No … You Don’t Deserve It

(click on the pic to listen to it) When CS Lewis overheard a group of young biblical scholars debating over what made Christianity so different from the other religions. He said the thing that separates Christianity from all other religions is grace. All of the other religions require you to do a certain group of tasks in order to measure up or earn your way to heaven.
In Christianity you can’t earn anything thing. Everything is given to you as a gift. It’s up to you to open the gift. No one can earn a gift. If they had to earn it …. Then it isn’t a gift. It was a reward for good behavior.

Think about this for a moment;

• Our children don’t earn a birthday party
• Our children don’t earn their Christmas presents
• Our spouses didn’t earn our love.

We simply give it! Why? Out of love for them. We didn’t have to do it. We aren’t forced to do it. But because of our love for them we wanted to do it.

Grace is one of those gifts that God wants to give us. Like our children, spouse, or special friend there is nothing we can do to earn it. He’s not going to force it on us. He simply says here it is and do what you want with it.

You can abuse it – but it will do you no good and it won’t change your life.

or

You can use it and experience freedom from religion, freedom from having to perform, freedom from spiritual check lists, and freedom from having to make God proud of you.

Grace says, “I am already proud you.” Grace says, “I already love you”. Grace says, “You are free to love God with all your heart mind and soul.”

Look at John 8:1-11

8 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.”

This is the story of the prodigal daughter. The story begins early one morning when a crowd gathered in the temple courts to hear Jesus teach. The Feast of the Tabernacles has just come to an end, which meant that great crowds would still be in Jerusalem. As Jesus teaches, he is suddenly interrupted by a crowd of men surrounding an embarrassed woman. The men are insistent on pushing their way through the crowd until they (and the woman) are standing before Jesus.

Who were these men? They are “teachers of the law” and Pharisees. They were the religious leaders of the Jewish people. That meant they were well-educated, well-known, and reputed to be men of wisdom and high moral standards. If anyone had a question about the Law of Moses, these were the men who had the answers. But although they were religious, they were not godly and their intentions on this day are not good. As the story unfolds, we discover that they are proud, self-confident, arrogant, ruthless, cunning, clever, calculating, and thoroughly hypocritical.

Who was the woman? We do not know. Was she single, engaged, or married? We do not know. What previous relationship might she have had with any of these men? We do not know. Is she very young or is she middle-aged? We do not know. This text tells us all we know about her; everything else is speculation.

How did they catch her in the “act of adultery?” Again, we can’t be sure, but something fishy seems to have been going on. The rabbinic law was very specific on this point. Since adultery was technically a capital offense, the law demanded that any accusation be a literal eyewitness testimony. It would not be enough to say, “I saw them entering the bedroom and then I saw them leave.” It must be more detailed and precise than that. Hearsay testimony would not be accepted for a charge like this. So how did these men “happen” to catch her “in the act?” We don’t know.

And that leads to a crucial question. Where is the man? Adultery by definition requires two people. It is not likely that the man somehow escaped but the woman didn’t. Perhaps it was a set-up. Perhaps they talked the man into seducing the woman so they could catch her in the act. By prearrangement they then let the man go free. As the succeeding verses make clear, these men didn’t care about the woman one way or the other. If this is a set-up, they have already caused adultery and apparently would be willing to cause a murder as well, so great was their hatred of Jesus.

The answer to all these questions can be answered in vs. 4-6a,

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….

What these religious leaders intended for evil. Jesus turned it into something good. They wanted to destroy this woman to prove a point. They wanted to trap Jesus and destroy Him.

What Jesus does is simply incredible. He took the focus off the woman and turned the focus on to the religious leaders.He turns to them and says, “if you have never sinned …. cast the first stone. The religious leaders wanted to talk about the woman – Jesus wanted to talk about them.

In the midst of this story, Jesus shows her grace. He was the only sinless man there. He could have thrown the stone! The law told him he had permission to kill her. Adultery was a capital offense and  punishable by death. Jesus simply says to her, “where are your accusers and go and sin no more.”

Jesus gives her an undeserved gift. That’s what grace is an underserved gift. There is nothing she could do to deserve it. There is nothing she could say to talk Him out of it. All she could was love Him back by accepting it and sin no more. 

The same is true for us. All we need to do is love Him back by accepting it and sin no more.

Paul elaborates in Romans 6:6 what Jesus means by “sin no more.”

6 Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? 2 Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it?

If you truly have experienced the grace of God – the desire to sin diminishes. It diminishes because you KNOW you have received something that you KNOW you didn’t deserve. This is why those who have come out of dark circumstances seem to understand grace better than those who have just studied it and/or talked about it.

I mentor a young man who wants to become a better dad. As a married, young, man he was into drugs and alcohol. He wife threatened him one day to grow up or get out. She started going to church. He promised her he would go to church. After several failed attempts she said, “stop messing around and start leading the way.” He knew he deserved divorce. He had failed her many times. He knew he deserved jail. Instead … he found Christ. He started going to church with his wife and  he hated it at first. One Sunday morning he noticed a little eight year old singing at the top of her lungs and raising her hands in worship. God broke him. Several weeks later, he made a commitment to follow Christ the rest of his life. He’s a better dad. A better husband. A better man. He didn’t do anything. He simply started loving God. Grace allowed all this to happen.

This man deserved divorce and jail. Instead, he got life.  This woman  in the story deserved, according to Rabbinic law, death. Instead Jesus gave her life!

This is what grace does – it gives life.

• It saves marriages
• It restores relationships
• It changes the direction of people’s lives

God has been doing this since time began. In the OT – Israel deserved death but God gave them life time and time again. For those who choose to love Him back – he always gives life. You also see it all the through the New Testament:

• The woman at the well. She brought the whole village out to meet Jesus.
• Zacchaeus. He gave back 4 times the amount that He cheated out of people.
• The publican. he couldn’t stop praising God and praying.
• The prostitute. She had been set free and couldn’t crying and washing the feet of Jesus with her tears and hair.
• All of the disciples who had deserted him. They came back together and carried the message redemption forward.

When you experience the grace of God something happens in and to you. How can you tell if you have experienced the grace of God in your life?

• You go from having to go to church to getting to go to church
• You go from having to pray to getting to pray.
• You go from having to read the scriptures to getting to read the scriptures
• You from having to serve to getting to serve.
• You go from having to – getting to
• You go from having an ungrateful heart to a grateful heart.
• You are thankful for what God did for you on the cross.

When you love God back you will begin to experience life – you begin to experience grace at its fullest. You KNOW you don’t deserve it. You KNOW you can’t say sorry enough. Because of what you have experienced you want others to experience this grace. You don’t want to keep to yourself. You want people to experience the life you have experienced.

Grace creates a grateful heart. In many cases it causes tears in your eyes or forces you to your knees knowing that you don’t deserve what’s going on your life right now. Like the woman in the story your response to this grace is to want to love Him back. When you love Him back you don’t want to sin anymore. You want to thank him by giving Him the control of your life and allowing His spirit to change the way you think.

This woman knew what she deserved but instead she experienced the unmerited favor of God.

All of us know what we really deserve.We know that we are not entitled to grace but God gives it to us freely. Our job is simply to receive it and open it up.

God is giving you this gift the same way he gave it to the woman in this story.

He is asking us to one of three things:

1. Stop throwing stones at other people
2. Open the gift and go send no more
3. Or both