Encounters with Jesus
Encounters with Jesus – February 22, 2026
Read the passage: Matthew 9:9-13
Jesus doesn’t pick who’s on his team based off of what people could do for him and how they benefit him. No, his operating system is completely built on grace. Grace being God’s free, undeserved love, favour and actions toward sinners, based on who HE is and not on what people have done.
Now, if I’m being honest, in all my years of being a Christian, the idea of GRACE has been the hardest for me to accept. Because you grow up learning that is good, it is POWERFUL to earn, to be self-made, to achieve stuff for yourself. So that your name is lifted high. But grace? To freely receive something you didn’t deserve? That feels weak. And yet, that is everything Jesus is about. We want to say, “God, I’ll do it myself” but the whole point of the gospel is that we can’t, but Jesus does, and that’s not bad news. That’s reality. Christians are Sinners Saved By grace.
But a Christian who cannot understand and receive grace, becomes a Christian who starts looking for their identity, their worth, and their belovedness in places that will eventually crumble and break. Today, we’re looking at the gift of grace and I hope to reflect through the different ways we may respond to it.
As we continue in our series on Encountering Jesus, I want to ask the question, “What do you find when you encounter Jesus?”
And from our passage, we see that you find:
1) A Grace that SURPRISES
2) A Grace that TRANSFORMS
3) A Grace that OFFENDS
Encounters with Jesus – February 15, 2026
Read the passage: Matthew 8:5-13
Growing up, I had a pastor named Jesse Morales. He was awesome! He played basketball with me. He was always asking about my walk with Jesus. And he believed in me! When I was in high school, he asked me to preach one Sunday. That was scary!
However, the best thing I admired about him was that he always shared his faith. He always told me stories of sharing his faith with someone at the gas station and then I’d meet that guy at church.
Then one day, he was diagnosed with ALS, which is a fatal neurodegenerative disease. This disease starts taking away your motor neurons. It progressed to the point where he couldn’t talk anymore.
So, when I visited him, he would communicate using a letterboard. I had to write down what he was saying to me. And he was always asking me again, how my walk with Jesus was going.
Do you know what amazed me the most?! Even though he couldn’t talk anymore, he was still sharing his faith, using the letterboard. He had a caregiver named Sonya and with the letterboard he shared about how she can have peace with God and eternal life with Jesus!
And you know what happened?! Sonya became a Christian! Isn’t that crazy!
When I heard that story, I was so amazed at his faith. Here’s a man that can’t talk anymore and yet he’s still find ways to share Jesus to people. He could have packed it in and just waited to be with be with Jesus. But he was still on mission, even till his last breath.
Our passage today is about amazing faith. We will learn from a person whose faith was so great that even Jesus was amazed.