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We're in the final week of a series called Honest to God, addressing issues that everyone experiences and struggles with but nobody talks about. This week, we're tackling Jesus and sexual brokenness through the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.
Before diving in, it's important to note that this is a practical message for a culture saturated with sexual degradation. Our goal is to understand how to live free from this struggle through God's Word.
When you open your Bible to John 8:1, you'll likely see a note stating that the earliest manuscripts do not include John 7:53 through 8:11. This passage—the story of the woman caught in adultery—appears first in Latin manuscripts around the 3rd century, not in the earliest Greek texts we've recovered.
There are two main views on why this happened. Augustine believed the story was in the originals but was removed by the early church out of fear that people would commit adultery freely because Jesus is so gracious to sexual sinners. Jerome held a different view: the story wasn't in John's original manuscript, but it was a genuine, famous account passed down orally through generations of disciples before being written down. Since John himself noted that he recorded only a tiny fraction of what Jesus did and said, this explanation makes sense in a largely oral culture.
The detail worth noting: John discipled Polycarp, who discipled Irenaeus, who spoke Latin—and Latin is where this story first appears in written form. This likely reflects the natural process of oral tradition being preserved in writing.
Either way, this account is true and worth our full attention.
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn, he appeared again in the temple courts where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" (John 8:1-5)
The Pharisees hated Jesus because He embodied grace and truth, while they focused only on rules and truth without compassion. As Jesus's popularity grew, their influence diminished—and this motivated them to destroy Him out of envy.
What they've created here is brilliant, but sinister: a "heads I win, tails you lose" trap. Here's why:
If Jesus says, "Don't stone her, show compassion," the Jewish people would reject Him as the Messiah, thinking He doesn't obey the Old Testament scriptures.
If Jesus says, "Stone her," He violates Roman law. Israel was under Roman occupation, and Rome prohibited execution without permission from the empire. Jesus would be arrested and killed before completing His ministry.
Notice something crucial: she was caught "in the act of adultery."
Adultery is a team sport. If they caught her in the act, they saw the man too. But only the woman stands before Jesus. Where's the dude?
This detail reveals the injustice embedded in their accusation—and it will matter deeply to Jesus's response.
Yes, according to the Old Testament, this woman deserved a death penalty. The scriptures are clear:
If a man commits adultery with another man's wife... both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death. (Leviticus 20:10)
If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel. (Deuteronomy 22:22)
There were not many repeat offenders in ancient Israel. This sin was taken with ultimate seriousness.
Sexual immorality kills everything it touches. We do not take it as seriously as we should.
When you see "sexual immorality" in your Bible, the Greek word is porneia—the root of our English word "pornography."
Porneia is a comprehensive term in Judaism referring to any sexual expression outside of God's Genesis 2 ideal: all sexual expression is meant to occur within the confines of covenant marriage.
Christians often bring one of three views to sexuality:
View 1: Sex is gross. Some see sexuality as a necessary evil to be avoided. They enter marriage carrying shame and disgust.
View 2: Sex is a god. Our culture holds this view. Sexual identity becomes supreme; any restraint is labeled repressive and harmful. Sex becomes an idol.
View 3: Sex is a gift (biblical view). God created sex not just for procreation but for recreation. He could have designed reproduction any number of ways—but instead, He created sexuality as a gift within marriage. It reflects His intention for intimacy and covenant.
God's definition of marriage: one biological man with one biological woman in a covenant marriage for a lifetime.
This is the only place where acceptable sexual expression takes place.
For followers of Christ, sexual immorality includes:
Jesus elevated the standard in the Sermon on the Mount: looking lustfully is equivalent to committing adultery in your heart. God is after heart transformation, not just behavioral modification.
If you're over 16 and have done any of these things—even once, even in thought—you've violated God's design. Raise your hand. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. This message is for all of us.
Christians often say, "All sin is the same. All sin is equal." This is not what the Bible teaches.
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body. (1 Corinthians 6)
The Bible teaches that all sin is equally wrong, but not all sins are equally damaging. Sexual immorality is disproportionately damaging in its consequences, shame, and the condemnation the enemy heaps upon it. When you give yourself to this sin, the damage is quantitatively different.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sins are equally damaging. Sexual immorality stands apart in its consequences and shame. The enemy heaps particular condemnation on this sin, and when you give yourself to it, the damage is quantitatively different from other transgressions.
The pornography industry generates $172 billion globally, with $68 billion in America alone—more revenue than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. Eighty percent of men in America report regular pornography usage, and the fastest-growing segment of consumers is young women.
The numbers are staggering. One major website reported 4.3 billion hours of pornography watched in a single year—equivalent to 500,000 years of viewing on one site. Minors aged 12-17 are the largest users, and the number one search term worldwide is "teen." Pornography producers increasingly target adolescents.
Sexuality produces dopamine—the chemical that creates a rush. But like all addictions, the same images stop producing the same dopamine levels. You must seek out more, harder, and more extreme forms to achieve the same effect. This is why regular pornography usage leads to escalation.
Through continued exposure, a normal body becomes insufficient. You begin to need images altered chemically or surgically. Then one body isn't enough. When you enter marriage, your spouse's body isn't enough—which is why pornography kills marriages and contributes to erectile dysfunction in men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Here's what makes this even more sinister: the reward centers of the brain are closely connected to the part that processes violence. Neurologists say, "What fires together wires together." The brain begins to fuse sexuality and violence together.
God created sexuality as an expression of intimacy, affection, love, and oneness. But through pornography consumption, the part of your brain processing violence and sexuality begin to merge. This is why 88% of pornography scenes include violence toward women.
In a recent study of 16- to 18-year-olds, nearly every minor learned how to have sex by watching pornography—not through godly conversations with Christian parents, but through demonic, satanic content. Young women in these studies reported being pressured to act out scripts their male partners learned from pornography, being badgered into uncomfortable positions, faking responses, and consenting to violent or painful acts.
All research shows correlation between pornography consumption and sex trafficking, violence toward women, and rape culture. If this isn't clear to you yet: no girl at age 10 looked at pornography and thought, "That's my goal." That's what I want to be someday."
People say, "It's consensual. Nobody else is involved. It's a victimless crime." No. Every time you engage with pornography—and it is a drug—you're tacitly saying to that woman's absent, abusive father: "Thanks for neglecting and abandoning her, for abusing her when she was eight so she'd have this brokenness." You're saying to the creepy uncle: "Thank you for sexually assaulting her at twelve." You're saying to the drug dealer who kept her high: "Thank you for enabling her to make these films."
I recently did a podcast with Joshua Broom, a Lakepoint man who started in the pornography industry. Jesus saved and redeemed him. He's now a pastor leveraging his life to destroy the pornography industry. He pointed out that approximately 30% of everyone he knew in that industry back then is now dead. Pornography kills people.
The problem isn't that pornography shows too much of a woman—it's that it shows too little. You're looking at a woman with hopes, dreams, and a soul, and all you can see is her body. It disciplines you to do that in every area of your life.
This generation is being formed—either into the image of Christ or into something else. Everywhere Jesus went, women felt safe. They were dignified. He valued them and lifted them up. The presence of Jesus communicated to everyone: you're valuable, and you deserve to be treated as valuable. We are being shaped by what we consume.
Many people don't realize that cohabitation before marriage is something God doesn't want you to do. Here are the statistics: only one in five cohabiting relationships end in marriage—a 20% success rate. Women who cohabit multiple times before marriage divorce at more than twice the rate of others. You think you're practicing for marriage; the data says you're practicing for divorce.
Additionally, sexual experience before marriage is a good indicator of infidelity during marriage. The more sexual partners someone has before marriage, the less likely they are to remain faithful in marriage. Think about this: if someone won't respect their marriage before they enter it, what makes you think they'll respect it after? That's what this data reveals.
Let me tell you a story about how ancient Eskimos would kill wolves that attacked their villages. They would take a razor-sharp knife, sharpen it to perfection, then dip it in blood and freeze it. They'd repeat this process three times until they had what looked like a blood popsicle. Then they'd bury the knife hilt-first in the ground with the frozen blade exposed.
Wolves, attracted by their sensitive sense of smell, would come and lick the blood popsicle. Eventually, the ice would numb the nerves in their tongues. As they continued licking through the blood to the razor-sharp blade beneath, they felt nothing—their tongues were desensitized. They'd keep licking, shredding their tongues into ribbons. As blood flowed, they'd smell it and, not recognizing it as their own, enter a feeding frenzy. They'd lick faster and faster until they bled to death.
This is what giving yourself over to lust and sexual immorality does to you. It numbs you. In your excitement, you keep returning to the thing that is shredding your soul.
Make decisions ahead of time so your sinful flesh doesn't have the chance to gravitate toward sin. The Bible says: > Make no provision for the flesh.
If you're single and dating, predecide your boundaries with your partner. Jan and I decided we would never be alone together. Our dates would be in public places. Decide what physical boundaries you'll never cross. Remember: when your appetite goes up, your judgment goes down. Don't go to the grocery store hungry—that's when you buy sushi-flavored Oreos.
To parents: I am begging you for your children's sake—do not give unrestricted smartphone access to younger children. Pornography websites spend $4.3 million per day on advertising. Guess who they're targeting? Your kids. Giving a 14-year-old an unrestricted smartphone is equivalent to putting pornography magazines in his bedroom closet and saying, "Hope you don't look at these tonight."
The scripture says:
Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Corinthians 7:5)
You better be praying a whole lot. The only legitimate source of sexual intimacy is your spouse. There is no other legitimate source.
Wives: you are the only clean drinking water he can get. Sometimes he gets thirsty. If every request for intimacy gets "not right now," you're setting up a crisis. Husbands: don't quote this verse as a club. If you are, you've already lost. Win her heart. Take her on a date. Get involved.
We need Pentecostal marriages—lots of tongues and the laying on of hands.
The Bible tells us to fight the devil, but to flee sexual immorality. Here's how I do this in my life:
Ten people have passwords to everything in my life—every social media account, email, everything. We have software monitoring all our computers and devices at home. I have a geolocation tracker on my truck so that if I'm ever accused of impropriety six years from now, I can show exactly where I was. I live out in the open.
I don't meet with women alone ever. Some call this obsessive. I call it happily married. And when people don't like this boundary, I remind them: Jana likes it. Jana likes it. I'm all in on that.
The whole purpose of this series—why we called it "Honest to God"—is because the moment you get honest, you get free. If you won't be honest, you cannot be free. The Bible says: > You are as sick as your secrets.
Sin is like a fungus: it grows in the dark, but it dies in the light. The depth of your confession will always equal the level of your freedom. You must get relentlessly honest.
This means you need to curate groups of godly men and women around you who will help you stay accountable.
Number five is where the sermon lands: you've got to receive grace. More than that, you've got to learn to breathe it. We breathe grace in from God, and then we breathe grace out towards people.
Watch what Jesus does with this woman. Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. No one knows what Jesus wrote because it's not recorded, but here's what I think happened.
When they kept on questioning him, Jesus straightened up and said to them:
"Let any one of you who is without sin cast the first stone."
Here's why he said this: In the Old Testament, if you made an accusation against somebody that resulted in a death sentence, the Old Testament required you to be the one who threw the first stone when that person was stoned. This put you on the hook for murder if your accusation ever proved false. That's a pretty good system.
When they heard this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first. Because the older you get, the more sin you've sinned—it's just time. Until only Jesus was left with the woman still standing there.
Jesus straightened up and asked her:
"Woman, where are they? Has nobody condemned you?"
"No one, sir."
"Then neither do I condemn you. Now go and leave your life of sin."
So what did Jesus write on the ground? There are theories. Some people think Jesus stooped down and wrote the names of the men who were there—powerful men, even religious men—who had sinned sins that required Old Testament capital punishment. Others think he wrote the names of the women those men had committed adultery with, which would have been quite bold.
But here's what I think Jesus actually did. In the Old Testament, there are only two times where the finger of God appears and begins to write. One is with Daniel and Belshazar—that's a different story. The other is when the Ten Commandments are written; the finger of God appeared and etched them into the stone tablets.
I think Jesus looked at these men who were saying, "Kill that woman," and the finger of God appeared once again, just like it appeared on Sinai. And he started writing the commandments those men had broken—the commandments that would require their death.
"You shall not bear false witness against someone in the court of law."
"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife."
And I think every man there—the Holy Spirit testified in their hearts: guilty. Guilty.
Then Jesus said:
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
Now let me ask you: was there anybody there without sin? Yes, there was. There was one who was without sin, and his name was Jesus.
Jesus Christ was there. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God. He was the spotless Lamb who came to take away the sins of the world.
The only person there who actually had the right to pick up a stone and start slamming it into the skull of that woman—he looked at her and said:
"Listen, if they don't condemn you, I refuse to condemn you."
Why? Because the Son of Man did not come to condemn the world. He came to save the world, that we might be saved through him.
And when she would have said, "But the Old Testament requires a death penalty," Jesus would have said, "Yes, it does. That's why right now I'm setting my face towards the cross. I'm going to take your place. I'm going to be crucified and die in your stead so that you don't have to."
Jesus was saying to this woman: Everyone who wants to condemn you can't. And the only one who could won't—because I came to save you.
Here's what I want you to hear: some of you, this whole message about sexual purity and sin—it's crippling your soul. You're thinking, "Who would ever want me? Who would take me?"
Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, wants you. He wants to forgive you, redeem you, and set you free. And he can do it.
Some of you need to hear that because you're shrinking back and the enemy is heaping on condemnation. But your spirit needs to be reminded: there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The Son of Man came to seek and to save those who were lost. You didn't come to condemn the world—you came to save the world.
He wraps his arms around you. And he says, "Neither do I condemn you."
We're in the final week of a series called Honest to God, addressing issues that everyone experiences and struggles with but nobody talks about. This week, we're tackling Jesus and sexual brokenness through the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.
Before diving in, it's important to note that this is a practical message for a culture saturated with sexual degradation. Our goal is to understand how to live free from this struggle through God's Word.
When you open your Bible to John 8:1, you'll likely see a note stating that the earliest manuscripts do not include John 7:53 through 8:11. This passage—the story of the woman caught in adultery—appears first in Latin manuscripts around the 3rd century, not in the earliest Greek texts we've recovered.
There are two main views on why this happened. Augustine believed the story was in the originals but was removed by the early church out of fear that people would commit adultery freely because Jesus is so gracious to sexual sinners. Jerome held a different view: the story wasn't in John's original manuscript, but it was a genuine, famous account passed down orally through generations of disciples before being written down. Since John himself noted that he recorded only a tiny fraction of what Jesus did and said, this explanation makes sense in a largely oral culture.
The detail worth noting: John discipled Polycarp, who discipled Irenaeus, who spoke Latin—and Latin is where this story first appears in written form. This likely reflects the natural process of oral tradition being preserved in writing.
Either way, this account is true and worth our full attention.
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn, he appeared again in the temple courts where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" (John 8:1-5)
The Pharisees hated Jesus because He embodied grace and truth, while they focused only on rules and truth without compassion. As Jesus's popularity grew, their influence diminished—and this motivated them to destroy Him out of envy.
What they've created here is brilliant, but sinister: a "heads I win, tails you lose" trap. Here's why:
If Jesus says, "Don't stone her, show compassion," the Jewish people would reject Him as the Messiah, thinking He doesn't obey the Old Testament scriptures.
If Jesus says, "Stone her," He violates Roman law. Israel was under Roman occupation, and Rome prohibited execution without permission from the empire. Jesus would be arrested and killed before completing His ministry.
Notice something crucial: she was caught "in the act of adultery."
Adultery is a team sport. If they caught her in the act, they saw the man too. But only the woman stands before Jesus. Where's the dude?
This detail reveals the injustice embedded in their accusation—and it will matter deeply to Jesus's response.
Yes, according to the Old Testament, this woman deserved a death penalty. The scriptures are clear:
If a man commits adultery with another man's wife... both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death. (Leviticus 20:10)
If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel. (Deuteronomy 22:22)
There were not many repeat offenders in ancient Israel. This sin was taken with ultimate seriousness.
Sexual immorality kills everything it touches. We do not take it as seriously as we should.
When you see "sexual immorality" in your Bible, the Greek word is porneia—the root of our English word "pornography."
Porneia is a comprehensive term in Judaism referring to any sexual expression outside of God's Genesis 2 ideal: all sexual expression is meant to occur within the confines of covenant marriage.
Christians often bring one of three views to sexuality:
View 1: Sex is gross. Some see sexuality as a necessary evil to be avoided. They enter marriage carrying shame and disgust.
View 2: Sex is a god. Our culture holds this view. Sexual identity becomes supreme; any restraint is labeled repressive and harmful. Sex becomes an idol.
View 3: Sex is a gift (biblical view). God created sex not just for procreation but for recreation. He could have designed reproduction any number of ways—but instead, He created sexuality as a gift within marriage. It reflects His intention for intimacy and covenant.
God's definition of marriage: one biological man with one biological woman in a covenant marriage for a lifetime.
This is the only place where acceptable sexual expression takes place.
For followers of Christ, sexual immorality includes:
Jesus elevated the standard in the Sermon on the Mount: looking lustfully is equivalent to committing adultery in your heart. God is after heart transformation, not just behavioral modification.
If you're over 16 and have done any of these things—even once, even in thought—you've violated God's design. Raise your hand. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. This message is for all of us.
Christians often say, "All sin is the same. All sin is equal." This is not what the Bible teaches.
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body. (1 Corinthians 6)
The Bible teaches that all sin is equally wrong, but not all sins are equally damaging. Sexual immorality is disproportionately damaging in its consequences, shame, and the condemnation the enemy heaps upon it. When you give yourself to this sin, the damage is quantitatively different.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sins are equally damaging. Sexual immorality stands apart in its consequences and shame. The enemy heaps particular condemnation on this sin, and when you give yourself to it, the damage is quantitatively different from other transgressions.
The pornography industry generates $172 billion globally, with $68 billion in America alone—more revenue than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. Eighty percent of men in America report regular pornography usage, and the fastest-growing segment of consumers is young women.
The numbers are staggering. One major website reported 4.3 billion hours of pornography watched in a single year—equivalent to 500,000 years of viewing on one site. Minors aged 12-17 are the largest users, and the number one search term worldwide is "teen." Pornography producers increasingly target adolescents.
Sexuality produces dopamine—the chemical that creates a rush. But like all addictions, the same images stop producing the same dopamine levels. You must seek out more, harder, and more extreme forms to achieve the same effect. This is why regular pornography usage leads to escalation.
Through continued exposure, a normal body becomes insufficient. You begin to need images altered chemically or surgically. Then one body isn't enough. When you enter marriage, your spouse's body isn't enough—which is why pornography kills marriages and contributes to erectile dysfunction in men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Here's what makes this even more sinister: the reward centers of the brain are closely connected to the part that processes violence. Neurologists say, "What fires together wires together." The brain begins to fuse sexuality and violence together.
God created sexuality as an expression of intimacy, affection, love, and oneness. But through pornography consumption, the part of your brain processing violence and sexuality begin to merge. This is why 88% of pornography scenes include violence toward women.
In a recent study of 16- to 18-year-olds, nearly every minor learned how to have sex by watching pornography—not through godly conversations with Christian parents, but through demonic, satanic content. Young women in these studies reported being pressured to act out scripts their male partners learned from pornography, being badgered into uncomfortable positions, faking responses, and consenting to violent or painful acts.
All research shows correlation between pornography consumption and sex trafficking, violence toward women, and rape culture. If this isn't clear to you yet: no girl at age 10 looked at pornography and thought, "That's my goal." That's what I want to be someday."
People say, "It's consensual. Nobody else is involved. It's a victimless crime." No. Every time you engage with pornography—and it is a drug—you're tacitly saying to that woman's absent, abusive father: "Thanks for neglecting and abandoning her, for abusing her when she was eight so she'd have this brokenness." You're saying to the creepy uncle: "Thank you for sexually assaulting her at twelve." You're saying to the drug dealer who kept her high: "Thank you for enabling her to make these films."
I recently did a podcast with Joshua Broom, a Lakepoint man who started in the pornography industry. Jesus saved and redeemed him. He's now a pastor leveraging his life to destroy the pornography industry. He pointed out that approximately 30% of everyone he knew in that industry back then is now dead. Pornography kills people.
The problem isn't that pornography shows too much of a woman—it's that it shows too little. You're looking at a woman with hopes, dreams, and a soul, and all you can see is her body. It disciplines you to do that in every area of your life.
This generation is being formed—either into the image of Christ or into something else. Everywhere Jesus went, women felt safe. They were dignified. He valued them and lifted them up. The presence of Jesus communicated to everyone: you're valuable, and you deserve to be treated as valuable. We are being shaped by what we consume.
Many people don't realize that cohabitation before marriage is something God doesn't want you to do. Here are the statistics: only one in five cohabiting relationships end in marriage—a 20% success rate. Women who cohabit multiple times before marriage divorce at more than twice the rate of others. You think you're practicing for marriage; the data says you're practicing for divorce.
Additionally, sexual experience before marriage is a good indicator of infidelity during marriage. The more sexual partners someone has before marriage, the less likely they are to remain faithful in marriage. Think about this: if someone won't respect their marriage before they enter it, what makes you think they'll respect it after? That's what this data reveals.
Let me tell you a story about how ancient Eskimos would kill wolves that attacked their villages. They would take a razor-sharp knife, sharpen it to perfection, then dip it in blood and freeze it. They'd repeat this process three times until they had what looked like a blood popsicle. Then they'd bury the knife hilt-first in the ground with the frozen blade exposed.
Wolves, attracted by their sensitive sense of smell, would come and lick the blood popsicle. Eventually, the ice would numb the nerves in their tongues. As they continued licking through the blood to the razor-sharp blade beneath, they felt nothing—their tongues were desensitized. They'd keep licking, shredding their tongues into ribbons. As blood flowed, they'd smell it and, not recognizing it as their own, enter a feeding frenzy. They'd lick faster and faster until they bled to death.
This is what giving yourself over to lust and sexual immorality does to you. It numbs you. In your excitement, you keep returning to the thing that is shredding your soul.
Make decisions ahead of time so your sinful flesh doesn't have the chance to gravitate toward sin. The Bible says: > Make no provision for the flesh.
If you're single and dating, predecide your boundaries with your partner. Jan and I decided we would never be alone together. Our dates would be in public places. Decide what physical boundaries you'll never cross. Remember: when your appetite goes up, your judgment goes down. Don't go to the grocery store hungry—that's when you buy sushi-flavored Oreos.
To parents: I am begging you for your children's sake—do not give unrestricted smartphone access to younger children. Pornography websites spend $4.3 million per day on advertising. Guess who they're targeting? Your kids. Giving a 14-year-old an unrestricted smartphone is equivalent to putting pornography magazines in his bedroom closet and saying, "Hope you don't look at these tonight."
The scripture says:
Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Corinthians 7:5)
You better be praying a whole lot. The only legitimate source of sexual intimacy is your spouse. There is no other legitimate source.
Wives: you are the only clean drinking water he can get. Sometimes he gets thirsty. If every request for intimacy gets "not right now," you're setting up a crisis. Husbands: don't quote this verse as a club. If you are, you've already lost. Win her heart. Take her on a date. Get involved.
We need Pentecostal marriages—lots of tongues and the laying on of hands.
The Bible tells us to fight the devil, but to flee sexual immorality. Here's how I do this in my life:
Ten people have passwords to everything in my life—every social media account, email, everything. We have software monitoring all our computers and devices at home. I have a geolocation tracker on my truck so that if I'm ever accused of impropriety six years from now, I can show exactly where I was. I live out in the open.
I don't meet with women alone ever. Some call this obsessive. I call it happily married. And when people don't like this boundary, I remind them: Jana likes it. Jana likes it. I'm all in on that.
The whole purpose of this series—why we called it "Honest to God"—is because the moment you get honest, you get free. If you won't be honest, you cannot be free. The Bible says: > You are as sick as your secrets.
Sin is like a fungus: it grows in the dark, but it dies in the light. The depth of your confession will always equal the level of your freedom. You must get relentlessly honest.
This means you need to curate groups of godly men and women around you who will help you stay accountable.
Number five is where the sermon lands: you've got to receive grace. More than that, you've got to learn to breathe it. We breathe grace in from God, and then we breathe grace out towards people.
Watch what Jesus does with this woman. Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. No one knows what Jesus wrote because it's not recorded, but here's what I think happened.
When they kept on questioning him, Jesus straightened up and said to them:
"Let any one of you who is without sin cast the first stone."
Here's why he said this: In the Old Testament, if you made an accusation against somebody that resulted in a death sentence, the Old Testament required you to be the one who threw the first stone when that person was stoned. This put you on the hook for murder if your accusation ever proved false. That's a pretty good system.
When they heard this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first. Because the older you get, the more sin you've sinned—it's just time. Until only Jesus was left with the woman still standing there.
Jesus straightened up and asked her:
"Woman, where are they? Has nobody condemned you?"
"No one, sir."
"Then neither do I condemn you. Now go and leave your life of sin."
So what did Jesus write on the ground? There are theories. Some people think Jesus stooped down and wrote the names of the men who were there—powerful men, even religious men—who had sinned sins that required Old Testament capital punishment. Others think he wrote the names of the women those men had committed adultery with, which would have been quite bold.
But here's what I think Jesus actually did. In the Old Testament, there are only two times where the finger of God appears and begins to write. One is with Daniel and Belshazar—that's a different story. The other is when the Ten Commandments are written; the finger of God appeared and etched them into the stone tablets.
I think Jesus looked at these men who were saying, "Kill that woman," and the finger of God appeared once again, just like it appeared on Sinai. And he started writing the commandments those men had broken—the commandments that would require their death.
"You shall not bear false witness against someone in the court of law."
"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife."
And I think every man there—the Holy Spirit testified in their hearts: guilty. Guilty.
Then Jesus said:
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
Now let me ask you: was there anybody there without sin? Yes, there was. There was one who was without sin, and his name was Jesus.
Jesus Christ was there. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God. He was the spotless Lamb who came to take away the sins of the world.
The only person there who actually had the right to pick up a stone and start slamming it into the skull of that woman—he looked at her and said:
"Listen, if they don't condemn you, I refuse to condemn you."
Why? Because the Son of Man did not come to condemn the world. He came to save the world, that we might be saved through him.
And when she would have said, "But the Old Testament requires a death penalty," Jesus would have said, "Yes, it does. That's why right now I'm setting my face towards the cross. I'm going to take your place. I'm going to be crucified and die in your stead so that you don't have to."
Jesus was saying to this woman: Everyone who wants to condemn you can't. And the only one who could won't—because I came to save you.
Here's what I want you to hear: some of you, this whole message about sexual purity and sin—it's crippling your soul. You're thinking, "Who would ever want me? Who would take me?"
Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, wants you. He wants to forgive you, redeem you, and set you free. And he can do it.
Some of you need to hear that because you're shrinking back and the enemy is heaping on condemnation. But your spirit needs to be reminded: there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The Son of Man came to seek and to save those who were lost. You didn't come to condemn the world—you came to save the world.
He wraps his arms around you. And he says, "Neither do I condemn you."
