Casting Stones, Addressing Sin and Helping the Overtaken

“Only God can judge me”, “ain’t nobody perfect”, “who are you to be judging me”, “its none of your business what I do”, or “cast the first stone if you don’t have any sins”

Often times if you have engaged someone who professes Christ about their behavior you may have heard one of or more than often all of those statements above. What is sad is, often, it is the local congregations that enable such a mentality. This mentality usually begins with a misunderstanding of John 8 which says:

 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”]]

I know the textual arguments about this text, but since it is in most bibles and is taught often I am going to address this text as if it is inspired text.

The religious leaders came and brought Jesus a woman to be stoned. Now they were right and they were wrong. Actually both parties were to be stoned and someone can’t engage in adultery alone. So that is problem one. Problem two is that they came with the motive to not obey the Law of Moses but to trap Jesus, so that they can say He spoke against the Law of Moses, which they did often. The third problem is they had not realized that they were not without sin. But the real problem is that they didn’t realize that Jesus was ushering in a new law called Grace! You see stoning left no room for reconciliation, no room for restoration, no room to extend the same grace that was extended to them, every time that went to the Temple on the Day of Atonement. Christ’s Law is one of love, reconciliation and grace; however, this is not void of holiness and living by the Spirit. The last sentence is where I want to focus.

Often times it is sad but true. Many Christians want to pick up stones. They have no problem receiving the Grace of God, yet have a huge problem extending grace and reconciliation when people are overtaken in sin. They have a zeal for holiness, but forget that this holiness begins with love and grace, not law and condemnation. This is sad and has caused great problems for the Church at large. However, in the same breath I must say that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that to address issues of sin is taboo today. You see condemnation is contrary to Christ’s law. Are lives are to be oriented and fixated on grace and reconciliation.  However licentiousness is also contrary to the law of Christ because we are to be an accountable, refining, conforming, discipling community also. Here is how Paul puts it:

6:1 Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.

Allowing people to live in sin IS NOT LOVING and casting stones is not loving. We are to loving address, admonish and exhort one another. Encouraging one another to become more like Christ. This is to happen within the context of a committed relationship. Let me pause and repeat that. This is to happen within the context of a committed RELATIONSHIP. Here is where I think the greatest error exists. If we have no plan to love, serve, cry with, bear burdens with, stay up late with, pray with, open our lives, homes and wallet for individuals who we want to see live a life of obedience and conformity, I suggest, no, I highly recommend, not scratch that I command you to to not attempt to tell someone how to live. Often times we want Homogeneity not relationship. However Christ calls us to relationship and once we want to see someone conformed we should automatically accept the fact this means that this may be a long road to travel on.

We have to realize that people are broken, hurting, programmed, that they have history, struggles, addictions, the human soul has been fragile since the fall and some people have closets packed full enough skeletons to be a national cemetery. We can tell where our hearts are on this matter within a few minutes. If we decide to engage a professing believer, but have no time to hear their story and to yoke up with them on this journey then we really don’t want to see them transformed for Christ’s glory but our own. I would recommend that you just let them go, because you will not help them become more like Christ you may encourage them to resent Christians even the more. Just let them waddle in sin, because you don’t have the time, nor the patience nor the Spiritual Maturity to help them.

We talk about homosexuals, people who live together but not married, we talk about young girls and boys who are neck deep in fornication, provocative dressing young women, young men who wear their clothes hanging off of their bottoms, the guy who is on his third wife, the single mom on welfare, the pregnant girl around the corner. We do a lot of talking but very little doing! We won’t move that young girl in, heck, we don’t even want to know her story, we just don’t want her to be pregnant nor do we want her to have an abortion. We don’t know if the young man who is a homosexual was molested by his dad, or the young girl was treated like a rag doll by her mom. We don’t care that the young men on the street corner (heck we won’t even go to the street corner, just drive by it) has a crack addict mother, or better yet a mother who has a mental disability but can still reproduce and have left this young man on his own. The reason why is that we don’t really care, we just don’t want them to sin. It is even worse when these people profess to know Christ.

Grace, love, relationships addressing sin and a ministry of reconciliation are synonymous works. We can’t address sin without having grace and love and a reconciliatory disposition. We also can’t be loving by letting people we can invite into our lives live in sin. That is also not the ministry of reconciliation. These terms are and concepts are interdependent, if one fails they all fail, we have to do a better job and harmonizing them.