Yesterday on Things Unseen, we started talking about knowing Christ, and I was saying at

the end that our access to that knowledge is really through the pages of the New Testament.

Well, we can't handle the whole New Testament in a week.

We need a focus.

So here's a focus that our Lord himself used to help his disciples.

Do you remember his questions at Caesarea Philippi?

Here's the way Luke puts it.

Who do the crowd say that I am? And the disciples answered John or Elijah or one of the

prophets, and then Jesus asked them a more direct question, but who do you say I am? I think it's

interesting, isn't it, that the crowds didn't say simply, well, he's Jesus, he's Jesus of Nazareth. That would have been true,

and they knew it. But there was something about Jesus that made people look for a different

category of answer. It seems that everyone Jesus encountered during his public ministry felt

that. His name was Jesus, but there was something bigger about his identity.

His opponents wished he could have just been described as Jesus. Pontius Pilate probably thought

that, but remember he felt compelled to ask, tell me who you really are.

Everyone who met him sensed they needed to reach beyond their ordinary ways of describing someone

if they were to discover who Jesus really was.

They were intrigued by him.

He was like one of his own parables.

There was a mystery about him, a puzzle about him, that

many of them were trying to solve but couldn't. But back to Jesus' question, to the disciples,

Who do you say that I am? Remember how Peter blurted out the right answer. Jesus is the

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