TD Jakes - When Sin Is Exposed
Romans 6:1 says, «Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?» God forbid! How can we who are dead to sin continue in it? Today, nobody talks about sin, allowing it to drape itself in church clothes and finery while pointing fingers at others without accusation. The church has muted its voice about sin, fearing that conviction might come too close to home. However, you don’t get taller by lowering the ruler; the standard is what it is. If anything, you must be willing to say, «I fell short of it,» not that you lowered it.
Today, we have arranged our theology to fit our predicament. It is quite clear that what we believe about God has been tailor-made to fit our reality. In fact, God is God, and He always will be; He will never change. It is not within our power to bring God down to our dysfunction; it is God who calls us up to rise to His requirements. The reality remains: culture may change, society may change, and times may change, but the truth is what it is. We have been warned but have ignored the warnings. We have been nudged but have disregarded the nudges. He has whispered to us, «You’re going too far; you’re getting out of line; you need to get yourself together.»
Yet, we ignore it because we hear God only when we want to. When you tell the church to praise God, the whole church will erupt; when you ask the church to give, people start looking the other way. We hear God when we choose to hear Him, mistakenly thinking that God is a God of our convenience. Yet, God is still God. Many times, God’s judgment isn’t to destroy us; rather, worse than destroying us, God will give us over to ourselves. The Bible speaks of a reprobate mind, of having your conscience seared with a hot iron, getting to the point where wrong feels right. Thus, we are living in a day when we call wrong right and right wrong. Instead of having to defend your ownness, you often have to defend your rightness because if you say what is right, it is now wrong, and if you say what is wrong, it is now right.
You may not want to hear this, but it is not about God being weary of this woman’s hardened heart or her rebellious disposition. It is not about God bringing her to open shame or humiliating her because of her obnoxious behavior. This woman is not even a prominent figure; she is not said to be a leader or a teacher who exalts herself above measure. She doesn’t even have a name; she is referred to simply as «a woman caught.» I wish I could ask if there are any women here who have ever been caught? Perhaps not in adultery but caught by the IRS over taxes, or caught going too far in handling your children, or caught yelling at your husband. She is «the woman caught.»
To be caught in the act is grievous, not just for a woman but for anyone; to be caught is a painful ordeal. The feeling of being trapped is agonizing. Psychologists teach us that the most humiliating trauma is public trauma. All of us have gone through private trauma that stayed within our homes. Most of us from my generation were raised with the saying, «What goes on in this house stays in this house,» because whatever it was needed to be handled privately before left to the court of public opinion.
When it reaches the court of public opinion, there is no end to the ridicule one can receive. Have you ever been caught? I considered telling a story about myself; I’m still deciding whether to share it. I was a young man in a grocery store with a family pack of pork chops. I can’t explain why I did it; I’d like to say I was starving and broke, but I wasn’t that broke. I just decided to take the pork chops. I didn’t realize the mirror overhead allowed the manager to see me. The manager caught me, and when I realized it, I faced a choice: fight or flight. I couldn’t choose, so I did both. I hit him with the pork chops as hard as I could, knocking him to the floor, and then I ran. I was in a moment of weakness, and finally, I ran because I thought if he caught up with me, I would be caught, and I didn’t want to go home and tell my mom I had been caught.
Come to think of it, I don’t know if I ever told her about this. To be caught was terrifying! I ran like I had never run before, and because I was so young and he was so old, I knew he couldn’t catch me. Just because I didn’t get caught doesn’t mean I was innocent. In the prison ministry, I don’t go in with my nose in the air; if it weren’t for the grace of God and some hefty pork chops, I could have been locked up too. Those thick pork chops delayed him long enough that I didn’t end up in cell block «me.» I don’t even know why I did it, but being around people who were acting out led me to do it to be accepted, to prove I had just as much courage as they did by stealing the pork chops. I still didn’t get to eat them because I had to drop them to run.
Human depravity escapes no one; it reaches everyone at every level. Imagine, if you can, being caught wrong. If the IRS has ever caught you, or if your boss has ever been at the door when you came in at 10 o’clock instead of 8, you know how your heart races when you realize you’ve been caught. Anytime you get caught doing something perceived as wrong, there’s a certain amount of anxiety involved. In this case, it is magnified to an extreme degree; one moment she is in the embrace of her lover, enjoying their intimacy, and then she is suddenly yanked from that euphoric experience into the degradation of being exposed, naked, and captured. If being captured weren’t enough, she has to pull herself out of that intimacy only to run into a terrifying situation.
There’s no preparation, no warning, no chance to get ready, no opportunity for excuses or pleas. Have you ever had life yank you? I didn’t expect to get many amens because so many of you can’t blow your cover; it’s important to protect your image. Yet there are many people in this room who have fled through windows, run out doors, or deleted texts to hide their wrongdoings. Oh, not you—you’re too holy! I’m talking about that one over there, the one in the balcony where nobody is sitting. Those invisible people.
Many know the terror and emotional trauma of being caught, especially when you know you brought it upon yourself. Whenever you are caught, you don’t enter a police car feeling cool and comfortable. You don’t get handcuffed feeling good about yourself. Your heart races, your pulse quickens, and your mind beats you up. You wonder if you will ever get out of this, especially knowing they have caught you, and caught you naked. At least let me get dressed; let me cover up! Although I’ve been exposed, if I’m dressed, I feel less vulnerable than when I’m exposed while undressed. Imagine how this woman felt. It is as if, according to the law, they catch her, but notice the injustice; they only caught her.
When it comes to men, we can be right and still be wrong. Yes, what she did was wrong; but it is an absolute fact that she couldn’t have done it by herself. Yet because she is caught in the act of adultery, she suffers the injustice of being brought to open shame while the man is given a pass. Her story is told in front of a crowd without her voice being allowed to speak for herself. It’s a terrible thing to believe what you read about someone without hearing the extenuating circumstances surrounding their dilemma.
We live in a society that allows people to make a living catching you wrong. It’s not hard to catch you wrong; it’s just more challenging to catch you wrong in church. But if I follow you around long enough, if I bug your phone and put cameras in your house, it wouldn’t be so joyful if we started playing videos of moments in your life. I know some of you are too old now and think there’s safety, but if we go back far enough, Bill Cosby, if we go back far enough, there isn’t a person in this room who hasn’t lived through a moment that, if shown on screen, would make you want to hide because you don’t want to be seen in the light of your worst moments. You want to be seen in the light of your best moments. What do you do when your worst moments go public?