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Jodi Hickerson: The Crossing: Life Verse
Jodi Hickerson
After high school, Jodi Hickerson spent time living in Haiti with Northwest Haiti Christian Mission. Then she served at Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky. After marrying her husband Mike (with whom she now has three amazing daughters), Jodi joined the staff of Heartland Community Church in Rockford, Illinois, where she served as a Teaching Pastor and on the Programming Team. In 2011, the Hickersons moved to Ventura, California, to plant Mission Church. Mike serves as the Lead Pastor and Jodi is a Teaching Pastor and Programming Director at Mission. Jodi is quite clear: being a part of what God has done and continues to do at Mission has been the faith adventure she cannot imagine missing out on!
She preached this message several times, mostly to church congregations in the U.S. (in Chicago, Ventura, and Las Vegas). The first time was in October of 2011 at Mission Church in Ventura, with the emphasis being that there were a lot of unchurched people in the room or people far from God. The desire was for people to know the God that Jesus reveals to us, that God meets us where we are and isn’t afraid of our mess, that grace is more powerful than shame, and that as the church we ought to meet people right where they are too, knowing that we all desperately need the grace of God! She uses the NIV except as otherwise noted.
“The Crossing: Life Verse”
Romans 8:1
Have you ever had one of those moments where you couldn’t believe what just happened just happened?! I like to call those “that just happened” moments—you know, those moments where you stand back and say, “Wow!…that just happened,” or, “Dang!…that just happened.” I was thinking this week about some of these kinds of moments that have happened recently…and I’m going to need your help with this… When I say the event…you reply with your best: “That just happened!” Okay? Here we go:
That just happened list:
UK winning eighth National Basketball Championship
KeSha’s “TiK ToK” sells more copies than any Beatles song
People are still watching America’s Got Talent
Lebron gets a ring
Lakers fans are now rooting for Steve Nash
And there were all kinds of “that just happened” moments in the life of Jesus. I mean, think about what the disciples must have thought. There was this one time when Jesus took a kid’s Happy Meal and fed 5,000 people… “That just happened!”
Or, when he got up from a nap in the bottom of a boat, and there was this huge storm blowing and everyone on board was terrified…and he stood up in the boat and told the wind and waves to stop and they did… You know the disciples on that boat had to be thinking… “That just happened!”… When he opened the eyes of the blind,…can you imagine being the blind man? One second you can’t see and the next…“That just happened!”… When he reached out and healed a person with leprosy that no one else would even touch,…I bet the people on the street just gathered around like, “Dang! That just happened!” And it doesn’t just show up on the pages of Scripture either.
I can tell you from experience that there were so many people in my life that saw this confused, people–pleasing, lying, manipulating, conning, insecure, impure, materialistic, cheating, hanging-with-the-wrong-crowd girl encounter Jesus and watch him change her life. It was as if jaws dropped and they were saying, “That just happened!” Did that just happen? Is that who I think it is? I can even remember getting a phone call from an old friend that I used to get in trouble with, and he said to me, “So, what, you’ve seen the light now or something?” And my answer was, “Yes.” And it was, and still is, a miracle.
Well, today we are continuing in this series called “Life Verse,” and our verse that I would love for all of us to have memorized, to have etched into our hearts this morning and really begin to believe, is Romans 8:1, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Let’s say that out loud together.
That is some good news. And I thought today that what we would do is dive into a story. To get to the heart of this verse,…gather around with a crowd of people at one of these “that just happened” moments where Jesus illustrates the truth of this verse as only He can through His encounter with a woman down in the dirt:
Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him… (John 8:1–6a, NLT)
Okay, so just so we can get a little context of what’s going on here,…Jesus was gaining some popularity—that just happens when you’re healing the sick and opening blind eyes—and the Pharisees (who were some of the Jewish religious leaders) didn’t like it one bit. These were people whose spiritual blindness never let them see Jesus for who He was… And so they knew that with Jesus teaching in front of the temple there would be a big crowd there…lots of witnesses… Because these leaders had been trying to get rid of Jesus for a while now—this was all a political game to them—they wanted more than anything to destroy his credibility with the people. And so they try to trap him by using this woman—because, if Jesus were to say that the woman should not be stoned, they could accuse him of violating Moses’ law. If he were to urge them to execute her, then they would report him to the Romans, who did not permit the Jews to carry out their own executions… However, Jesus is fully aware that this is nothing more than a trap.
Not to mention that it’s more than a little suspici...
