But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’
‘No one, sir,’ she said.
‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin’.” (John 4:2-11 NIV)
I recently sat down with a student who requested to meet with me. He told me of a conversation he had had over the summer with a good friend. “He called me out,” he told me. “He told me that I needed to get the priorities of my life in order, focusing more on the Lord and less on what I wanted to do.” He went on to say how much he appreciated his friend for that, and me for the way I treated him with kindness and compassion even as I, too, pointed out things that needed to change in his life. In sum, he was grateful we had called him to repentance.
There is a sense I get that much of the Church believes truth can’t be told lovingly, so it is best to be avoided. Think about it, how much does the church talk about repentance from sin? There is a lot of talk about struggle with sin, about forgiveness of sin, but what about the need to repent from sin? I don’t hear a lot about that today. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous, that we’ve given up fighting it or feel self-righteous in drawing attention to another’s sin. Yet, Jesus talked a lot about the need for repentance (Luke 3:8; Luke 5:32; Luke 13:1-5) in order to be saved and to live a fruitful life. And both Peter and Paul echo Jesus’ teachings (Acts 2:38; Acts 3:19; Acts 20:21; II Corinthians 7:9-10) If repentance gets this kind of attention from Jesus and His disciples, should it not be more of a focus of the Church? How is it we have become so reluctant to talk about the need to turn away from sin?
In what I hear and observe I think it is because we don’t believe we can call people to repentance and love them at the same time. Rather, we think it is judging to call people out. So we don’t do it. We ignore the sister who gossips and the brother who lies. We know our friend is viewing porn online, but we don’t say anything. But if Jesus and the Apostles were unafraid to confront sin in the lives of people, particularly those who claimed to be followers of the Lord, then we must be more bold in confronting it, too.
And to solve our problem with the sense of judging, Jesus lays out a perfect example for us in the way He dealt with the woman caught in adultery. It seems much of the Church is comfortable quoting (as does the world) “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” to anyone daring to confront sin. Yet, Jesus didn’t stop there. Indeed, He did call out the self-righteousness of the woman’s accusers, but He confronted the woman as well. She was guilty of adultery and Jesus didn’t condemn her, but He did tell her the truth: She needed to repent of her sin.
The call to repentance is not condemnation nor does it need to be done angrily or in a self-righteous or condemning way. Jesus demonstrates this clearly. But it does need to be done, for it is an integral part of the Gospel. Grace and repentance go hand in hand in the Scriptures. We’ve got the first one down pretty good. It is the other one that needs a lot of work.
Today, if you know someone caught in the grip of sin, know that it is an expression of love to call them to repentance if you do it like Jesus—not condemningly, but out of love so they can be set free.
© Jim Musser 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment