The Savior Ate with Sinners

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Transcript:

Do you know any people that just seem to think they’re better than everybody else? They’re not fun to be around, are they? They think they’re better than everybody else.

They think everybody’s beneath them. It’s really not fun to realize, though, that sometimes all of us fall into that category, or maybe it’s just me, but I think a lot of us fall into that category from time to time. My mother used to say, why don’t you save yourself the aggravation and shop at Target?

and I’d tell her I like going to Walmart because I always feel better about myself. Some of y’all are laughing, some of y’all are looking at me like, oh, that’s terrible. You thought the same thing.

It is wrong. We all have those moments, though, where we think we’re better than somebody. Hopefully they’re isolated moments and hopefully we repent of that quickly when we realize it.

But I think we all at times have the tendency to think, oh, thank goodness I’m not like that person over there. You see, there was a whole group of people in the scriptures that that seemed to be the reason why they got up in the morning, was to get up in the morning and not be like those people over there. And I’m talking about the Pharisees.

You know, they even used to pray a prayer. I can’t remember the exact wording of it, but they’d pray every day thanking God they weren’t women or tax collectors or other people that they considered less than them. Now, think about the audacity there of getting up every morning and saying, Lord, thank you.

Lord, thank you that I’m not like Louise. I just had to point you out. We’re glad you’re here today.

Lord, thank you that I’m not like those people over there. I mean, think about that. Is that really how you want to spend your time talking to God, putting other people down?

We’ve got plenty of stuff that we need to ask God for and that we need to praise God about, but no, none of the Pharisees wanted to take that time to brag to God about how good they were because they were not that group of people over there. Like God was going to be impressed with that. And we see this group of people and that superior their attitude spilled over into every interaction they had with somebody else.

This morning we’re going to look at one of these interactions in Luke chapter 5, if you haven’t already turned there with me. Luke chapter 5, we’re going to look at how the Pharisees were this, on the one side, thought they were better than everybody else and thought they were too good to need Jesus. And they’re looking down their noses at these other people who realized they need Jesus but probably thought they were too bad to have Jesus.

And we see the way these two groups of people interact with each other and with Jesus. And I think there’s a lot that we can learn from it for our lives today. Luke chapter 5, starting in verse 27.

Just going to look at a few verses this morning. Luke chapter 5, starting in verse 27. After these things, he, meaning Jesus, went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, follow me.

Now this is Jesus. He passes by where Levi is seated. Levi is also known as Matthew.

So this is the apostle Matthew that he’s talking about. He sees him sitting there doing his business as the tax collector, and walks up by him and says, come follow me. And so he left all, verse 28, he left all, rose up, and followed him.

Now it’s amazing, first of all, that Jesus would call a tax collector to follow him, because they were not considered good people. They especially were looked down on by the religious establishment. I mean, they were on the same level, as far as the Pharisees were concerned, tax collectors were on the same level as prostitutes.

They were just people you didn’t associate with. And not only that, but this is a tax collector who at that very moment is there doing what he does at his tax office, at his booth or building, whatever it was. He was there at the place where he collected his taxes and Jesus walks up to him in the midst of his activity that makes him so objectionable to the Pharisees.

And Jesus says to this human garbage the Pharisees would have considered him and says, you, come follow me. And just as incredible is the fact that this backslidden man, this backslidden Jewish man, gets up and does it. He drops everything to go follow Jesus.

It says in verse 28, he left all, rose up, and followed him. Verse 29 says, then Levi gave him a great feast in his own house, and there were a great number of tax collectors and others who sat down with him. Now, Levi throws a feast, and it says, for Jesus.

Once Levi or Matthew, once he meets Jesus, once Jesus introduces himself to Levi, and Levi is so excited to meet him, and there’s this change that takes place in him, once this happens, he is so excited that he cannot keep it to himself, and wants to introduce as many people as he can from his circle of friends, from his walk of life, wants to introduce as many of them as he can to Jesus so they can know Jesus the way he’s come to know Jesus. So what does he do? He throws a party of tax collectors.

It says in verse 29, tax collectors and others. Now the Pharisees go on later to refer to them as tax collectors and sinners. So what you have when it says tax collectors and others is just an assortment of all kinds of sinners.

You go to the wrong side of the tracks, you go to the underworld of their society at that time, and you find, you scrape the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, for all the people you can find. And he gathers as many of those people as he can to bring them to his house to introduce them to Jesus. Now, if there was one of those kinds of parties going on in Seminole today, you and I probably wouldn’t attend, would we?

Imagine all the tax collectors. I don’t want to hang out with them. Imagine all the prostitutes in town and the drug dealers in town and the drunks in town and the fighters in town and just all the people with a bad reputation.

They’re getting together for a party. If you consider yourself too respectable, you’re not going to show up for something like that. But Jesus came to this party.

Jesus went to Levi’s house. We’ve got to always keep in mind to understand why Jesus does the things that he does in the Gospels. We’ve got to keep in mind his mission that he stated in Luke 19.

10, I have come to seek and to save that which was lost. Jesus didn’t come to show off. He didn’t need to show off. He’s God in human flesh.

He didn’t need to prove anything to us. He didn’t need to show us how great he was. He didn’t need to brag about how holy he was.

Anybody that was around him could see how holy he was. His mission was to seek and to save sinners. And by doing that, he’s glorified.

By doing that, we see who he really is. So he goes to this party. The other religious leaders and the other religious people in town would not have done this.

But Jesus did, and they can’t understand why. It says, There were a great number of tax collectors and others who sat down with them, and their scribes and the Pharisees complained, verse 30, complained against his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? I know I read it in a fairly monotone voice, but I always picture them gasping.

Why would you eat with those people? Clutching at their pearls and just acting horrified that Jesus would sit down and eat with this kind of people. Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?

You know, I think the Pharisees really didn’t understand, or they’d forgotten, or they just chose not to understand, that they were also sinners. Somehow that memo had missed them, because for them the sinners were always the people over there. So we need to understand, even as the religious crowd in town, that the sinners are not the people out there.

The sinners are the people in the mirror. So they said, why do you eat and drink with these people? Verse 31, Jesus answered and said to them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.

What he’s saying there is healthy people don’t need a doctor. Now you may be sitting there saying, well, what about checkups? All right, I don’t think they had that back then.

I don’t think they were real big on preventative medicine. You didn’t have an urgent need to rush out and see a doctor if you’re totally healthy, right? But if you’re sick, if you’re sick and you realize how sick you are, and you start to get a little scared about it, it starts to become serious business for you, then you rush out and you can’t wait to get to a doctor.

Today is not soon enough. You want to see them yesterday. Jesus said it’s not healthy people that have that urgent need for the doctor.

It’s sick people. And he says in verse 32, I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. When you think about Jesus’ mission, they’re asking, Jesus, why do you eat with those people?

Well, when you think about his mission, where in the world else would he be? That would be like the doctor, the emergency room physician, spending all of his time hanging out with really healthy people. At that point, he’s not doing what he was trained to do, is he?

He’s not doing what his mission is to do, which is to take care of those who are sick. Jesus didn’t come to hang around really holy people. By the way, there aren’t any.

And that fact was lost again on the Pharisees. Jesus came to earth to spend time with sinners. And we need to make sure we understand this.

Because in our world today, the thought is, you know, Jesus would have hung out with sinners. Jesus wouldn’t have been like the people in the church. Okay, there’s some truth to that.

But what the world often means when they say things like that is, Jesus would have been okay with whatever anybody wanted to do over here. You know, you’re going at a party getting drunk, Jesus would be right there with you. Patting you on the back saying, whatever you want to do is fine.

You’re having affairs, Jesus doesn’t judge you for that. you name the sin and the world wants to say because Jesus was loving and spent time with sinners that he was okay with everything they did but Jesus didn’t say I came to spend time with sinners he said I have come to call sinners to repentance and we’ll get into that a little bit more in a moment but that word repentance means a change of mind Jesus hear me on this Jesus loves you what whatever your sin is this morning whatever sin it is you’re struggling with if you’re not if you’re a believer, whatever sin you’re still struggling with to get victory over, if you’re not a believer, whatever sin it is that is holding you back from trusting Jesus as your Savior, hear me on this, that Jesus loves you no matter what your sin is.

Jesus loves you for who you are, for who he created you to be, and he loves you right now wherever you are. But the other side of that coin is Jesus loves you way too much to leave you the way he found you. When sin is destructive to our lives and sin is detrimental to our relationship with God, Jesus looks at us and he loves us far too much to leave us there.

You know, Charlie will call me in some days after Charlie’s had lunch. And Charlie Charlie doesn’t just have lunch. Lunch has Charlie.

Some of y’all have had little kids. You understand. saying, Benjamin and Madeline have kind of grown out of this a little bit, but we have to strip Charlie down to a diaper a lot of times at mealtime and strap him in at the table.

And I’m a little bit of a germaphobe, for those of you who didn’t know. And I’ll come in, because usually he eats before the rest of us do at lunchtime, and I’ve been working in my office, and Charlie will say, can you come get him cleaned up? Which sometimes entails as a baby wipe or six, and sometimes entails I have to go throw him in the shower.

And I’ll come in there and he’ll just be covered head to toe for everything from his eyebrows down with macaroni and cheese residue. And it just makes me sick to look at. And I look beneath that crusty exterior of macaroni and cheese and look at him holding out his greasy hands at me and I’m like, oh, don’t touch my clothes.

and I love my son even through that cheesy exterior I love my son but I have no intention of leaving him in the filth I found him in no no we’re headed to the shower and he’s getting cleaned up folks that’s exactly how Jesus feels toward us toward sinners he loves us wherever he finds us he loves us no matter what we’ve been into but that doesn’t mean he affirms whatever choice we’ve made. He loves us too much to leave us in the filth that he found us in. So when the world says, oh, Jesus is kind and loving and Jesus was accepting of sinners, yes, in a sense, that’s true.

But Jesus didn’t come to leave us in our sins either. So Jesus loves, folks, Jesus loves the drunkard. Jesus loves the gossip.

Jesus loves the adulterer and the homosexual. Jesus loves the prostitute Jesus loves the drug dealer you fill in the blanks whatever it may be Jesus loves them Jesus loves you but Jesus also came to call you to repentance to call us to repentance to change our minds to bring us into a right relationship with God to leave those things behind so that we can have life and have it more abundantly not to be bound up by this sin that eats us up and destroys us but so that we could have abundant life in fellowship with the God who made us. So that’s what he says to the Pharisees. He says, I haven’t come to deal with the healthy people.

That’s not where the doctor goes. He goes to where the people are sick. To think of it in terms we would understand from the last week, the emergency responders didn’t come and conduct search and rescue operations in Seminole.

They didn’t come and spend time with us. They didn’t come and have coffee with us at McDonald’s at 6 o’clock in the morning here and just hang out and shoot the breeze where everybody was safe from the storms. No, the first responders went where there were people needing to be dragged out of the rubble of a motel in El Reno. Jesus didn’t come to hang out with people who were perfect. Jesus came to call sinners to repentance.

And what we need to take from this story is that none of us, as he’s talking to the Pharisees, none of us are too good to need Christ. And on the other hand, none of us are too bad to have Christ. See, the Pharisees thought they were too good to need Christ. Oh, we’re good. We’re not like those sinners. But here’s the thing Jesus said in Matthew chapter 5, verse 20.

Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. So Jesus looked at these good, in quotation marks, good religious people, these upstanding, these pillars of the community, these people who just thought they had it all together. He looked at them and said, you’ve got to be better than that, or you’re not getting in.

And none of us are better than the Pharisees. None of us can keep the law as well as the Pharisees, but even they couldn’t do it perfectly. Because even if they had the outward aspects of the law, even if they could behave right and keep those outward aspects of the law fulfilled, where the law spoke to the condition of the heart, they were rotten to the core.

See, we’ve all got sin in our hearts. He said, you’ve got to be better than the scribes and the Pharisees. When you get right down to it, God’s standard is absolute sinless perfection.

Unless we can do that, we don’t get into heaven. We don’t get into his kingdom. Certainly not on our own.

Unless we have absolute sinless perfection, we are not too good to need Jesus. And some people sit in church year after year, decade after decade, and never actually put their faith in Jesus Christ because they’re putting their faith in, well, I’m just good enough. I go to church.

I tithe. I follow the law. My kids behave.

I’m living a good life. That’ll be good enough. No, God says you’ve got to do better than that.

It’s sinless perfection or nothing. You’ve got to be better than the scribes and Pharisees. So they thought they were too good to need Christ, and the tax collectors were separated from God by their sin.

See, the tax collectors and the others that were with them, they were sinners, and that sin separates us from God. The thing is, though, the Pharisees were separated from God, too. The only difference between the tax collectors and the Pharisees when it came to sin is that the tax collectors knew they were separated from God.

the tax collectors recognized it. So in terms of being restored to God, the tax collectors were in a better position. It was going to be easier to reconcile the tax collectors to God than the Pharisees, because once forgiveness was offered, the tax collectors knew they needed it and wanted to take it.

The Pharisees didn’t think they needed it and wouldn’t have been inclined to take it. That’s why you see way more of what we call the sinful people coming to trust Christ during his ministry than the religious people. Folks, they all had the same sin.

They all had the same sin sickness. We all suffer from the same sin sickness today, and we all need the same cure, but only those who acknowledge the need, only those who admit they’re sick and acknowledge the need for the cure are going to find it. Because only those who acknowledge that they are sick are going to go see the doctor.

Now men have a bad reputation about this, don’t we? Wife says, you need to go see the doctor. I’m fine.

You’ve got a tumor on the side of your head the size of a basketball. I’m fine. Stick some duct tape on it, it’s fine.

That’s us a lot of the time. I go once a year for a checkup so I can tell Charla, You know that if I’m really in a bad situation, I’m going to go see the doctor. This is fine.

I think it’s my way of getting out of the constant. You need to go see the doctor about this. I’m fine.

And sometimes men, we really will think we’re fine. Or we’ll convince ourselves we’re fine, and so we won’t go see the doctor. You know when we start to get better?

When we finally acknowledge, wait a minute, something’s wrong here, and I can’t fix this, and we go see the doctor. That’s why Jesus used these two explanations. The sick man won’t become well unless he admits his sickness and goes to see the physician.

Jesus said, I didn’t come to deal with healthy people. The physician came to deal with sick people. And by the same terms, the sin sick man won’t become well unless he admits his sin sickness and goes to see the great physician.

You and I are sick with sin. The Pharisees wouldn’t acknowledge it. And so they were destined to stay sick until they did.

The tax collectors realized they had a sin problem and were willing to go see Jesus. So, back to their question, why do you eat with these people? Of course, Jesus spent time with sinners.

Because sinners are the only people who need a Savior. You don’t need a Savior unless you’re a sinner. You don’t need Jesus unless you’re a sinner.

But folks, if you’re a sinner, there’s no alternative. There’s one cure and there’s one great physician. That’s Jesus who came to pay for our sins and fall on the cross.

he came to spend time with sinners because sinners need a savior. And so we see in verse 27 that one of the first people he called in his ministry was this great sinner, this tax collector named Levi. And he called him in verse 27 to come and follow him.

Now we know what follow means. I went and looked at the word in the Greek. And the way it’s constructed means to take the same road.

What he’s saying, and I think that just makes it all the clearer for us what he was talking about. Jesus, when he said, follow me, he’s saying, come take the road I take and let me lead. He’s not saying, follow me, like we would follow somebody on Twitter or Facebook, or we just check in with them every once in a while and see what they’re up to.

He’s saying, come take the same road, walk in my steps. It’s sort of like that song, Good King Wenceslaus, that we sing at Christmas, but we have no idea what it’s about. And he’s talking about going and finding firewood, I think.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard the song. But he tells the young man, walk in my steps. The snow is deep, and it’s frigid, and it’s cold, so walk in my steps, and you’ll find it easier.

Jesus was telling Levi, come walk in my footsteps. Come take the same road I’m headed down, and let me lead you. And when he called Levi to do this, this was a term that was used when somebody was supposed to drop everything and become a student under a particular master or rabbi.

And it required Levi to drop everything, and that’s exactly what he did. Because it says in verse 28, he left all, rose up, and followed him. Now this is incredible, because you see some people in the Gospels who were religious, that when Jesus said, follow me, they said, well, we’ve got to take care of all this stuff.

We’ve got to tie up loose ends. And Jesus said, no, if you’re not willing to drop all this stuff and follow me, you’re not worthy to follow me. It was Levi, the tax collector, the sin-sick tax collector, who recognized, had to have recognized, how separated, how distant he was from God.

It was that man who said, you know what? There’s no alternative. I’m dropping everything, and I’m going to go follow Jesus.

and it’s not only that but he appears to have invited everybody he knew I love that I love the zeal of a new convert you know sometimes we get to be Christians for several years and we start to get self-conscious about it you know what I’m talking about get a little self-conscious we start to get nervous about talking to people about Jesus Thursday we were doing Bible class and my son asked me it was a lesson about Solomon had nothing to do with the gospel but somehow he brought the conversation back around to the gospel. He said, how do I tell people about Jesus? I said, well, we can do a lesson about that.

He said, but I want to know now. I don’t know who he’s got in mind that he’s wanting to tell about Jesus. I said, okay, we’ll do that.

So we didn’t do PE. We had an evangelism class. He’s a new convert, about two years.

You know, it was conversations with him as much as with us that led Madeline to start asking questions. Benjamin, they’d be in there playing Legos or whatever they’re allowed to play together that they don’t throw around the room together. They’d be sitting in there playing, and Benjamin would start sharing the gospel with her.

The zeal of a new convert, I love it. That’s what Levi was doing. All the people I know, they need to know about Jesus.

He didn’t care what anybody thought. I think we need to get to that point where we realize we’re not upstanding pillars of the community. We don’t have it all together.

We’re sinners like the tax collector, and it shouldn’t matter to us what anybody else thinks. I’ve heard several times in the last month that sharing the gospel is just one beggar telling another beggar where they found bread. We need to get to that perspective.

We’re excited to tell other sinners where they can find the forgiveness that we found. That’s what he did. He wanted his friends to come and meet Jesus as well.

When somebody is truly transformed by Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the preaching of the gospel, they cannot keep it a secret. It’s going to come spilling out of them eventually. So what happened here in Levi’s life?

It was repentance. It’s repentance. The explanation I give for the word repentance is that it’s a change of mind towards sin and toward God that compels us to receive his mercy.

I had a friend call me yesterday and somehow or another we got on the subject of repentance. And so many people believe that repentance means turning from your sin. And then when we say salvation requires repentance and faith, people get the idea, I have to get my life cleaned up before I can come to Christ. If you could get your life cleaned up before you came to Christ, you wouldn’t need to come to Christ, all right?

Repentance doesn’t say, I’m going to never sin again and I’m going to do better and God, don’t you love me now because I’ve made this promise I’m going to do better. God knows eventually we’re going to slip up again. All right?

God is not under any illusions about this and thinks, oh, good, suddenly they’re sin-free. Let’s let them come to Jesus now. No, no. Repentance does not mean turning from our sin.

The Greek word for repentance is metanoia, and it means a change of mind. It means a change of mind. So here’s how we illustrate this.

The natural sinner sins and says, God, I don’t care what you want. I want to do this. I know you hate it, but tough, because I hate you and I love this and this is what I’m going to do, and you deal with it.

Whether we ever say those words or not, that’s our attitude as a natural sinner. As a repentant sinner, we look at our sin, we look at the things that we do, and we say, God, you’re right, this is wrong, this is terrible, why did I do this? God, I’m so sorry.

And we may turn around and do it again at some point. It may be one of those people say, oh, if you’re repentant, you’ll never do the same thing again. Baloney.

the Apostle Paul the Apostle Paul said the things that I would do I don’t do and the things that I wouldn’t I shouldn’t do I do anyway oh wretched man that I am but see that’s repentance it doesn’t mean you stop sinning repentance means you get on the same page with God and you acknowledge that that sin is wrong you learn to hate that sin even as it wells up within you you hate your own sin and you deal with God about it and you seek his forgiveness the unrepentant natural sinner says, I don’t care what God wants. And the repentant sinner says, God, I am so sorry. The repentant sinner has changed their mind toward God.

And you know what? I don’t want to leave you with the idea that, oh, I can sin however much I want as long as I hate it. No, God uses that change in our desires to change us and grow us.

And repentance will lead us to turn from sin. That’s a very important distinction. Repentance will lead us to turn from sin.

Turning from sin is a result of repentance. It’s the result of repentance over a period of years sometimes, but the actual repentance itself is a change of mind toward God and toward that sin. To where instead of wallowing in that sin before, as a natural sinner, the repentant sinner hates the sin and struggles against it and fights against it.

Sometimes we win. Sometimes by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, we have victory. Sometimes because of the weakness of our flesh, we give in.

But the repentant sinner is on the same page with God and agrees with God and struggles against that sin. And when we’re repentant, when we realize, when we change our mind and realize how awful our sin is and that God is right and we’re wrong, At that point, we recognize there’s a problem here and we need forgiveness. See, you can’t really separate repentance and faith.

They’re different, but they go together like a hand in glove. See, it’s repentance that shows us our need for salvation. And it’s repentance that compels us to put our faith in Jesus Christ to receive God’s mercy.

So we see that Levi was repentant here. his life was his thinking began to change and he began to bring others to Jesus and if the Pharisees were sinners too why didn’t they repent in the same way as Levi did and part of it is because they were too satisfied in their own self-righteousness to realize their spiritual need they got to a point where in their religion they thought oh we’re so good all they could see were the things they were doing outwardly, and it blinded them to the sin on the inside because they thought, I’m good enough. God has to accept me.

They were self-righteous, and it made them think, I don’t need God. What do I need to be repentant about? I’m not like that person.

I’m not like those sinners. Folks, there is nothing more deadly to our spiritual condition than for us to believe we are so good we don’t need God’s forgiveness. I heard Adrian Rogers say a few weeks ago.

He said it years ago. He’s dead now, but I heard it on the radio a few weeks ago where Adrian Rogers said, the worst form of human badness is human goodness when it becomes a substitute for the new birth. The worst thing we can do is put our trust in our own goodness.

There is nothing so deadly to our spiritual condition than when we get so religious that we think we are so good we don’t need God’s forgiveness. See, Jesus didn’t come to call the righteous. He didn’t come to deal with perfect people.

He came to call sinners to repentance. And this call still applies to us today. This call didn’t have an expiration date on it.

And when we look at his dealings with the tax collectors and the Pharisees, we need to remember, as I said at the beginning of this message, that none of us are too good to need Christ, and none of us are too bad to have Christ. See, don’t sit here this morning and let your goodness, or your religious deeds, or the fact that you’ve gone to church for decades or that you’ve been a pillar of the community, don’t let that convince you. Don’t let that delude you into thinking you don’t need God’s forgiveness. I’ve got nothing to repent for.

I’ve lived a pretty good life. I’m better than others. Jesus said you’ve got to be better than the Pharisees.

Don’t let your goodness delude you into thinking you’re too good to need Jesus Christ. Even their righteousness was not enough. So if you’re sitting here this morning and you’ve been a moral person, you’ve been a part of the church for years and years, but you’ve never trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, you are not too good to need Him. See, we’ve all sinned, and that sin separates us from God, and that sin will separate us from God all through this life and into the next until we spend eternity separated from Him in hell.

There will be a lot of good, moral people in hell, because in spite of their goodness and their morality, they weren’t perfect, they weren’t sinless, and they were never willing to acknowledge their need. They were never willing to agree with God about the sin that they did have. Folks, don’t let that be you.

If you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, I’d invite you to do so this morning. If you’re here this morning and you’re thinking you’re too far gone, maybe you’re not t