Series: Face To Face Speaker: Steve Hixon Sermon Series Listing

Our lives are filled with “close encounters”, face-to-face dealings with the people we meet every day. Books, tapes, seminars and specialists abound with helpful hints about how to start new relationships, fix broken ones, and use others to get what we want. We struggle just to get along with relatives, neighbors, co-workers and spouses. And rare is the person who feels comfortable with people of a different race, creed, lifestyle or socio-economic standing.

Into this relational chaos steps Jesus, a person so grounded in his own identity and in his relationship with the Father that his way of relating to everyday people was nothing less than astonishing. Holy men, high-rollers, prostitutes, blue-collar workers - he seemed to have time for all of them. Nothing they could say or do appeared to shock him or cause him to lose his spiritual balance. He confronted and challenged, encouraged and enlightened - various facets of his most common theme the love of God for ordinary people.

In this series it is our desire that we get to know Jesus better, as we watch him in “close encounters” with the people of his day. Their struggles were no different than ours - their insecurities, joys, questions and fears. And so we see in the way he treated them the same love with which he pursues us, and a model for how we should treat one another.

For further study:
The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey
The Great Physician, by G.Campbell Morgan