“Living for Christ? Sounds great! How do I do it?” Here's an irreducible minimum: By LOVING other people. “Loving other people? Sounds great! How do I do it? Where do I start?” Good questions. Here are a few ideas: Start on your knees. Ask God in prayer to change you. Ask God to help you love other people. Tell God you want to love people like HE loves people. But you need to know, if you pray that way earnestly, God WILL change you. And you just might start loving some rather “unlovely” people.
Here’s another, real practical way we can start: We can start loving other people by laying aside our prejudices, our intolerance, our preconceived notions, our favoritism and our spiritual and natural pride. Because when God’s love makes us whole, we begin to recognize that there really is no difference between THEM and US. There is no “THEM”. It’s just “US”. All of US. ALL dead in sin without Christ. Not one BETTER than another. At the core of Christ’s strength, his compassion, his patience, his tolerance is this: LOVE. Because He IS love. And if we are to be followers of Christ then we must be compelled, constrained, controlled, made whole by His love. In John chapter 8 we get a first-hand example of all of this that we can LIVE every day.
JOHN 8:1 Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, 2 but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. 3 As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. 4 “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” 6 They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. 7 They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” 8 Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. 9 When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. 10 Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” 11 “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”
Can you imagine what it was like for that woman that day? Let’s put ourselves in her place. There isn’t a person reading this that hasn’t done something that they wish they hadn’t done; that they’re embarrassed about or ashamed of. What if you were smack in the middle of doing whatever that was, and the Sin Police came busting in the room – caught you doing whatever it was you were doing, and then drug you immediately to First Church of Intolerance, and put you in front of a whole crowd of people – told EVERYONE exactly what it was they caught you doing – and then wanted to punish you for it, by throwing rocks at you until you were dead? What if?
“I saw him get drunk at Cowboys on a weeknight! She was smoking cigarettes…again! We found him looking at porn on the computer! She’s been taking prescription painkillers! They’re having sex and they’re not married! They haven’t been to church in 30 years! He cheated on his taxes! She cheated on her husband! They stole! He lied!”
But it just so happened that on the day they decided to do that, the Son of God was there. And he said, “All right, let him have it. Let her have it. But let the one without sin throw the first rock”. And one by one they walk away until it’s just you and Jesus. And he says to you, “Where are your accusers? Is there no one to condemn you?” and you say, “No one”. And he says, “Then neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more”. What if?
How about this: It did happen. You and I were both dead in our sin, caught in the act. And Jesus ran off our accusers and he’s saying to you and me, “I don’t condemn you, go and sin no more”. Many of us have been raised in places, families, churches, where they spent a lot more time on the “Go and sin no more” part than they spent on the “Neither do I accuse you” part. And what happens is, we get afraid that the rock throwers are going to be there to meet us at the front door of the church. So we run FROM God instead of running TO Him. Can you imagine for just a moment, what the value of a place would be where before anyone ever heard the words “Go and sin no more”, they heard the words, “Neither do I accuse you”? Perhaps there’s a reason Jesus put them in that order. First things first. It’s the GOODNESS of God that brings people to repentance – not His judgment and anger.
Sin is sin and wrong is wrong and we ALL need to repent of our sin and start walking right. Our actions absolutely have consequences. But those consequences shouldn't include having your actions met with the feigned shock and accompanying condemnation of people who have done the very same thing themselves. If we want to LIVE for Christ, we must FORGIVE like Christ. More tomorrow...
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