In this message, Pastor Eric explores one of the most famous of all biblical passages—John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world…”)—and the verses surrounding it. This message brings together the new understandings explored in previous messages of this series—a reframing of what it means to “believe” and to be “saved”—in order to explore how Jesus speaks about eternity life. Importantly, deconstructing these words at the heart of our faith in order to see them anew as if for the first time allows us to see that when Jesus speaks of “eternal life” in passages like this, he isn’t speaking about believing ideas about him in order to go to “heaven” when we die. Rather, he speaks about a quality of life, a depth of life, that God desires for us to experience in this life. As Jesus says in Luke 17, “the Kingdom of God is in your midst/within you.” It’s just that most of us miss it most of the time because we live life on autopilot, live life on the surface.
Are you tired of living life on the surface? Do you ever think: “there’s got to be more to life?” These senses are inclinations of what Jesus is speaking about—that there is more. This “more”—what one scholar calls “eternity life”—doesn’t mean more material wealth; it might, in fact, mean the opposite; but it does mean a deeper sense of purpose and greater meaning and connection in life. And, in the end, isn’t that what we all really want?
The challenge for all of us is, as Jesus says over and over, to have “eyes to see” this eternity life, this depth of life, that is all around us, if only we opened ourselves to it. The challenge is to see it, and then to choose it. Herein lies the greatest challenge of life.
