But John 3:16 does not hand us a feeling. It hands us a cross. The verb is concrete. Costly. Final. This is not the love of greeting cards.

Worship can quietly shift from being something we offer to God to something we perform for ourselves or others. Excellence is not the problem. The problem is when the experience becomes the goal — when the feeling becomes the measure of truth. When that happens, we keep the glow, but lose the weight.

The world keeps chanting, “You are what you achieve.” Jesus breaks through with a better word: “Come to me, and I will give you rest.”