GO, AND SIN NO MORE

The scribes and Pharisees had left, each man convicted by his own sinful heart. Jesus was left alone with the woman who had been taken in sin and brought to Him for her public stoning to death. He asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’, v. 10 ESV. Calling Him ‘Lord’, she answered Him, ‘no one’, v. 11 ESV.

We can almost see the kindness in His eyes, and hear the tenderness in His voice. How softly did He speak? How graciously did He look upon her? How her heart must have leaped with joy, the promise of a new beginning of her life, to this point wasted by sin. Only moments before, she had stood, possibly shaking with fear, as the leaders of her religion circled around her, stones in their hands and hatred in their hearts. Her death was a foregone conclusion until the Saviour intervened. ‘Neither do I condemn you’, He softly said, ‘go, and from now on sin no more’, ESV. He did not need to condemn her. Her own heart already stood condemned and she knew it. But, in these few words, He directed her towards her future, a life of righteousness. She would never forget this moment.

Have we forgotten? Each one of us, saved by grace, faces a life of ‘no condemnation’ because we are now in Christ Jesus, Rom. 8. 1. None of us will ever attain sinless perfection but far too often we seem to give in to sin. As Paul wrote in Romans chapter 7, we struggle, and often do not live victorious lives over sin, as described in Romans chapter 8. Christian liberty is not liberty to live any way I want to; it is the liberty to not have to live the way I once did.

We cannot know for sure the extent of the Lord’s pardon of this woman, or if He pardoned her at all. But, in His act of grace, He gave her this challenge that speaks to us today. The burden of our lives, even though we still have the sinful nature within, is to walk worthy of our calling and, with the Spirit’s help, live lives as holy as we possibly can. These five words, that changed a sinful woman’s life, could well be a motto for our daily walk in an evil world: ‘Go, and sin no more’.