Spectators to Heaven

As the family of God, we gather in churches to worship, sing, listen, and give. If we’re not careful, though, we can end up being spectators when it comes to living as Jesus would have us live. Often when we see people in sin, rather than helping them out of it, we harbor a secret hope that they’ll be caught. When they are, we feel justified, thinking, “I knew it. That person’s life always seemed a little off.”

Why do we do this? It could be because we feel guilty about our own sin. We all have something in our lives that could be a justifiable target for others who are throwing stones. The truth is that the Pharisees who brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus (see John 8:3-11) could have dragged anyone out of the crowd and stoned them. Nowadays, accusing people do that very thing through social media.

Jesus’s way is different. “Jesus stood up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.’” (John 8:10-11, ESV).

As a preacher of the gospel, I love those three words, “Neither do I.” Jesus didn’t condemn her, and that was a radical thing for him to do. It still is today, when he tells each of us who repent, “Neither do I condemn you.”  

Yet Jesus got even more radical when he told the religious leaders, “I have much to say about you and much to judge, but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him” (John 8:26). Wow! That sounds like an insult, but in fact Jesus had a whole laundry list of things for which he could condemn them. He has a similar list about our lives today; but instead of condemning, he says, “Neither do I condemn you.”

What an amazing moment. It revealed the powerful love behind God’s grace that “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8).