Several years ago, I wrote a book called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Based on my twenty years of experience as a pastor in Manhattan, I chose the most persistent arguments that skeptics make against Christianity and sought to show that, in the end, they were not convincing. Then I presented what I considered to be the most compelling reasons why Christianity is the only true hope for the world and also why it makes so much sense to those who believe. I’ve always appreciated skeptics’ arguments and the invaluable role they play in defining and clarifying what is unique about Christianity. It bothers me when Christians dismiss these questions glibly or condescendingly. Taking the time and effort to answer hard questions gives believers the opportunity to deepen their own faith while creating the possibility that doubtful people may become open to the joy of Christianity.

This essay is based on the first of a series of talks I gave in Oxford Town Hall in Oxford, England in 2012. A campus group asked me to speak for five nights to students—most of them skeptics—exploring encounters that Jesus Christ had with five individuals in the Gospel of John. I could not imagine a more exciting project. First, of course, these accounts reveal the core teachings of Jesus, and in a particularly dramatic and vivid way. But the conversations Jesus had with these persons were not merely about personal sins and specific religious practices. In these encounters we see addressed the big, “meaning of life” questions: Who are we, and why are we here? Why be a good person; why love instead of hate? What’s wrong with the world? (Obviously, something is—you just have to look at the newspaper or in the mirror any given morning to be aware of that.) And what, if anything, can make it right?

Everyone has a working theory of what the answers are to these questions. If you try to live without one, you will soon be overwhelmed by how meaningless life seems. We live at a time when some insist that we don’t need any such answers, that we should admit that life is just meaningless busywork in the grand scheme of the universe, and leave it at that. When you are alive, they say, just try to enjoy yourself as much as you can, and when you are dead, you won’t be around to worry about it. So why bother about trying to find the meaning of life?

However, the French philosopher Luc Ferry, (who, by the way, is in no way a Christian himself) in his book A Brief History of Thought, says that such statements are “too brutal to be honest.” He means that people who make them cannot really believe them all the way down in their hearts. People cannot live without any hope or meaning, or without a conviction that some things are more worth doing with our lives than others. And so we know we do have to have answers to these big questions in order, as Ferry puts it, “to live well and therefore freely, capable of joy, generosity, and love.”

Ferry goes on to argue that almost all our possible answers to those big philosophical issues come from five or six major systems of thought. And today so many of the most common answers come from one system in particular. For example: Do you think it’s generally a good idea to be kind to your enemies and reach out to them rather than kill them? Ferry says this idea—that you should love your enemies—came from Christianity and nowhere else. And as we will see, there are plenty of other ideas we would consider valid, or noble, or even beautiful, that came solely from Christianity.

Therefore, if you want to be thoughtful—if you want to be sure that you are developing good answers to the fundamental questions—you need at the very least to become deeply acquainted with the teachings of Christianity and, especially, with its founder Jesus Christ. And the best way to do that is to see how he explained who he was and what he was all about to people he encountered.

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of people coming to Christianity is that they think they know all about it already. They think they already know the answers that Christianity offers to the questions of life. But based on my experience, I don’t think they usually do. So my aim in this essay, and in the subsequent ones in the Encounters with Jesus Series is to give the Christian answers to these fundamental questions by doing a close reading of several of Jesus’ encounters with various men and women. These are answers I believe we cannot live without.

The first encounter I want to look at is a subtle but powerful one with a skeptical student. It has lessons for those who are skeptical themselves about Christianity, and also for Christians who encounter skepticism from those who do not believe. To understand the encounter, we must put it in context. It comes just after what has been called the “Prologue” at the beginning of the book of John. Ferry points out that this prologue was one of the turning points in the history of thought. The Greeks believed that the universe had a rational and moral order to it, and this “order of nature” they called the Logos. For the Greeks the meaning of life was to contemplate and discern this order in the world, and they defined a well-lived life as one that conformed to it. The gospel writer John deliberately borrows the Greek philosophical term Logos and says this about Jesus:

In the beginning was the word (Logos), and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him, all things were made. Without Him, nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and in that life was the light of all mankind. . . . And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. . . . (John 1:1-3, 14 NIV)

This statement fell like a thunderbolt onto the world of the philosophers of the ancient world. Like the Greek philosophers, and unlike many contemporary ones, John affirms that there is a telos, or purpose, to our lives—something we were made for, that we must recognize and honor in order to live well and freely. But here the Bible insists that the meaning of life is not a principle or some other abstract rational structure, but a person, an individual human being who walked the earth. As Ferry notes, this claim struck philosophers as “insanity.” But it led to a revolution. If Christianity was true, a well-lived life was not found primarily in philosophical contemplation and intellectual pursuits (which would leave out most of the people of the world, would it not?), but in a relationship with Jesus Christ, which could be available to anyone, anywhere, from any background.

To show us immediately how this works in real life, John brings it down to earth by showing Jesus interacting with a group of students. Back in the days of Jesus there were no universities; if you wanted to be a student you attached yourself to a teacher. There were a lot of spiritual teachers, and many followed them and became their students, or disciples. Perhaps the edgiest and most avant-garde teacher of that time was John the Baptist. He was very popular, with many followers and a number of dedicated students. History has recorded some of them: Andrew, who had a brother Peter; and Phillip, who brought his friend Nathanael. Some of the students already believed what their teacher was saying about the coming Messiah, the one John called “The lamb of God” (John 1:29). But a few of them were skeptical. Nathanael was one of these skeptical students, until he had an encounter with Jesus Christ:

The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Phillip, he said to him, “Follow me.” Phillip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Phillip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked. “Come and see,” said Phillip. When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.” “How do you know me?” Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Phillip called you.” Then Nathanael declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” Jesus said, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” He then added, “I tell you the truth, you shall see Heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. (John 1:43–51)

I want you to notice three very important aspects of Nathanael’s encounter with Jesus: Nathanael’s problem, Nathanael’s need, and Nathanael’s prescription.

First, we will look at his problem. Nathanael is at least an intellectual snob, and maybe even a bigot. Phillip comes to him and says, I want you to meet this new Rabbi, he’s got answers to the big questions of our time, and he’s from Nazareth. Nathanael sneers, “Nazareth!?” Everybody from Jerusalem looked down on people from Galilee. This kind of attitude is characteristic of the human race. Some neighborhoods have always looked down at other neighborhoods as being on “the wrong side of the tracks.” And how do people who are looked down upon deal with it? They go looking for other people on whom they can look down. And so it goes endlessly. Though Nathanael was not from Jerusalem but from one part of Galilee, he felt he could look down on a place like Nazareth, which was considered to be in an even more backwater and primitive region of Galilee. Always there are the right people, there are the suitable people, there are the smart people, and then there are (lower your voice) those others. And the way you signal to other right, smart, and suitable people that you are one of them is to roll your eyes when the wrong people and places are mentioned.

We want others to think of us as capable and intelligent, and we often seek to establish this identity not through respectful, diligent argument but through ridicule and disdain. People are not merely mistaken but out of step, regressive, intellectual midgets. Nathanael could not believe that somebody from a place like Nazareth had the answers to the big questions of our time. “You’re telling me he’s got the answers—and he’s from Nazareth? Uh, I don’t think so.” He’s rolling his eyes. “He’s from there? Really?”

If you have this view of Christianity, or know someone who has this view of Christianity, that is no surprise. Many people today view Christianity much like Nathanael viewed Nazareth. Christianity was from Nazareth then, and it is still from Nazareth today. People love to roll their eyes at their idea of Christianity and its claims about who Christ is and what he has done and can do for them. The knowing people, the suitable people all say, “Christianity—been there, done that. I grew up with it, I realized early on it’s not for me, and I’ve made up my mind.” So Jesus is still from Nazareth.

If that is your attitude to Christianity, I have two suggestions for you, because I think you have two issues before you. The first is that this kind of dismissiveness is always deadly. It absolutely kills all creativity and problem solving, not to mention any hope of a relationship. Tara Parker-Pope, in her book on marriage called For Better, cites eye-rolling as one of the definitive warning signs that a relationship is in serious trouble. Marriage counselors look out for it because it signals contempt for the other person. A successful marriage can handle disappointment, disagreement, pain, and frustration. But it can’t handle complete dismissal of the other; contempt literally kills the relationship. A more concrete example is one where you have misplaced your keys. Once you’ve looked for them in all the places where they “can” be and haven’t found them, you’ll have to start looking in places where they “can’t” be. And of course, that’s where you’ll find them. So there’s nothing more fatal to wisdom and good relationships than rejecting certain ideas—or certain people—out of hand.

Your second issue is more substantial. By despising Christianity you sever the living taproot to what are probably many of your own core values. As we noted, Christianity originated one of the foundational ideas of peaceful civilization—that you should love your enemies, not kill them. Another idea foundational to our contemporary consciousness, as Luc Ferry points out, is the concept that every single human being, regardless of talent or wealth or race or gender, is made in God’s personal image and therefore has dignity and rights. Ferry says that without Christianity’s teaching that the Logos is a person and other doctrines, “the philosophy of human rights to which we subscribe today would never have established itself.”

Here is another view, taken for granted today, that came from the Bible—namely, that you should take care of the poor. In pre-Christian Europe, when the monks were propagating Christianity, all of the elites thought that loving your enemies and taking care of the poor was crazy. They said society would fall apart, because that’s not the way the world works. The talented and the strong prevail. The winner takes all. The strong eat the weak. The poor are born to suffer. Isn’t that how everything’s always worked? But the teachings of Christianity revolutionized pagan Europe by stressing the dignity of the person, the primacy of love including toward enemies, and the care of the poor and orphans.

You may say, “Well, that’s an interesting historical argument, that these ideas came from the Bible and the church. But I can believe in them without believing in Christianity.” That may be true at one level; but I’d like you to see that it’s a shortsighted response.

The book of Genesis is a window into what cultures were like before the revelation of the Bible. One thing we see early on is the widespread practice of primogeniture—the eldest son inherited all the wealth, which is how they ensured the family kept its status and place in society. So the second or third son got nothing, or very little. Yet all through the Bible, when God chooses someone to work through, he chooses the younger sibling. He chooses Abel over Cain. He chooses Isaac over Ishmael. He chooses Jacob over Esau. He chooses David over all eleven of his older brothers. Time after time he chooses not the oldest, not the one the world expects and rewards. Never the one from Jerusalem, as it were, but always the one from Nazareth.

Another ancient cultural tradition revealed in Genesis is that in those societies, women who had lots of children were extolled as heroic. If you had many children, that meant economic success, it meant military success, and of course it meant the odds of carrying on the family name were secure. So women who could not have children were shamed and stigmatized. Yet throughout the Bible, when God shows us how he works through a woman, he chooses the ones who cannot have children, and opens their wombs. These are despised women, but God chooses them over ones who are loved and blessed in the eyes of the world. He chooses Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Rebecca, Isaac’s wife; Samuel’s mother, Hannah; and John’s mother, Elizabeth. God always works through the men or the boys nobody wanted, through the women or girls nobody wanted.

You might be thinking how nice and uplifting this part of Christianity is—God loves underdogs. You might say to yourself, “I can agree with that part of the Bible. But all the other parts about the wrath of God and the blood of Christ and the resurrection of the body, I don’t accept.” But those parts of the Bible—the challenging, supernatural parts—are central, not peripheral. The heart of the unique message of the Bible is that the transcendent, immortal God came to earth himself and became weak, vulnerable to suffering and death. He did this all for us—all to atone for our sin, to take the punishment we deserved. If it is true, it is the most astonishing and radical act of self-giving and loving sacrifice that can be imagined. There could be no stronger basis and dynamic motivation for the revolutionary Christian ethical concepts that attract us. What made Christian ethics unique was not that Jesus and the early Christians were such nice people doing all these nice things to make the world a nice place to live. These ideas never occurred to anyone as making sense until they came to understand the Christian message about the nature of ultimate reality—and that message is summarized in what the Bible calls “the gospel.”

The essence of what makes Christianity different than every other religion and form of thought is this: Every other religion says if you want to find God, if you want to improve yourself, if you want to have higher consciousness, if you want to connect with the divine, however it is defined—you have to do this and that. You have to gather your strength, you have to keep the rules, you have to free your mind, then you have to fill your mind, and you have to be above average. Every other religion or human philosophy says if you want to make the world right, or make yourself right, then summon all your reason and your strength, and live in this way.

Christianity says the exact opposite. Every other religion and philosophy says you have to do something to connect to God; but Christianity says no, Jesus Christ came to do for you what you couldn’t do for yourself. Every other religion says, here are the answers to the big questions, but Christianity says Jesus is the answer to them all. So many systems of thought appeal to strong, successful people, because they play directly into their belief that if you are strong and hard-working enough, you will prevail. But Christianity is not just for the strong; it’s for everyone, but especially for people who admit that, where it really counts, they’re weak. It is for people who have the particular kind of strength to admit that their flaws are not superficial, their heart is deeply disordered, and that they are incapable of rectifying themselves. It is for those who can see that they need a savior, that they need Jesus Christ dying on the cross, to put them right with God.

Think about what I’ve just written. It sounds counterintuitive at best and off-putting at worst. The very genius of Christianity is that it’s not about “Here’s what you have to do to find God.” Christianity is about God coming to earth in the form of Jesus Christ, dying on the cross, to find you. That is the truly radical and unique truth that Christianity has contributed to the world. All the other revolutionary ideas about caring for the weak and needy, living for love and service instead of power and success, loving even your enemies sacrificially—all flow from the gospel itself; namely, that because of the depth of our sin, God came in the person of Jesus Christ to do what we could not do for ourselves, to save us.

Now I ask you—if you concede the source of many of your convictions, why embrace one part of the Christian teaching without accepting the other part that explains it and makes it coherent? Do not be like Nathanael. Do not let a conviction that Christianity is simply outdated or intellectually unsophisticated blind you to what it offers. Watch out for your pride and your prejudice. Be aware of contempt and dismissiveness. It is toxic in all aspects of life, but especially here at the point of asking the foundational questions.

So the first important aspect of Nathanael’s story is the problem of pride and contempt. But the second aspect is that—despite his scoffing—he has a deep underlying spiritual need. He says, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” and yet only a few moments later he is saying, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” Once Jesus begins to give him some credible evidence for who he is, Nathanael shifts allegiances very quickly—probably too quickly. (As we will see later, Jesus mildly rebukes Nathanael for not taking time to think it out.) Does this surprise you? It doesn’t surprise me.

When my wife, Kathy, and I moved to Manhattan more than twenty years ago, we wanted to start a new church. We were told that New York City was filled with the young, the ambitious, and the brilliant, and that if you started a church in Manhattan nobody would come because they all think they know better. They looked down on organized religion, we were told, and especially Christianity. Christianity, remember, is from Nazareth. They rolled their eyes at it. So nobody’s going to come. But curiously, that did not happen; today, Redeemer has more than five thousand people who regularly attend Sunday service. It is a thriving community.

The reason for all this is the same reason Nathanael changed. Underneath the loud, public assertions of skepticism there was a lot of covert spiritual searching going on. All those young, ambitious, and brilliant people wanted to look like they didn’t care too much about answering the foundational questions or that they had found them in whatever they were furiously pursuing; but underneath, they had the same need we all have, and none of us can escape. They had to look for these answers. And many found them in Christianity.

In the same way, despite all his bluster, notice that Nathanael nonetheless went with Philip to meet Jesus. Why did he do it? Like many young Jews in his generation, Nathanael was struggling with the fact that the Jews were under the boot of Rome, and they had no idea what God was doing. They were having a collective racial identity crisis. Should they be looking for a messiah? What was their future? Were they still God’s people or not? Had God rejected them? Evidently he wasn’t satisfied with the answers to these questions he got from others. He must not have been very happy with his own understanding of things and, perhaps, with his own spiritual condition. So he thought, “Maybe I should look at Nazareth, as unbelievable as that sounds.”

Students today wrestle with different forms of the big questions in life, but many of them are also unsatisfied with the answers they have gotten in the most respected schools and books and may, like Nathanael, quietly begin to investigate Jesus. A classic example of this move occurred in the life of the famous poet, W. H. Auden, who moved to Manhattan in 1939. By that time he was already a great writer, and he had abandoned his childhood faith in the Church of England, as had most of his friends in the British intellectual classes. But after World War II broke out he changed his mind, and he embraced the truth of Christianity and shocked many by going back to the church.

What happened? In his account of his spiritual renewal he observed that the novelty and shock of the Nazis in the 1940s was that they made no pretense of believing in justice and liberty for all—they attacked Christianity on the grounds that “to love one’s neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings.”1 Moreover, “the utter denial of everything liberalism had ever stood for was arousing wild enthusiasm not in some barbaric land, but in one of the most highly educated countries in Europe.” In light of all this, Auden did not believe that he could any longer assume that the values of liberalism (by which he meant freedom, reason, democracy, and human dignity) were self-evident.

If I am convinced that the highly educated Nazis are wrong, and that we highly educated English are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs? The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to. The whole trend of liberal thought has been to undermine faith in the absolute. It has tried to make reason the judge. But since life is a changing process the attempt to find human space for keeping a promise leads to the inevitable conclusion that I can break it whenever I feel it convenient. Either we serve the Unconditional, or some Hitlerian monster will supply an iron convention to do evil by.

Christianity—even for Auden, who was raised in the church—was from Nazareth. He had moved away from it as obsolete and unhelpful. But the rise of the Nazis made him see something. He believed in human rights, in liberty and freedom. But why did he? The operational principle of the natural world is that the strong eat the weak. So if it’s natural for the strong to eat the weak, and if we just got here only through the natural, unguided process of evolution, why do we suddenly turn around when the strong nations start to eat the weak nations and say, that is wrong? On what basis can we do that? On what basis can we say that genocide in the Sudan, where a strong ethnic group “eats” the weak one, is wrong? If there is no God, then my views of justice are just my opinion—so how then can we denounce the Nazis?

Auden realized that unless there was a God, he had no right to tell anybody else that his feelings or ideas were more valid than their feelings or ideas. He saw that unless there was a God, all the values we cherish are imaginary. And because he was sure they were not imaginary—that genocide was indeed absolutely wrong—he concluded that there must be a God.

Like the skeptical student Nathanael, Auden was haunted by the fact that the “right people” of his time laughed at Christianity. But his unanswered intellectual questions—about the grounding of moral values, among other matters—made him willing to look at Jesus anew. And he had the same experience that Nathanael did when he opened himself to the man from Nazareth. He believed.

In Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue, the philosopher offers the kind of reasoning that brought the poet Auden to faith. MacIntyre argues that you can never determine whether something is good or bad unless you know its telos. So he asks, for example, how can you tell whether a watch is a good one or a bad one? You have to know what its purpose is. If I try to hammer a nail with my watch, and it breaks, should I complain that it is a “bad watch”? Of course not; it wasn’t made to hammer nails. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to tell you the time at a glance. The same principle should apply to humanity. How can you say that someone is a good person or a bad person unless you know what they are designed for, what their purpose is?

Ah, but wait. What if you say, “I don’t know if there is a God or not, and I don’t think human beings were designed for anything.” Do you see your dilemma now? If you believe that, you should never speak about good or bad people again. If you believe we have no design or purpose, and you still say to some people, “You are not living right—you are doing wrong,” then you are being inconsistent or disingenuous.

I cannot prove that Christianity is true. But I can show you there are good and excellent reasons to believe in Jesus. If you, like Nathanael, are willing to admit the depth of your need to discover better answers to the big questions than you are getting, and if you are willing to stop rolling your eyes at Christianity, I invite you to consider the man who came from Nazareth. Considering the world-changing ideas that have come from there, there is no good reason not to.

The third aspect of Nathanael’s story to examine is the prescription Jesus gives him to meet his need. Jesus says two things to Nathanael when he meets him.

First he refers to him as an Israelite “in whom there is nothing false.” For Jesus to say that Nathanael was a transparent, straight-talking person was probably putting it rather nicely. Others might have characterized Nathanael as abrasive. Probably a lot of people didn’t like him because he was so outspoken and was always stepping on people’s toes. But Jesus shows us something about himself here. He can see us to the bottom but is nonetheless gentle with us. Nathanael is surprised at his insight (and maybe his generosity of spirit) and asks, How do you know me so well?

And then Jesus slips in, “I saw you under the fig tree.” Now, parenthetically, one of the reasons we can trust that this is an eyewitness account is that nowhere else are we ever told what was happening under the fig tree or why it was significant. And if you’re making up a fictional story you don’t do that, because it doesn’t move the plot forward and raises distracting issues for readers. So what was Nathanael doing under the fig tree? Nobody knows. All that matters is that Nathanael couldn’t believe that Jesus knew about it. It was so private, so significant, so astounding to him that Jesus would know that and still affirm him. He says, “You are the king of Israel! You are the Messiah!”

And Jesus gently rebukes him. He says, Oh, first you were too skeptical, and now you’re ready to adopt me; but I haven’t even begun to talk to you about who I really am. Yesterday you were rolling your eyes, and today you’ve had an emotional experience. You’ve found a man who has supernatural knowledge of you. But slow down; don’t be so impressed by appearances. You really still don’t understand who I am.

Jesus’ disciple Thomas, after the resurrection, tells the other disciples, I’m not going to believe that he was raised from the dead until I see the nail prints in his hands and put my finger in them. When Jesus then appears to Thomas he does not say, How dare you question me? He says, Here, look. Now stop doubting and start believing. In other words, Jesus says, I like the fact that you expect to get reasons to believe in me, and I’ll give you reasons because you’re looking for them in good faith. Jesus is not against people thinking. In fact he’s insisting that Nathanael do a little more thinking.

And therefore, if you’re skeptical about Christianity, I would like you to realize that you have a balance to strike. First, to remain skeptical forever is intellectually and morally self-defeating. On the other hand, surrendering to the first idea that you hope will solve your deep emotional needs will not help answer any questions for you. It’s not enough to turn to Christianity simply because it meets some perceived needs. Christianity is not a consumer good. You should turn to it only if it is true.

Did you notice the last thing Jesus says to Nathanael? He says, “You believe because of that? I tell you the truth, you shall see angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” See, when you first come to Jesus you think, I’m probably not going to get answers to the big questions, but maybe he’ll help me be a better person; maybe he’ll deal with my loneliness or some other problem. You always come to Jesus hedging your bets, staying guarded as to whether you’ll get your needs met.

But when you actually find him, he’ll always be far more than you ever imagined him to be. When he says that Nathanael will see angels ascending and descending on the son of man, he’s referring to the story in the Old Testament where Jacob falls asleep and sees a ladder between Earth and Heaven, and angels ascending and descending on the ladder. Angels are a sign of the royal presence of God. Because people have turned from God and have destroyed one another, there’s a slab, as it were, between Heaven and Earth. A wall between the ideal and the real. But Jacob has this vision, this dream that somehow, someday there will be a connection between Heaven and Earth, and there will be some way to get into the very presence of God. And here Jesus makes the incredible claim that he is that way. He is the Logos of the universe, the bridge between Heaven and Earth.

You can almost hear Jesus laugh as he responds to Nathanael. He says, in effect, “Oh my! You think I’m the Messiah. You probably think I’m going to get on a horse and throw down the Roman oppressors. But I’m going to show you far greater things than that. Doing that would not change the whole human condition, defeat evil and death, and renew the world. I tell you, I am the axis mundi. I have punched a hole in the slab between Heaven and Earth. Through my incarnation as a human being, and through my death on the cross, which you haven’t even seen yet, I can bring you right into the presence of God.”

Though most spiritual seekers start their search afraid of disappointment, Jesus says that he will always be infinitely more than anyone is looking for. He will always exceed our expectations, he will be more than we can ask for or imagine.

So shed your prejudices and come look along with Nathanael. Come look and talk about Jesus with your friends. Come and be ready to have your priorities and categories changed. Whatever you are expecting, whatever you are hoping, whatever you are dreaming—you will discover something much greater in Nazareth.