Adulteress Woman

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So we are in our series on identity, which seems incredibly appropriate given the last, I don't know, five, six years that has been a bit of a hot-button topic, right? That's something that people are really working through, what is my identity and how we have sought so many different ways to try to identify ourselves, whether it is through our our politics, through our tribes, our friendships, through our political identity, through our cultural identity. That is something that obviously you guys have been working through and I know is always on the forefront of our minds, and this week we are moving through John chapter 8. Now last week you spoke about the woman at the well and this, right? Am I correct? I thought, okay, oh I had a moment there, I was like, wait a minute, I watched the wrong sermon? And on the surface this is going to seem like a text that's going to hit the same things, but there's something unique here that I want to share with you. So let's get into the text, John chapter 8. I'm going to begin in verse 1, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Now early in the morning He came again to the temple. All the people came to Him and He sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and placing her in the midst, they said to Him, teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such a woman, so what do you say? They said this to test Him, that they might have some charge to bring against Him. Jesus bent down and wrote with His finger on the ground, and as they continued to ask Him, He stood up and said to them, let He, let Him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. And once more He bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before Him. Jesus stood up and said to her, woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? She said, no one, Lord. And Jesus said, neither do I condemn you. Go from now on, sin no more. Let's pray together. Gracious God, as we gather together to sing songs and praise of you to hear your Word proclaimed, to share in communion together today. Lord, I pray that you just open our hearts that we would receive your Word, hear the Word of forgiveness and the Word of life that you proclaim in this text. Lord, open our hearts to see who you call us to be. Lord, open our hearts to hear where our identity comes from, and we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen. Alright, if you don't mind, I was thinking about this text a lot as I moved through it, and there was an event in 2013 that really popped into my mind as I was reading this. So I want to pull up, if you don't mind, there's a tweet that I'd love to throw up on the screen. You have it there? Okay, it's a little small, I'm gonna read to you. This is from a woman named Justine Sacco. I don't know if anybody knows this. This is a little, it's a while ago, 2013. Some of y'all were still probably in, what, elementary school when this happened? Great. Says, going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white. That's bad, right? Now here's the story behind this tweet. Justine Sacco was a PR representative for a large firm, and she was actually on her small Twitter account that had about a hundred and seventy followers, and she loved to have dry, sarcastic humor. For her, this was a bit of a satire, and she tweeted out to her friends, and maybe it'd get like one or two likes on her tweets, which is probably more than I get on mine, and she wouldn't think about it. She'd dry out her, she'd try out her humor, and some of it would land, and some of it wouldn't, right? And she shot this tweet out thinking, I'm so clever, I'm so funny, and then hopped on a plane to go on a trip to South Africa, put it on airplane mode over a seven, eight hour flight, and then when she landed and turned on her phone, her phone blew up, because somebody that was in her friends list grabbed this tweet, shared it, and it spread like wildfire. From the moment that she got on the plane, before she sent that tweet, between that time when she landed, she had become viral. She lost her job, like on the flight. She landed to find out she had lost her job, and had become one of the most hated people, one of the most hated people online that you could find, was receiving death threats through her DMs. That's a terrible joke, but I cannot imagine the experience that that woman was going through, and some would say absolutely justified. I mean, what an insensitive tweet, right? But man, trending number one on Twitter, can you imagine, from 170 followers? Insane for that. Now, I was thinking about that, and then as I was thinking about...