.
He loves because it is his nature to do so.
“God is love” (1Jn 4:8). Nothing on the face of the earth could have merited his love, though there was much to merit his displeasure. This stream of love flows from its own secret source in the eternal deity, and it owes nothing to any earthborn rain or stream; it springs from beneath the everlasting throne and fills itself full from the springs of the infinite.” -Charles Spurgeon 6
The takeaway?
God’s love isn’t just wide—it’s deep and sacrificial. And that love fuels our mission.
The Greatest Invitation
“. . . that whoever believes in him . . .”
The invitation is open to “whoever believes.”
This underlines the inclusive scope of the gospel message—it is not restricted by race, social status, or background.
The church’s mission is to extend this invitation as widely as possible.
The Greatest Escape
“. . . should not perish . . .”
Missions exist because people are perishing without Christ.
**The gospel is not just about improving lives but about rescuing people from perishing and bringing them into eternal life with God.
Without missions, many will never hear of the One who saves.
Although many people think primarily of John’s Gospel in terms of the bright side of love, it has a dark side that is perhaps more threatening to the unbeliever than almost any other document in the New Testament except the Apocalypse.
To overlook the dark side in John is to miss the full message of the Gospel.
God’s judging (krinetai) is a negative theme that is also foundational to this Gospel and is obvious in these verses.
The purpose of Jesus’ mission was life, not condemnation.
He came to save, not judge.
John Calvin said in his commentary on Isaiah 28:21, where the prophet speaks of the Lord’s judgment as “his strange work” (“For the Lord will rise up as on Mount Perazim . . . to do his deed — strange is his deed! and to work his work — alien is his work!”).
Calvin writes: “The work of destruction is a strange work to God; it is more natural to Him to spare than to punish.”
Judgment is something he does only when necessary, in holiness and justice.
The Greatest Destiny
“. . . but have eternal life.”
Eternal life begins now and culminates in the age to come.
If we share God’s heart, we will share his mission.
Conclusion
John 3:16 is often called the gospel in a nutshell, but it is also the mission of God in a nutshell.
It gives the why (because God loves), the who (the world), the how (by sending), and the goal (eternal life).
**Without understanding this connection, Christian missions can drift into mere humanitarianism or cultural expansion.
But rooted in John 3:16, missions stay centered on proclaiming God’s love through Christ for the world’ s salvation.
Do you need Christ’s salvation today?