Condemned No More [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, You'll See, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. You just bring your whole self to God and the parts that you least like about yourself and just bring it all and let God's love and His grace like a light come shine into every nook and cranny of your heart. Oh, the love of God. So the first thing we learn from this story about the way Jesus sees sin is He sees all of it. Not just a woman who happened to have a flagrant sin that was caught and visible and shameful, but the sin also of the Pharisees and all of us. And He loves us.

Here's the second thing that I notice and is so important. The Pharisees wanted, once they knew of her sin, they wanted to use her sin to shame her and to elevate themselves. In other words, they wanted to leverage the fact that she had this flagrant sin in order to somehow put themselves in a better position. And Jesus did the opposite.

If there's going to be somebody that wouldn't leverage your sin against you, that person has to love you fully and be fully secure and have no need to leverage something against you. And that's Jesus. We are quite confused about what to do, about our uncleanliness.

I was, I got so tickled. We have a friend who has a couple of young boys and when one of them was a little fellow and was having his first real bout with a stomach bug and the little guy's throwing up. And he just, you know, didn't know what to do with it, all the big mess. She went in, she cleaned everything up and she brought him a big bucket. And she said, now sweetie, next time, if you get sick and you got to throw up, then, you know, do it in the bucket. And so she went away and a little while later on, sure enough, she could hear him in there, poor guy's sick again. And she goes in, he's in there with a bucket on his head. He thought she meant do it in the bucket, which was a greater mess than it would have been with no bucket at all.

And I thought, we're just like, we're like that. We don't know what to do with our mess. And let me tell you what this story's about. It's about Jesus cleaning up the mess.

It's not about a technique. It's not about, it's about what Jesus has done. And here's what Jesus wants to do. He wants to cover rather than expose the woman. He wants to cover her shame. And this is what God is like. He takes no delight in seeing someone squirm under the weight of shame.

He has no delight in that whatsoever. When our son Bennett was little, we went to the circus one year. And one of the acts, really pretty impressive, was a giant steel ball, mesh steel mesh ball. And they put a motorcyclist in there. And he started riding that motorcycle around and around until the, I guess the whatever, the centrifugal force, whatever.

It's such that he can go all the way upside down and around and like this guy. And they said, and now we're going to enter into the steel ball of death, another motorcycle. And they put another one in there and he's riding around. And they're missing each other and they're zinging around and zinging around, zoom zoom zoom. Trying to like, oh man, they could hit, just hit each other at any moment. And now a third motorcycle into the steel ball of death. And the motorcycle zing zing zing like this. And then finally a woman walks out there and they said, and now we're going to put in the beautiful mist so and so into the middle of the steel ball of death.

Standing there with absolutely no helmet or any protective gear on of any kind. And Bennett looked at me and said, why daddy? Why? It was just really hard to explain to a five-year-old, you know. Well, we just love to watch somebody who might die any minute now.

Here she is. It was a cruel thing that the Pharisees did. How far they were from the kingdom of God. To think that this was their religious role. To bring a sinner into public shame.

And to offer her no help. They're very far from God. They didn't understand the heart of God and they should have if they had really paid attention to the scripture at all. Because right in the beginning, God showed us who He is.

Here's what happened at the fall in Genesis 3. The Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself. So this crushes and hurts the heart of God. That his own creatures, his own children, his own.

Those that are his own image bearers would be actually afraid of him. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? And the man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you've done? And the woman said, well the serpent deceived me and I ate. I'm surprised they didn't say apples were eaten.

And I deeply regret following the woman's advice. They felt naked and they were so ashamed. You know what they were feeling? They were feeling what that woman felt when the religious leaders paraded her around.

As someone caught in adultery. They were feeling what I felt when I was crouching behind a rock in a rock quarry. They were hurting. They were so ashamed of it all. They didn't know what to do.

They just started trying to cover themselves with some kind of leaves. And here's what God did. Did He say, well you just go ahead and feel what that feels like.

And you just go ahead and experience the shame you deserve. This is what God did instead at verse 21 of chapter 3. The Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and He clothed them. He clothed them. I tell you, everything in the heart of Jesus was for this woman. He wanted to clothe her.

He wanted to cover the one that the religious leaders were exposing for their personal gain. Jesus doesn't lead this woman through any itemized checklist of her sins. He doesn't give her a plan for penance. He doesn't tell her the things that she needs to do to prove that she's sorry.

No, God is just at work. Forgiving deeply. It's very important to understand that though there is a place for confession of sin, it's not something that's heralded very often in the New Testament. In 1 John we read, if we confess our sins, then God is faithful and just to forgive us. And some people would read that and say, well therefore, if you haven't confessed all your sins, then you remain unforgiven.

Beloved, let me just clear that right up. When you accept Christ, let me tell you about what happened to your sin. All of it was nailed to the cross of Jesus Christ.

None remains. And furthermore, if you had to confess all of your sins in order for them to be forgiven, we would all be lost because guess what? We only know a fraction of our sins. I've only had one moment in my life where I feel like God just turned the light on for a few seconds to let me see my sin in the way that He did. Just a few moments it was when I was called to the ministry as a junior in college and the Holy Spirit came into my little dorm room and called me in the ministry and I wept and I wept and I wept and I wept because for just a few seconds He let me see that I had laid out a selfish plan for my life and even though I was a father of Christ, I hadn't asked Him a single time what He was calling me to do with my life. And in those moments, He just let me see it. And then I couldn't see it anymore, but I wept for about three weeks. We would be walking around like Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 6 saying, I am undone. He barely even let you see. So what God does is He is at work forgiving you by the grace of the gospel in ways you don't even know He's at work forgiving you.

Let me tell you, the grace of God, it's like you have an immune system in your body that is right now fighting off a million bacteria that could otherwise harm you and you don't even know it. That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Want to give someone a present this Christmas that they'll never forget? Let us help you give a gift that money can't buy. This Christmas, give someone your blessing, a positive biblically based faith-filled vision for their life. In the beginning, God blessed Adam and Eve and then told them to be fruitful and multiply because in God's design, blessing isn't the reward for productivity.

It's the fuel for it. Now, more than ever, someone you love needs your blessing and we're here to help you craft it. This month's special offer from Alan Wright is a beautiful booklet that will teach you how to craft a meaningful blessing. Easy step-by-step instructions are biblically based and even include a worksheet that helps you write your blessing. So this Christmas, give someone you love a present not found in stores, a gift from your own heart that will encourage and empower. Write down the blessing and put it in a package under the tree or put it in your Christmas card. They'll never forget it. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we'll send you this booklet as our thank you so you can discover the power to bless.

Call us at 877-544-4860 or visit PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. You don't even recognize that anything's going on until you get a cold that somehow didn't get erased by your immune system. But all day long, your life's being saved by the immune system within you.

All day long. God's grace is that to me and to you. He's at work in mysterious ways right now, cleansing and working His love throughout your heart. And some angel saying, Father, don't you think you ought to show Alan this particular sin? And the Father's saying, not right now. He's not quite ready for that one yet. He's the best teacher in the world, and He takes you one step at a time with what you're ready to learn next.

I love Him so much. Search me and know me, God. Let me give you the third sense of what I learned from this is that here's how Jesus views sin. He does not want her to leave with a consciousness of sin.

He wants her to leave with a consciousness of no condemnation. And that's the way that Jesus dealt with the whole trap in the first place. So here's the posture of Jesus. He is seated, which was the customary way for a rabbi to teach. And He's in one of the outer courts of the temple, and He's seated. They bring in all of a sudden in the middle of His teaching this rude group of religious leaders cruelly brings in a woman in the middle of Jesus' teaching.

It'd be like somebody right now in the middle of my sermon bringing in some woman and accusing her of adultery and everybody gawking at her while some group of religious people are pointing their finger at her right in the middle of the... And Jesus is just sitting there, and they say, what do you say about this, Jesus, trying to trap Him? And He just remains seated, and He just starts writing in the... He just starts writing down in the dust, writing in the... And then after He writes a little bit, He stands up. And He looks around at the Pharisees and said, whoever is without sin, be the first one to cast a stone. And then He crouches back down, and He writes again. And as He's writing, they start leaving one by one.

The older ones who are the most concerned about their honor leave first, and then younger ones start leaving one after the other. And preachers and commentators have had so much fun over the years trying to guess what Jesus was writing in the ground. Some have said He was just doodling, biding time to make His plan of what He was going to say. Others have said that He has written down the names of the Pharisees. My favorite, which I've come actually to believe because it makes so much sense, is that He first wrote down the names of the Pharisees, letting them know, I know who each one of you is. And then He crouched back down and started writing the names of their mistresses in the dust.

We don't know. But what we do know is that Jesus loved this woman, this sinner, and He wanted to deal with the accusations on her behalf because He's an advocate who deals with accusing voices on your behalf. And they started dropping those stones one after the other into the dust, thud, thud, thud. And God wants you to know the same for your life, that the voice of the accuser has to drop impotently to the ground in light of what He's done for you on the cross. And what Jesus wanted her to see after that was what He wants you to see and He wants us all to see through the cross. He stood up so He was back in the dust.

The woman is standing, I imagine, hanging her head in shame. He is at her feet like a servant would be. And then Jesus stands back up. And for the first time in the story, now, He directs her attention to see what He sees. And He says, Where are your accusers?

So that she has to pick her head up and look around and realize they're all gone. I'm not sure why most of the translations do not render it more literally. It doesn't literally say, Where are they? It says, Where are your accusers? And the reason that this is important is because this is the nature of hell itself, to bring accusation. And Jesus says to her, Has no one condemned you?

A different word than accusation. Judged you, brought a judgment against you. And she says, No one, Lord. And when she says, Lord, most commentators agree, she was signifying she had come to a saving faith in Christ. That anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And essentially, Jesus looks at her and says, I don't condemn you either.

And this is the primary thing He wants her to know. Romans 8, 1, There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8, 31, What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all.

How will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? Who is it that's going to be able to bring the accusation? It's God who justifies, who is to condemn? Essentially, what Paul is saying is there's only one person who could sit in the seat of judgment. There's only one who would have the right to condemn, and that's God Himself. That's the person of Jesus Himself. But instead, he said of condemning, it's God who justifies. And it is the one Jesus Christ who died for us more than that who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

You've got to note this well. Jesus said, let him who has no sin be the one to cast the first stone. And who was the only person in the crowd, and in fact the history of the world who had no sin? Jesus Himself. The only person who had the right to cast the first stone is the one who died for that woman.

The one who had the right to cast the first stone loved her perfectly and wanted her free. Where are your accusers? It's important because this is the word that is used in Revelation chapter 12 verse 10. Starting at verse 9, the great dragon was thrown down, the ancient serpent who was called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him, and I heard a loud voice in heaven, John said, saying, now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come for the accuser of our brothers. There's the word, accuser of our brothers has been thrown down who accuses, there's the word, them day and night before God, and they have conquered him by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony, for they love not their lives even unto death. Their accuser, the accuser of the brothers, has been thrown down by the cross of Jesus Christ because justice has come. Jesus has paid the price for your sin, and therefore every accusation against a Christian has to fall like a rock down into the sand, thud, thud, thud, because when your eyes are lifted up, as this woman's was, and Jesus says, where are your accusers? You have to look around and go, they've all fled because of what you've done, Jesus. Has no one condemned you?

No one, Lord, neither do I. When he said go, it's not a word that means, oh, go, get on out of here. It's a word that means more like travel on to a new place and lead a life that's completely different. Some people think that the gospel message is go and sin no more and you won't be condemned. That's exactly not the gospel. The gospel message is this, in Jesus Christ, you are no longer condemned and never shall be, therefore you can go and sin no more and ask the gospel.

Alan Wright. Boy, that is good news, and it's all about that perspective. It's our series titled You'll See, specifically today's teaching, Condemned No More, and Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Want to give someone a present this Christmas that they'll never forget? Let us help you give a gift that money can't buy. This Christmas, give someone your blessing, a positive, biblically-based, faith-filled vision for their life.

In the beginning, God blessed Adam and Eve and then told them to be fruitful and multiply because in God's design, blessing isn't the reward for productivity, it's the fuel for it. Now, more than ever, someone you love needs your blessing, and we're here to help you craft it. This month's special offer from Alan Wright is a beautiful booklet that will teach you how to craft a meaningful blessing. The easy step-by-step instructions are biblically based and even include a worksheet that helps you write your blessing. So this Christmas, give someone you love a present not found in stores, a gift from your own heart that will encourage and empower. Write down the blessing and put it in a package under the tree or put it in your Christmas card.

They'll never forget it. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we'll send you this booklet as our thank you so you can discover the power to bless. Call us at 877-544-4860 or visit PastorAlan.org. You're in the studio with Pastor Alan, and it's about that perspective, right?

Yeah, it is. And I think that changes our whole outlook on life. The order of events is so important in this story that Jesus says, I do not condemn you.

And then he says, go send no more. And I think, Daniel, a lot of us have had that backwards. And maybe it's just somewhere unconsciously in our souls, we think like this, if I could send less, if I could be a better Christian, then God's going to love and bless me more. And this story upends that order of events and reminds us of the gospel. No, God loves you. He died for you knowing every single thing wrong with you, knowing every sin in your past, present, and all your future sins. And knowing all of that, he came in love and died for you. So God's love has been set on you. His forgiveness comes to you through the cross of Jesus Christ, not because you have proven that you can send no more, but the more that you think on this, the more that you know his love and the more that you let him love you, the more you're going to be empowered to go and send no more. That's what it's like to see your sin through the eyes of Jesus. The sin that he hates, he hates because it ruins our lives and he made us for more. But the love that he has is for us, each and every one of us. In Christ, you are not condemned. So therefore, go and send no more. So that's the order of events. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.