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By Rev. Eugene Gyakari
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
— John 3:16
This is perhaps the most quoted verse in all of Scripture, recited from memory by children in Sunday school and inscribed on banners at sporting events. But familiarity has a way of dulling the edge of what is genuinely astonishing. Most people who can quote John 3:16 have never fully paused to be undone by it.
Why would God go to that extent?
Sit with that question honestly. The Creator of the universe — self-sufficient, lacking nothing, dependent on no one — looked at a humanity that had rejected Him, defied Him, and repeatedly chosen everything over Him, and chose to love them anyway. Not with words. Not with a declaration from a safe distance. But with His Son. With a sacrifice so complete and so costly that there is no human category adequate to contain it. What kind of love compels a Father to give His only Son for people who did not want Him? What kind of love absorbs the full weight of every human sin so that the guilty might go entirely free?
I became a better Christian the day I stopped reciting John 3:16 and started meditating on it. When the magnitude of what God chose to do for me settled into my understanding — not as theological data but as personal, particular, costly love — it did not merely inform me. It transformed me. It changed the questions I asked about love. No longer only “how much do I feel for someone?” but “how far am I willing to go for them?” Those are very different questions, and the second one is far more demanding.
None of us will be called to die physically for another the way Christ died for us. But the cross establishes a principle of love that reshapes everything: genuine love is not primarily a feeling that rises and falls with circumstances. It is a decision — a costly, sustained, self-giving commitment to the good of another person that persists precisely when it is most difficult to sustain.
The Bible is, at its heart, a love story. From the first garden to the final wedding feast of Revelation, it traces the relentless pursuit of a God who refuses to abandon the people He created and loves. Christianity is not a religion of rules — it is the practical, lived-out demonstration of that love story by an ever-growing community of people who have been loved into loving.
LOVE PROVEN IN THE VALLEY
I knew I loved my wife from the early days of our relationship. But I became deeply convinced of the depth and sincerity of that love when I stood with her in her lowest moments — when the seasons were not bright, when there was no external reward for staying close, when presence itself was the only gift I had to offer. It is relatively easy to love someone when they are well, successful, and pleasant to be around. The true test of love is not what you feel at the peak but what you choose in the valley.
This is what relationship actually means. Not proximity. Not convenience. Not the warmth of shared good times. Relationship, in its truest form, is the willingness to remain — to enter another person’s darkness without guarantee of quick resolution, to carry someone’s weight when they cannot carry their own, to be present in the moments that are neither glamorous nor comfortable, simply because the person matters more than the circumstance.
The Apostle Paul prays for this kind of love in one of the most breathtaking passages in the New Testament:
”…that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
— Ephesians 3:18-19
The love of Christ is not a concept to be understood — it surpasses understanding. It is a reality to be experienced, in four directions simultaneously: wide enough to embrace every human being regardless of their history; long enough to span eternity; high enough to lift the lowest soul to the heights of God’s own presence; and deep enough to reach into the darkest pit and pull a person out. This is the love that was demonstrated at the cross, and it is the love that believers are called not merely to admire but to embody — toward one another, and toward a watching world.
THE INVITATION
People value things over the people who give them. They remember the gift and forget the giver. They celebrate the service and overlook the servant. In doing so, they miss the most precious dimension of every human transaction — the relationship behind it.
A car is a wonderful gift. But it depreciates. It breaks down. It can be replaced. The person who loved you enough to give it to you — the relationship that made the gift meaningful in the first place — that is irreplaceable. And yet we spend our lives accumulating the cars and neglecting the people, then wondering in our quieter moments why all the things we have gathered feel strangely empty.
God is calling us back to the original order — back to the primacy of relationship, back to the love that gives rather than takes, that stays rather than leaves, that sees the person behind the need rather than the transaction behind the interaction.
The most powerful demonstration any believer can offer to a self-absorbed world is not a better argument or a more impressive platform. It is love that costs something — love that shows up in the valley, that honours the people who held us when we could not hold ourselves, that looks at another human being and says, as God said in John 3:16, I choose you, and I will prove it.
PRAYER
Father, forgive me for the times I have valued what I could receive over the people You placed around me to love. Teach me to love the way You love — not with words only, but with presence, with sacrifice, and with the willingness to remain. Open my eyes to the relationships I have taken for granted and give me grace to honour them before it is too late. Let the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge become the defining characteristic of my life. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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