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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

For Us

So glad we could spend this time together gathered around God's word.

I'm certain I'm gonna be blessed as we go to the Word of God together.

Let's pray before we begin and pray expecting that God will bless us.

Our Father in heaven, we are thankful for Jesus.

We are thankful that before the foundation of this world you enacted a plan of salvation for us so that throughout eternity we could be together with you and not separated.

As we come to you now, we ask that your spirit would move powerfully among us, that your word would be alive, and that through it you would speak to us.

If we need to be challenged, challenge us.

So we ask now that you would do in this time just what you want done.

We make ourselves available to you, we offer you our hearts and we pray gratefully in Jesus' name.

Kim Philby was destined to make his mark in this world.

He was the son of a rather brilliant man, educated at the very best schools in England, including Trinity College in Cambridge.

You might just say he went to Cambridge University.

For 30 years, Kim Philby worked for British Intelligence, rising to a very high rank in the British Secret Intelligence Service, what you and I would refer to as MI6.

He ran MI6's entire counter-espionage program.

That is, he was in charge of stopping spies collecting information on Britain and he set up the section that spied on the Soviet Union.

But what nobody knew was that while Kim Philby was in charge of an important part of Great Britain's spy program, he himself was in fact a double agent.

While supposedly protecting Britain from spies, Philby was a spy himself, working for the Soviet Union.

They say it was likely that he was recruited while at Cambridge.

He provided a lot of information to the Soviets that led directly to the deaths of a large number of agents and inflicted real damage on both the American and British intelligence programs.

You know, I've often wondered just how many people know whose side God is on.

God gets blamed for an enormous amount of bad things.

In 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina, Time magazine featured an article that was titled, Where Was God?

It investigated responses from people about what they thought was the cause of the calamity.

Seems it was God's judgment for just about everything.

After the Asian tsunami, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, Of course this makes us doubt God's existence.

Insurance companies refer to acts of God.

They are disasters that dramatically affect lives, always negatively, and God gets the credit or the blame.

So very often when personal tragedy strikes, The question asked is, why did God allow this?

Now, that's not always a bad question, you know.

Even Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

But all too often, present in the question is the suggestion that God is a villain.

And the question gets murky for some people when we start to wrestle with matters of personal sin.

Is God still with me after what I've done?

How far does the love and patience and acceptance of a God who abandons his people stretch in the case of sinners committing sin?

And thankfully the Bible provides us with serious answers.

Now, you don't have to go too far in the Bible to figure this out.

Let's take our Bibles and we'll turn to John chapter 8 for a brief look at how Jesus handled a broken life and related to a broken person.

Now evidently Jesus had spent the previous night on the Mount of Olives.

Of course, that's where he went the night before he died on the cross.

Strengthened by night of communing with his father, Jesus is in the temple the next morning.

It happens to be the eighth day of the Feast of Tabernacles.

You would expect it would have been a very reverent scene in the temple.

But suddenly, something happens that shatters the reverence and The silence.

The Bible says this, it's John 8 and verse 3, then the scribes and Pharisees brought to him a woman caught in adultery.

And when they had set her in the midst, they said to him, Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery in the very act.

Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned.

A group of very upstanding men bring a woman to Jesus who had just been caught in the act of immorality.

The woman, you'd expect that she was cowering, most likely weeping.

There was tension in the air because justice is being demanded.

But aren't you glad that doesn't actually settle it in the mind of God?

If guilt settled it, our collective goose would have been well and truly cooked a long time ago.

The Bible says that all of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

If our misdeeds settled it, if our sins settled it, none of us would ever have even the slightest hope of going to heaven.

And then Jesus writes in the sand and he makes that famous statement.

He who is without sin among you let him throw a stone at her first." Now they were right.

He tells them to go right ahead, stone the poor creature, as long as they themselves are without sin.

You know, when that woman heard Jesus say those words, she no doubt thought she was dead.

These holy, righteous men, she thought, they came off as so holy, they'll probably all be throwing rocks at me.

But they drop their rocks and walk away, leaving Jesus, the perfect, holy, righteous Son of God, God in the flesh He was, alone with this miserable, wicked, corrupt individual who really did deserve to have the book thrown at her.

And then Jesus said, remember she's guilty, Neither do I condemn you.

Go and sin no more." Can you imagine how she felt?

After catching her in her offense, they dragged her out of her home.

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