Series: The Parables of Jesus Speaker: Steve Hixon Sermon Series Listing

They say the best teachers tell stories.

If that’s true, Jesus must be the greatest teacher of all time.

Have you ever traveled to a foreign country, and then had a difficult time explaining to your friends exactly what it was like? Normal words don’t work; they seem inadequate to describe the experience. Photographs may help, but even then you end up saying, “I guess you had to be there.” So eventually you get around to… telling stories. And in the midst of those stories, something real begins to make its mark.

Jesus came from a foreign country and brought some of it with him. He called it the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s partly here, partly not. It’s the now-and-the-not-yet. But he chose to describe for us a different way of living, a new way of treating other people and a new way of relating to God — the King of the new kingdom. There’s a lot to teach, because we’re not used to living this way.

So Jesus took things we already knew, and compared (or contrasted) them with truths about his Kingdom. He talked about soil and seeds and farmers, weddings and vineyards, lost coins and lost sheep, foolish virgins and wise stewards and humble tax collectors. And slowly but surely the disciples began to catch on.

People love stories, and most of all we love stories about people. And deep down, we delight to hear the kinds of stories where we discover that, surprise!, we’re right there in that story. “That’s me!”, we exclaim. And for better or worse, we’ve seen something of ourselves we weren’t really expecting to see. But there it is, and now what am I going to do about it?