When Jesus plucks us out of our own ashes, he doesn’t expect perfection—he has already attained that on our behalf (2 Cor. 5:21). We have died with Christ, and he will raise us to life. He has purchased our right-standing with God. Still, he does want to change us, little by little, to love sin less and to desire him more.
The light was dim in my bedroom that night. I knelt, face-down, the fibers of the carpet tickling my nose. The world felt like it was shrinking around me to contain only this room, this moment. I had been blind for so many years, living—no, relishing—in sin. I chased it and held it near to me like my favorite pet. But that night the veil was lifted, and my sin was exposed before me. No longer could I take cover under the guise of being a “good person.”
Tears dropped to the floor as conviction crumbled the hardness of my heart. It was in this crumbling of everything I thought I knew that Jesus found me. As I was pursuing sin, he was unrelenting in his pursuit of me. This was my “go and sin no more” moment. In a blink of an eye, my worldview shifted in alignment with the God who created me, and the trajectory of my whole life changed.
He sought me, he saved me, and there was no way he wouldn’t change me.
A Woman and a Trap
There’s another woman whose life held a similar story. She was merely a pawn in their game—a test and a trap for the Lord Jesus Christ. The scribes and Pharisees discovered her sin of adultery and decided to use it to make a point. To them, her life meant nothing. They didn’t care if she lived or died. Dragging her into the middle of the crowd where Jesus was, they said, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” (John 8:4–5).
Scripture doesn’t tell us how this nameless woman felt as she stood in front of these men with their threatening looks. Perhaps she was bowed down with the weight of her shame and terrified as she seemingly stared death in the face. Maybe she was imagining what was to come, already dreading the sharp stones striking her flesh. Would God be gracious enough to let one hit her in the temple, ending her life quickly, or would she experience a slow, pelting death? Did she feel utterly hopeless?
The woman waited for the verdict as Jesus wrote something in the dirt with his finger. The Pharisees and scribes kept asking him until finally he silenced them saying, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7).
In pretending to care about the law and holiness, these men exposed their hard and darkened hearts. They sought to catch Jesus and find him guilty; instead, he caught them. One by one he exposed their sin, and each of them walked away (John 8:9).