Have you ever seen John 3:16 on a sign in a crowd?

Have you ever seen John 3:16 on a sign in a crowd?

In the seventies and eighties, a man named Rollen F. Stewart, also known as “Rockin’ Rollen” or “the Rainbow Man,” would be seen attending various major televised sporting events wearing a huge rainbow-colored "afro" wig, holding up giant placards with the letters and numbers, John 3:16. Rollen didn’t go to sporting events because he liked sports, he just found a good cause to rally for... and once he got a taste of his first "fifteen minutes of fame," he was hooked.

After a while of being seen on TV, the whole phenomena of Rollen going to every major televised game to hold up his sign became a kind of “where’s Waldo” diversion for the crowd. People would find themselves scanning every stadium to see if the rainbow headed man with the sign was there, and sure enough, here he was holding up his sign," John 3:16." However, Rollen’s celebrity ended when team owners and camera people thwarted his obsession, thinking him to be a nut and a pest. When he was no longer making regular appearances on TV due to their clever intervention of avoiding him on camera, Rollen took up a new hobby, that of appearing on the evening news.

In no time at all he began making news headlines because Rollen was arrested for bombing churches in California with stink bombs during services, which he justified, saying that it was intended to get them free publicity for God on the evening news. He got lots of publicity as he was carted off to jail, and he paid a few fines for disrupting the peace, but it wasn't enough for Rollen. He wanted to be more famous than that and he was concerned about the end of the world, so, in Sept. 1992, Rollen was charged with 3 counts of kidnapping.

After taking hostages, Rollen locked himself in a hotel room with a gun, and was quickly surrounded by police at which time Rollen demanded a press conference saying he wanted to warn people about the end of the world. Needless to say, he never got his press conference, and not only that, the police knocked down the door, rescued the hostages and took Rollen away to jail where he is considered a very sick and dangerous man.

Rollen did a lot of things that got him noticed, unfortunately they were all either foolish or illegal things. Not only that, he did them for the wrong reasons. Worse of all, he justified the things he did believing (falsely) that he was doing something great "for God." There is nothing farther from the truth. There is no glory for suffering for doing wrong....

Perhaps in prison, Rollen wil have learned some essentials of the Christian faith, like wisdom, humility and love for his fellow man. Rollen was zealous, and he was religious, and he may even have thought he was doing good things, but the truth is that he wasn't and he has had to suffer for it. He knows the importance of coming to faith in Jesus Christ, but somewhere along the way, Rollen was deceived