Lance, the Law, and Grace

Before I even start let me say something in the interest of full disclosure, I have yet to take a spiritual gifts indicator that Compassion was not one of my top three gifts.  With that being said, I feel sorry for Lance Armstrong.  I know, he brought it on himself and he deserves what he gets.  I just hope that standard is never applied to my life and I hate when it gets applied to others’ lives.  I don’t think a single one of us wants what we deserve or would want to experience what we have potentially brought on ourselves (including the sports writers who will spend the next months slicing and dicing Lance with their words).

I wonder what life looks like for Lance today?  Does he have friends that will stick with him through this?  Does he even have a place that he can go eat and not do so in shame?  How does he feel about this mark on what was his legacy?  What will Lance do now?  These are the same questions I have every time I hear of a fellow pastor who is getting a divorce because he had an affair.  These are the same questions I had when all of my childhood baseball heroes were exposed in a steroid scandal.  Maybe I am more concerned about these things than the individuals themselves are?

Here is what I do know.  Christ was and is in the business of restoration.  Unfortunately, most people are not so interested in restoration.  We swarm when there is a failure.  We love to analyze what went wrong.  We love to pick apart the lives of others when they fail.  We love to speculate on which of their many sins was the one that actually opened the door to their failure?  We do all of this without ever acknowledging that many of the same sins exist in our lives.  I’m not saying we gloss over sin, I’m just saying we should focus more on the road to restoration than we do the sin.  We should be more concerned about the person than we are the story or the sin.

Wednesday night the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8) came up in our LifeGroup at the church.  We were discussing how we are to respond to the sinfulness of others.  Our leader made a great point.  Jesus did not gloss over this woman’s sin nor did He condemn her for it.  Jesus was instructive and restorative in a single statement.  Verse 11 says, “Neither do I condemn you (restoration); go (hope), and from now on sin no more (instructive).” 

As a pastor, my heart aches for people when their sin catches up to them.  Of course I don’t want them to continue in sin.  And of course, if they are a leader, I am not going to allow them to continue in leadership.  However, on a personal level, I just want to grab them, give them a giant hug, and say, “this will work out.”  “This is why Jesus died.”  “This is why Christ paid the price He did.”  “Now, go and sin no more.”

What a tricky line we walk in this life.  One thing is for sure, there is no shortage of people in this world who are hurting.  And to each of them Christ would say, “Neither do I condemn you.”  Such condemnation would be counter to His character.