If you have your Bibles with you, please open up to the gospel of John, chapter 8. If you are using the red pew Bibles in front, it is page 1059. We have been looking through the gospel of John, the ministry of Jesus, and the miracles of Jesus. We come across this story today in John 8 that may be familiar to some of you. It is the story about the woman who was caught in adultery. While you are looking at the passage, you may want to refer to your Bible, especially if you have the NIV, because it has a little disclaimer at the top of chapter 8. It says the earliest and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53 to 8:11. You may say what does that mean. It pretty much means what it says. The earliest manuscripts do not contain this particular story. Contrary to popular belief, the Bible did not fall out of the sky one day. The Bible traces its roots all the way back to lots of ancient manuscripts. About 5,000 that are relatively close when you compare them, and they can be traced almost all the way back to the original gospel writers, including the apostle John. With archaeological digs, there are new manuscripts that were found. Some were found up to 100 years later and contained this particular passage where John didn’t contain it. Some suggest that maybe this was an insertion later on. They are not saying that the story is not true. What they are saying is the story may not belong in the gospel of John. Some scholars won’t even comment on the whole passage because they believe that maybe it is not part of John. There are scholars and theologians and preachers who enjoy this particular passage because to guys like me it is really a picture of Christ. It sounds so much like something Christ would do and say. To me, particularly it is a great picture of the gospel message. The message that we all have sinned and we have a loving father up there who wants to forgive us. He sent his son and because of that we have the opportunity for eternal life; to begin a new life. Hopefully, you will begin to see that gospel message and hopefully you will begin to see as we go through this a little bit of the connection between the story and the story of the woman in the video. Once again, we are reading from John 8. We will start back at 7:53 because it ties to it. (Scripture read here.)
This story is probably familiar to a lot of you, but it is a pretty straightforward story. Here we have Jesus going into the temple courts where he would appear and he began to teach. Most likely, he was teaching on what we would call the Old Testament, particularly the first five books that they would call The Law. Here is Jesus in the temple courts. The people are starting to surround him to sit at his feet and hear of his teaching. In the middle of this, and this is early in the morning, the scribes, which were basically teachers and Pharisees, they dragged this poor woman in. They bring her out into the middle of this courtyard in front of all these people and onlookers. They make her stand up before them and begin to accuse her. They say “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.” Then they go on to say in the law, their law, the law that Jesus is teaching on, Moses commanded us to stone women such as these. They say to Jesus, now what do you have to say about this? On the surface, it looks like an open and close shut case. The Pharisees think this woman is guilty of something. She probably feels she is guilty of something. Even Jesus may feel that she is guilty of something.
But the story sounds a little bit fishy. Especially when you understand that in the Old Testament there was a law like this, but it required two eyewitnesses to the event, which you wonder where they got the witnesses and how they happened upon this woman. Not only that, this is something you women may appreciate, the man was supposed to be stoned alongside of this woman. He was nowhere to be found. The whole story sounds like a bit of a setup. If we look at John 8:6, they were using this question as a trap in order to have a basis for accusing him. What could they accuse him of? At that particular time, they were under Roman rule, and you couldn’t just drag people out and stone them. They were somewhat of a civil society. If he was to say she is guilty, take her out, and stone her; then they would have dragged him to the Roman authorities and they would have a basis for accusing him. If he says, let her go. I am all about compassion. Then they would drag him back to the Pharisees and say this man is in direct violation of the moral law of Jesus. In a sense he was in a trap. So what does Jesus do? Jesus does whatever he feels like doing. In this particular case, he bent over and started to write on the ground with his finger. There are all sorts of speculation as far as what he was writing on the ground. Some suggest maybe he was writing out the sins of the people around him or the sins of the Pharisees. Some suggest that maybe he was writing out the commandment that spoke of adultery. Do not commit adultery. Some suggest that maybe he was doodling. He was just passing the time away while he was thinking of an answer. The reality is we just don’t know what he was writing. The best thing that I have heard is that it was more of a symbolic gesture. A gesture that would tie Jesus back to the writing of the original commandments. You may recall that the Jewish people, male and female, were taught about the Ten Commandments, and they actually believed that the commandments were written by the finger of God. In fact, if we go back to Exodus 31, we see where the Lord finished speaking to Moses at Mount Sinai. What happened then was he gave him the two tablets of the testimony, which are the Ten Commandments. The tablets of stone inscribed with the finger of God. I think what Jesus is doing is making a subtle reference that he is possibly involved in the authorship of these commandments.
Whatever the case, they are getting irritated and they begin to badger Jesus. They continue to question him. What are you going to do about this situation? Then what we see in verse 7 is that he says out of the blue “If any one of you is without sin, then you be the first to throw a stone at her.” That is why I believe this passage needs to be in the Bible because this is classic Jesus. In one simple comment what he is doing is taking that spotlight off of himself and off the woman and he is turning it onto them. Really what he is focusing on is their heart. This woman’s heart was tainted by sin. She had definitely made some mistakes in life, but their hearts were tainted with outright evil. They were using this poor, wounded, broken, defenseless woman as a way to advance their desire to get Jesus arrested and ultimately killed. They were evil. He points it on their heart. They don’t know what to do. It says “At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time. The older ones went first until only Jesus was left with the woman still standing there.” This is an interesting passage. Why do you think the older ones left first? The older ones were more aware of their sin. Do you ever notice the older you get, the more you are aware of the sins of your youth? You are doing it and having a good old time. You don’t think about it. I guarantee you will be thinking about it when you start hitting 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. You will be thinking back to high school when you shouldn’t be doing that thing, so you better think about it now. That is what is going on there. The older ones know their sin. They know the risk of being exposed and they would lose their jobs and reputations because some of the people in the crowd may have known some of the guys on an intimate level. So they walked away one at a time until they were pretty much all gone. The only one left is Jesus and the woman. There is still probably the crowd that was there for the teaching. This woman is standing there. She was facing her accusers with fear, shame, and embarrassment. Now she is facing Jesus. I suspect she still has possibly a little bit of fear but probably just shame. Just outright shame standing in front of this teacher, this holy man of God. She doesn’t know what he is going to say. So Jesus just turns to her and asks her a question. He says “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She probably got her head low, feeling a little bit of shame and says “No one, sir.” What does Jesus say? “Well then neither do I condemn you. Go and leave your life of sin.” It is so cool this little vignette that took place so long ago. Jesus in some sense is saying I was there with the father. We inscribed the Ten Commandments together with our finger; the finger of God. We are both holy. We are both of the same essence. We alone have the right to condemn people. We also have the right to forgive people. He was speaking of his authority as one who wrote the law, the one to be the judge of the law, but ultimately the one to grant a pardon by the law by the blood of Christ. We know that this is what Jesus would do.
I know you have all been paying attention through this John series, but we went through chapter 3 of John. How many of you know John 3:16? “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believed in him would not perish but have eternal life.” How many of you know John 3:17? That is the one that pertains to this verse. John 3:17 says “For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him.” Jesus was not on a mission to condemn. He was on a mission to save. In this particular vignette he was demonstrating that he was here to save the people. While the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were there ready to heap the stones on this particular woman, Jesus is standing there with a pardon, with a gift. Here you go. I am not going to condemn you. Once again, the lady doesn’t know what to do. She has to decide am I going to receive this free gift. Am I going to believe this guy? Or am I going to look back at my past? What am I going to do? I am so confused that I don’t know what to do. She was standing at a crossroad in her life. When I was reading this, a passage in the book of Exodus came to me. You know the story of Moses and all the Israelites were in slavery to the Egyptians for 400 years. God sent Moses as the deliverer. He is going to deliver the people from the slavery. He is going to convince Pharaoh to let the people go. He let them go. They begin to go and go towards the Promised Land, but they hit that wall of water. They were a little scared. They looked behind them and the guys are chasing them. They start getting panicky. They don’t know what to do. Surrender or what. At this point, Moses as their leader, the deliverer, he stands up and says “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you.” Not tomorrow, not six months from now, not six years, but today. He says now take one last look at those Egyptians behind you. The Egyptians you see today you are never going to see again. They are going to be swallowed up by that water.
That is a picture of what is going on here with this woman. The woman is at a crossroads. The men are gone. The condemners are gone. She is just there with Jesus. Jesus is the new Moses. They are standing together. The way is open for her. The sea has been parted. All she has to do is say I receive it, I accept it, and I am going to stand firm in that deliverance. I am going to see it today. It is up to her at that point. Totally up to her. Jesus did his part. He gave her a pardon. She has to decide if she is going to receive it. More importantly, she has to decide is she going to walk in it. Is she going to follow the command where Jesus says “Go now and leave your life of sin.” She has to decide if she is ready to pick up her bags and go. Actually, she has to decide whether she is ready to unpack her baggage from her past and let it go. She had a lot of baggage in her past. Consequently, she had to die to it. You can’t leave a life unless you die to the life. She had to have a little funeral service. She had to take all the muck and junk of her past, all the regrets, all the bad choices, all the things people did to her, all the things she did to people that got her into this situation, she had to bury it. She had to let it go. We don’t know what got this woman into this situation. We don’t know if she abused as a child or maybe she was abused as an adult or she was in a bad relationship or she had an unhealthy affection for men or she just showed up at a party one night and drank too much like the woman in the video. I hope you are beginning to see the connection between this story and the woman in the video and possibly your own story. They both had baggage, but they had to let go. If they didn’t let go, it would affect their relationship from that point on. They couldn’t selectively take things with them. They had to let it go. She had to let go of the muck and the junk of her past if she was going to live that new life, that new beginning that Jesus was offering to her. She had to decide whether she was going to look back or look forward. She had to decide whether she was going to go back or go forward and begin to walk into that new beginning. The deliverance that was there today and leave her past behind.
Because it is warm in here, I am going to cap off the sermon a little bit. If she is supposed to leave her past, where does that leave us? As I have said before, as we sit and read God’s word, he is hovering over us reading our hearts. He sees the depth. He sees our pain. He sees the muck and the yuck. We can’t hide anything. We don’t like that. He sees it all. He wants to know which person do you align yourself with here. Some of you stand on the side of condemnation where you are throwing the stones. Chris said last week that the people of the church are the meanest people to other people in the church. We are good at heaping condemnation on people. As a side note, there is a place for church discipline. When somebody places themselves into membership, they place themselves in a family. If you have a family member that is doing things they probably shouldn’t be doing, don’t you try to address that because you see the life they are living is not realizing their full potential. It is the same way in the church. It is really a form of discipleship. But discipline without discipleship is spiritual abuse. Discipline and discipleship share the same root. They both go together. They are both a form of teaching with the ultimate purpose of bringing that person back to the image that God created them to be. Bringing them back to a sense of wholeness. Bringing them back to a sense of walking in their true identity, their self-worth. But in order to do that, in order to discipline anybody, we need to have a spirit of humility. In other words, we have to know that we can’t throw the first stone because we deserve to have stones thrown at us too. Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Nobody can stand before the holy God. I remember I was at a men’s retreat several years ago. The speaker was talking about men and their whole tendency to sin. He said you guys all have bad hearts. In fact, if you knew the heart or mind of the guy sitting next to you, you would probably get up and leave the room you would be so disgusted. You laugh but that is true. We have that hardened heart that oftentimes would go into impure thoughts and behavior. We have to approach it with a sense of humility. No one is without sin. With the goal of restoration. Of bringing that person back to the place they were designed to be. We can’t stand on the side of condemnation without discipleship.
Also, there are people who just wallow in self-condemnation. Like the woman in the video, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She felt she had gotten past, but she just wallowed in it to the point that it affected her new marriage. She wallowed in that guilt. She had forgiven the guy, but she couldn’t forgive herself so she is wallowing in the muck and the yuck. There are people like that, and I am talking now really about non-Christians. People who just live in this whole world of self-condemnation. Some of it comes from their family. Some of it comes from the church but a lot of it comes from themselves and really the enemy of their soul. We are talking about Satan here that would just love to keep people down. Would love to keep them down. If there are Christians in the room and you know people like that, you need to remind them that the core gospel message is a message of grace and hope and love and forgiveness. God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him. You need to give that message to people that are living in that. That is a message you cannot get anywhere else in the world. Not through psychology. Not through a counselor. Not through anyone but through Christ. Ultimately, the Triune God are the only ones who can stand as judge and the only one that can forgive. You need to remind the people because that is what the gospel does. The gospel is a gospel of forgiveness. That is the core message of the gospel. That is what makes the gospel so powerful. This lady in the video started to get this. Probably the lady in the story. There is forgiveness out there. I can forgive that person. I can forgive myself too. There is forgiveness.
We know there are Christians out there that also wallow in self-condemnation because even though they have accepted Christ as Lord, they cannot forget their past sins. They just beat themselves up over and over again to the point of really being ineffective. People are saying you are a Christian. I thought Jesus forgave you. They live in it. I think it goes back to a matter of belief. They have not taken it from their head down to their heart. They say I believe in the cross, but they really haven’t. They haven’t believed that the cross and the blood of Christ is sufficient for their sins. Once they believe that, then like the woman in the video, they can begin to walk in victory and not tragedy. That is really what makes the difference. That is how you know someone has accepted it and does believe it because they begin to go forward. They begin to go and leave their life of sin. In other words, they unpack their baggage. They unpack all the muck and yuck of their past, all the stuff they did in high school and in college, and all this stuff and they start slowly unpacking it and leaving it at the cross one piece at a time. They just leave it there. Then they go. They don’t stay. They go and they go forward and begin to live within alignment of their new identity in Christ. They become in Christ. They become vitally connected with Christ. Christ becomes their life. They leave that stuff behind. What they do, like the woman in the story had to do, is perform a funeral to get rid of that stuff. To bury it. It is over. It is done. Stick it in that coffin. It is done. It is buried. It is buried with Christ.
As a side note, we have a picnic today assuming the weather holds out. We are going to have our annual picnic. You are all welcome to attend. Bring your family, your dogs, and just bring everybody. Chris is cooking hot dogs. We are having this picnic, but we are also going to have baptisms. We have never done pool baptisms. We have the pool from 6-7:30 and we decided if we have people who want to be baptized, then let’s do it outside. I will try anything once. I baptized a guy at the polar bear plunge last year. I can baptize somebody anywhere. Just let me know. We are going to have these baptisms and a lot of people in a church this size have different views of baptisms. Is it infant baptism? Is it adult baptism? Is it sprinkled? Is it immersed? You need to get out of that stuff. Really what the symbolism of baptism is, if its anything, it is about a death and a life. When we baptize somebody we say buried with Christ. In order to have a burial, you need to have a death. You don’t have to physically die, but you have to die with Christ. I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but it is Christ who lives within me. You have to accept the death on the cross as the forgiveness of sins. So you go down in that water and what you are doing is identifying with Christ taking your sins and the sins of the whole world and all the muck and junk that are attached to it, and you are placing it on the cross and then you are going in the tomb. You don’t know what is happening down in that water. It just seems like a pool but all that muck is going away. I have people seeing images underwater. Seeing things like the devil. Seeing God. Seeing everything else because it is more than just a pool party. There is something changing going on inside and people are feeling it. Then they come up out of the water and they are raised up from the water. Buried with Christ but raised to walk in newness of life. Raise from the dead. At that point, you are aligning yourself with the resurrection. Just as Christ was raised, you too will be raised. Not to stay but to go and walk a new life. The verse I always use when I baptize somebody comes out of the book of Romans because Paul says it so well. He says “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life and we have a new beginning.” That is what is going on in baptism. In some sense, when you are standing in the water, you are aligning yourself with the woman in the video feeling condemnation. You are aligning yourself with the woman in the story or even back there with the Israelites back in Moses’ time. You are standing there knowing that you have sin in your heart. That is the first place of understanding that you can’t do anything to earn your relationship with God. I don’t get it, but I know it is true. We do not have the right to stand in front of the holy God.
In conclusion, we stand there in condemnation, but we also stand there willing to receive the gift. We stand there knowing that, although we deserve to be condemned, Christ did not come into the world to condemn. God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him. It is at that point where we decide. He has done the work. We don’t do anything. We just stand in that deliverance and we decide do we want it today, tomorrow, or the next day. He says I am offering it today. Today. We have to decide if we are going to receive that gift and if we are going to take it. And we are not only going receive but we are going to believe it. That is why it is faith. It is faith where you have to be able to take that thought, take that idea, take that core message of the gospel that no one else in the world can offer you, and you take it in and you receive it into the very depths of your soul. You say I am not looking back at those Egyptians. I am not looking back at those Pharisees. I am not looking back on the past of all those people that condemned me for my behavior. I am looking towards my future. I am looking towards that deliverance. I am looking towards that open wall and that spread out sea. I am looking forward to that deliverance, that new promise, that fresh start, and that new beginning, and I am not looking back. Today, as we close, I know there are people in here who have not received Christ as savior for whatever reason. They are stuck in a place. They live in a sense of self-condemnation. They want so much the freedom but they just haven’t gotten to the place where they can accept it and receive it. I pray today, as the band gets ready to come up and play, if you are someone that just needs to know and receive that free gift of eternal life, that free gift of forgiveness that Jesus gives, that you would consider coming forward and kneeling down for prayer and that somebody would pray with you. There are Christians that, once again, even though you have lived your whole life as a Christian, you have lived in this constant condemnation so you really haven’t been productive for God. You live in this self-centered condemnation. Really this world that you have created of muck and mire and Satan is sitting back there saying I got you. There may be a time when you say no you don’t. I am not looking back at those Egyptians. I am going to grab that promise of Paul where he says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus for through Christ Jesus the law of the spirit of life have set me free from the law of sin and death. Then there are people that just need prayer. Maybe you are dealing with something financial or health-wise. Maybe you are dealing with a move of some sort. A start back to college. Whatever it is. I would encourage you too to consider coming forward and have somebody from the church pray over you. That is ministry time. That is what it is all about. Once again, as we go into prayer time, consider whether you are at a place where you can begin to accept that gift, accept that freedom, and get away from that condemnation, and walk within that new beginning that Christ offers. Let us pray.
