This past Sunday (which was a great gathering for Eternity) I preached on Legalism as we continued our “Religion Is Garbage” series.

Just like Eternity, I am finding myself working into a groove from a preaching standpoint and having to hone some things in. This was very evident to me as I looked down at my notes with four pages left to go and realized I was about 45 minutes in. So, like any good preacher would - I improvised. And for the sake of time - without really sacrificing any flow of thought in the sermon, I finished up but in doing so skipped about 1 ½ pages of manuscript.

So I figured I would share that portion of the sermon here for folks to chew on and interact with. This caution was to follow the fact that you can’t make God any MORE or LESS happy because of what you DO or DON’T DO. But it is a caution for those who deduce that because I can’t make God any more or less happy with me, then it really doesn’t matter how I live…

CAUTION:  Now…I want to be very clear on this…please do not hear me saying that it doesn’t matter how you live because Jesus is going to love you anyway because that would be to misinterpret what I’m saying altogether.  What we’re talking about here is obedience for the RIGHT reasons vs. obedience for the WRONG reasons…but make NO MISTAKE…continued, willful disobedience is NEVER PRESENTED IN SCRIPTURE as an acceptable option.  The same Jesus that loved the adulteress and spared her life from the angry mob ready to stone her was the same Jesus that lovingly commanded her to “GO AND SIN NO MORE“.

Except now the command to go and sin no more is lived out of a very deep understanding of the wonderful love and gift that’s been given to you and out of a freedom to know that you are perfectly accepted in Christ and can quit striving for the acceptance you so long to find…if you’ve been spared your life and the one who saved you demonstrated His deep love for you by sparing your life, and if that truly impacted you and you truly accepted that, then the last thing the adulteress would have wanted to do was to go and take her clothes off and hop in the sack with another married man because she knows that the one she would truly be committing adultery with was not the man in the sack but the man in the street.  There’s a big difference between “I have to do this for Jesus to love me….AND… He loves me so much and He’s demonstrated it in so many ways that I can’t imagine doing this and betraying the love that He’s shown me…

To put it more practically…I don’t stay faithful to my wife so that she will love me…I stay faithful to my wife because of the faithfulness that she has shown me and I can’t imagine betraying her…the love that we have is too deep…too rich…too costly…I wouldn’t dream of taking my clothes off with another woman and then coming back to her and justifying it with “well I knew you would love me anyway so I thought I’d go and have some fun”…if you have truly made Christ your treasure and if you have truly believed in the Gospel and repented of your sin…you wouldn’t dream of just going out and acting any way you want and then come running back to Jesus and saying “Well I knew you were a big guy and you could handle it” so I had some urges and I couldn’t control myself so I acted that way…and I’m sorry Jesus but I know you’re a big enough God to handle it”…we wouldn’t dream of acting that way…sin should grieve us…when you don’t live by the commands of Jesus..you’re not just breaking a rule, you’re betraying the one who has given you life…and that should grieve you…that should break your heart…and if it doesn’t break your heart…then you need to examine your heart…and pray that God would help you find out why…

One more thing and then I’m done…when Jesus said to the woman “Go And Sin No More“…he said it after he had saved her life…and we need to pay attention to that order…he didn’t tell her to sin no more first and then he would save her life…no he saved her life and then told her go and sin no more and there are two things we need to take from that:

1)  We need to demonstrate love first…we need to love people and demonstrate that love in their moments of need..we need to be there for them and show them that we have a vested interest in their life…Jesus saved her life first…

2)  He did tell her to “go and sin no more“…and that was also a demonstration of love…and as Christians we need to understand that being called to live according to the truth of God’s word is not an expression of judgment, anger, vengeance, meanness, or legalism but rather is an expression of love.  And so when we are called to repent of attitudes, beliefs, emotions, or actions that are in opposition to the truth of the Bible, that the person calling us to repent (provided they have demonstrated love for us) is doing the most loving thing they can do for us.  It would not have been a loving thing for Jesus to allow the adulteress to go on in her adultery.  It would not have been a loving thing for Jesus to allow her to believe for another day that just because she was somehow justified in her sinful behavior…(no matter what kind of good reasons she may have had for it)…calling someone to repent of sin is an act of love..and we need to start receiving it as such…and quit being defensive about correction, rebuke, or calls for our repentance….