"Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"
"No one, Sir," she said.
"Then nither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."
— John 8:10-11
Big Idea #5. Find the pain… and you will find the door.
The more I meditate on this passage, the more wisdom I see in the approach Jesus used. As the story opens, a woman caught in the act of adultery, is thrown down before Jesus to see if Jesus will take a hard line on sin and insist that she be stoned according to the law of Moses.
She had been exposed. She had nothing to cover herself with except guilt and shame.
The opponents of Jesus thought this would be an ingenious way to trap Jesus, but God uses all the enemy’s traps as opportunities for His glory.
There in her place of shame, Jesus had exactly what He needed to transform her life. Why do people end up in extramarital affairs? Contrary to all the hype about marriage and sex and romance, people are unfaithful because they are searching for solutions to their own neediness, their own internal pain.
Jesus was right there, dealing with the root cause — internal pain and shame.
This, by the way, is the reason so many approaches to curing moral impurity don’t work. They don’t work because they magnify shame instead of correctly removing it. They leave the root cause intact.
But, with one sweep, Jesus takes out lifelong shame. "Neither do I condemn you." Jesus doesn’t condone her sin — he calls it what it is — but He demonstrates to her in her place of exposed pain that His pardon is greater than all her sin. She is free. The shame is gone. The Master does not condemn her — the pain is gone. She is free to leave her life of sin because nothing now is holding her to it.
The places we protect the most are the places where we need Jesus the most. If we don’t let the Physician treat the wound, we cannot get better. The deeper the pain, the more powerful will be the transformation that Jesus brings.
Be encouraged!
Dwight
Dwight Clough is the author of four Christian books and is an active member of Lake City Church in Madison. This devotional is also available via email and you may review the archives back to 2002. To contact Dwight or Kim, use their contact form. You may also support their ministry.