THE MISSION OF JESUS CHRIST
John
3:16 For
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes
in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
This must be the most quoted
and memorized verse in all of the New Testament. The mission of Jesus Christ,
the nature of God, the need of man and the avenue to life are summed up here. In
this verse we the intent and purpose of John’s
Gospel.
Christ’s mission is to bring
about the will of the Father. His mission is not to amaze us with miracles,
meet our material needs or cure us of all diseases. No, his mission is to bring
into the world a salvation for mankind’s greatest problem, sin. His short life
is the offering of a final sacrifice or payment for the penalty of our sins.
Once completed, he would accomplish the goal set by the father and distribute
that accomplishment to people throughout the world and throughout every
generation.
God is love. Over the
centuries people have rejected the God of the Bible because of the history of
war and slaughter found in the Old Testament. They have read limited portions
of Scripture and have drawn their own conclusions about God. Looking at the
suffering and evil in the world they have deduced that a God who would allow
such suffering was not worthy of their worship or obedience. But God gave of
himself in order that the evil and sin within a person could be forgiven and
that the everlasting life we each will share would be one with him and not one
in hell.
Many a mistake a man makes.
Sin is the root of all our struggles in life. It causes us to do the things we
do not want to do and prohibits us from doing the things we should do. What a
woeful state we find ourselves in. We cannot educate ourselves out of sin. We
cannot obey our way around sin. We cannot talk our way into goodness. The bottom
line, we are slaves to sin.
