Everything in our lives comes down to relationships

• Family, friends, coworkers, cousins, neighbors, and with God.

o Your relationships can even determine how content you feel, how satisfied you
are in life, even if you love your job or not

 Examples… horrible boss, rough marriage, friendship that is falling apart.

o So much in life comes back to one thing… relationships.

 We believe this. If you live out the Biblical truths we will be talking about
in this series, it will affect every single relationship in your life. In a big
way.

o Relationships aren’t always easy and they can even be overlooked…

 It is so easy for us to overlook people in our everyday lives
because we are the most distracted generation to ever walk
the planet

o A lot of times, I think we can get stuck and we see our relationships more as
transactions. What can I get out of it?

 How can this person help me? How can they help me get what I want?
How can I use them and lose them?

 We see this in movies all the time… people get used and abused, all just to
climb the corporate ladder. People are transactions and there is nothing
intentional about relationships.

o Today is about moving them from transactional to intentional.

Main:
 But, why?
o If someone is a jerk to me, if someone is different than me, why not just look past
them? Why not just ignore them and not deal with them?

 Isn’t that what we kind of do in our culture today anyway? If someone is
different or we share different opinions, we just ignore them. Or we block
them on social media.

 It is possible today for us to insulate ourselves with people that look, talk,
think, and act like us.

o That’s also so much easier to do in life than being intentional with people.
However…

 If you love Jesus, He has set the bar pretty high and calls us to a higher standard.
o Read Matthew 5:43-48

o Jesus calls us to be different from the people around us.

 He calls you to love people you wouldn’t normally want to love.

 He calls us to love people that might not ever thank you for it.

 He tells us that being his follower means we are going to show love to the
people in our lives that we wouldn’t normally think to love.

 It’s also, not about what you’re going to get out of loving someone,
it’s about loving people because that’s what Jesus did and would
do.

 We often only show love to the people where we know there will be a
return on the investment.

 Why? Because it’s easy.

o But, what about everyone else? What about all the other people in your life that
can be easily overlooked?

 Read Luke 19:1-2

o Zacchaeus, was the chief tax collector. Not only that he had become very rich.
 He was the guy that oversaw all the tax collectors that took money from
the Jewish people and gave it to the Roman government. So he was not
very well liked.

o When people would have seen Zacchaeus, they would have just walked past him.
No intent one becoming friends. No intent on striking up conversation. They
would have looked right past him. Yet, here comes Jesus.

 Jesus was intentional with those that were overlooked.

o Read Luke 19:3-5

 Are there people in your life that maybe do things that seem odd,
out of place, embarrassing, that you immediately overlook because
of how they act?

 But that’s not Jesus…

 Jesus recognized Zacchaeus. Jesus saw potential in Zacchaeus. Jesus saw
past his flaws and didn’t care how others may have looked at him.

o Jesus was the friend of the overlooked. Jesus sets the example for us to…
 Show love to the overlooked people in your life.

o Read Luke 19:6-10

 So how can you love the overlooked around you?

o Read James 2:14-18

 Be the kind of friend you need.

o We have Zacchaeus’ all around us
 At the store, gas station, grocery store bagger, your barber
 In a culture that moves so quickly and is so distracted, there are
people overlooked all around us.

o Being the kind of friend that we all need to those around us, especially
being a friend to those that are easily overlooked in our culture isn’t
always going to make sense…

 Read Luke 19:7

 These people were so mad that Jesus would “waste” his time on
someone that culture had deemed unfriendable.
 But it was through Jesus being the exact kind of friend that
Zacchaeus needed, we see his life transformed.