Immeasurable love
Immeasurable Love
Spurgeon walks through the most quoted verse in the Bible word by word and plants himself on the smallest one: the so that the text itself leaves unmeasured, because it cannot be measured.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
This passage also appears in bible verses about god's love.
- Passage
- John 3:16
- Preached
- 7 June 1885
- Place
- Metropolitan Tabernacle, London
- Reference
- Sermon 1850
It is the verse everyone knows, which is exactly why almost nobody hears it. Spurgeon treats it as if it were new: he takes it apart and gives each piece the time that familiarity has taken away.
His opening observation is the best in the sermon: if God's love could be measured, the verse would give the figure. Instead it says so, and Spurgeon holds that even inspiration declined to compute it and left that small word open, for each reader to fill by looking.
The gift
He did not give something: he gave his Son, and Spurgeon loads the phrase with everything that included. Not only the cross at the end, but the exile among men, the carpenter's bench, the hunger, the mockery. The gave is not a moment but a whole history.
He recalls Abraham ready to give up Isaac, and marks the difference: Abraham's hand was stopped. The Father's was not.
The whosoever
Here is the verse's audacity. The word sets no entry conditions: Spurgeon walks it through the cases his hearers had written off, the condemned man, the blasphemer, the one at the edge of death, and finds nobody out of reach if he believes.
His compass is exact and without a trick: every unbeliever is excluded, every believer is included. The line exists, but neither the past nor the size of the sin draws it.
And the faith required can be minimal. His line is one that stays: though it be so little that he must put on his spectacles to see it, Christ will see it and reward it.
Should not perish
The negative half of the promise: the believer does not perish. Spurgeon reads it as real preservation, not a provisional pardon. A life joined to Christ cannot be torn away, because undoing that work would take the same power that did it, and that power will not turn against its own.
Everlasting life
And the positive half. Everlasting does not just mean it lasts: it means it shares in the life of God, so that as long as there is a God the believer will not merely exist, but live.
Spurgeon closes with his own case: when he first believed, in a little chapel, he did not yet know what he had just received. The definition he gives it years later is the most quoted line of the sermon: the only religion that will save you is the one you cannot leave, because it possesses you.
In his own words
“Even inspiration could not compute its measure, and therefore the Holy Spirit gave us that great little word SO.”
“The only religion which will save you is one that you cannot leave, because it possesses you, and will not leave you.”
“Though his faith be so little that I must needs put on my spectacles to see it, yet Christ will see it and reward it.”
This is our summary. The full sermon by Charles Spurgeon is available at The Spurgeon Library. It is in the public domain: you can read all of it for free.
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