A couple days ago, I finished reading Max Lucado’s 3:16: The Numbers of Hope. I’d heard lots of rave reviews about Lucado’s books, but this is the first one I’ve gotten around to reading. The book stood out to me in a display at Barnes & Noble during my Christmas and New Year’s vacation: the reference to the famous verse in the Gospel of John takes up nearly the entire front cover with two nails serving as the two dots of the colon.The book is broken down into twelve chapters, each of them focusing on a portion of John 3:16:

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…”

Lucado does a fantastic job summarizing the scripture in the first few pages of the book:

A twenty-six-word parade of hope: beginning with God, ending with life, and urging us to do the same. Brief enough to write on a napkin or memorize in a moment, yet solid enough to weather two thousand years of storms and questions. If you know nothing about the Bible, start here. If you know everything about the Bible, return here. We all need the reminder. The heart of the human problem is the heart of the human. And God’s treatment is prescribed in John 3:16.

He really hits the nail on the head here. If you’ve just discovered the amazing story that is the Holy Bible, John 3:16 can serve as a CliffsNotes synopsis. On the other hand, if you’ve read the Bible for years, John 3:16 is a great compass that can put us back on track.

There are countless passages in 3:16: The Numbers of Hope that caught my attention and made remember that Christ is truly the center of all things. I’d love to quote all of them here, but that wouldn’t give you much reason to buy the book and read it yourself, would it? I highly recommend this book for everyone with the slightest interest in Jesus and Christianity; it will either put things in a brand new light or reaffirm things you learned long ago but have since fallen out of focus.