Pastor Russell Johnson opened the Like Never Before series with the movie cameo, the famous face that flashes on screen and disappears. He said that is how Gentiles looked in Israel's story: Rahab, Ruth, Naaman, Nineveh, rare. Then Jesus arrives and the cameos become regular cast. In John 4:4, the word behind "had to pass through Samaria" is not geography. John uses it for divine necessity, the same compulsion behind the Son of Man being lifted up. Samaria was not a detour. It was the destination. Devout Jews would add days to their journey to avoid that ground, carrying centuries of contempt back to the Assyrian resettlement of 722 BC and the rival temple on Mount Gerizim. Jesus went straight through, sat down tired at Jacob's well at noon, and asked a Samaritan woman with five husbands behind her for a drink. Samaritan, woman, sinner: three walls, walked through on purpose. Pastor Russell showed this was always God's heart, from Genesis 12:3 to Isaiah 49:6, but in the Old Testament grace flowed through the nation. Now God sits on the well Himself. He closed with the first two pastors of Faith Bible Church, Bill Elkins and Dave Anderson, and fifty years of grace now handed forward.

Elder Greg Cryer closed the series with the road his family traveled up the mountain to Turpin, Haiti, more than ten years ago. It had a destination and it had been cleared, but it was never paved, and the ride was all ruts and gravel and dust. He said many of us travel the Christian life the same way: Father and Son, but no Spirit. Working from Ephesians 2:8-10 and the good works God prepared beforehand, Greg walked three stops. First, I am secure. John 1:12-13 gives us a birthright as children of God, and Ephesians 1:13 says the Spirit seals us. Satan's lie is that we are insecure. Second, I am significant. 1 Corinthians 12 says the Spirit gifts each of us for the common good, and no gift outranks another. Here the lie sends us to people, circumstances, or self instead of Christ. Third, I am dependent. 2 Corinthians 12:9 says power is perfected in weakness, and we resist that because independence lets us keep control. Drawing on Dr. Bill Yarger's Biblical View of You, Greg said we can never earn God's love or lose it.

Pastor Russell Johnson opened with Fletcher Reede in the 1997 film Liar Liar, a man who cannot make his hand write a lie about the pen he is holding. He said Romans 7 runs the same way in reverse: we want to do right and find ourselves doing the opposite. Turning to Romans 8:1-8, Pastor Russell traced a tightly argued chain. The word behind "no condemnation" points less to the verdict than to the sentence being carried out, and the old sentence is the one Ephesians 2:1-3 describes. We have been pardoned, yet we keep showing up at the old prison asking for our old cell. Verse 2 answers with a higher law, the law of the Spirit of life, and verse 3 with a Son sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that verse 4 can call us to walk rather than work. Using a doll held down by gravity and lifted by balloons, Pastor Russell pictured prayer, Scripture, worship, and community tied on one at a time. Romans 8:5-8 gives the mechanism: setting the mind. Borrowing an image from Jonathan Haidt, whom he was careful not to endorse, he described a rider on an elephant. We do not wrestle the elephant. We aim it, daily, until desire follows.