Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 5:27-39, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 9
- Date: Sunday, March 9, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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A Transformation from the Inside Out
As a history fan, I grew up fascinated by the White House. As a child, I thought I would love to grow up and live there someday. Now it just seems like a headache. I’m no longer interested in that, any more than you would be interested in my living there.
But I remain fascinated by its history, and one thing many people do not realize is that it is not exactly the same building that has stood there for more than two hundred years. That building has been rebuilt multiple times. The first time was when the British torched it during the War of 1812. One of the more recent times it was rebuilt started back in the 40s.
There were stories of Truman’s daughter playing the piano while its legs began sinking through the floor. They realized it was a serious problem when furniture began falling through the floor. So they realized, we need to do something about it. Congress appropriated a few hundred thousand dollars for remodeling.
Once the work began, they realized it would cost millions. They essentially had to gut the entire structure, leaving little more than the exterior, and rebuild it from the ground up and from the inside out. That makes me feel better about starting a project and having to make fifty-six trips to Lowe’s. It’s never been quite on the scale of what they got in there and found out they were going to have to do.
They realized that a remodel, some redecoration, and a few cosmetic improvements would not be enough. They had to completely gut and transform the inside of the building. What we see today is a house whose outer shell has stood since John Adams was president, though additional work has been done since then. That’s a long time ago. None of us was alive when John Adams was president.
The shell of that building has been there, and we look at it and think that’s the same building. But if you go inside, it’s been completely transformed. That’s what Jesus does in the lives of sinners. We may have the same body that we had before. We may look the same on the outside.
To someone who knew us before Jesus and knows us afterward, we may look the same on the outside. But Jesus does not come merely to remodel or redecorate us. Jesus completely transforms us from the ground up and from the inside out. As we continue our study of Luke, we are going to see how Jesus transforms the life of a sinner.
We are in Luke chapter 5, looking at the end of the chapter. Throughout the passage, Luke uses the name Levi, but this is the same person we more commonly know as Matthew. Here’s what Luke says.
After that, He went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth, and He said to him, “Follow Me.” And he left everything behind and got up and began to follow Him. And Levi gave a big reception for Him in his house, and there was a great crowd of tax collectors and other people who were reclining at the table with them.
The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?” And Jesus answered and said to them, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
And they said to Him, “The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers. The disciples of the Pharisees also do the same, but Yours eat and drink.” And Jesus said to them, “You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and they will fast in those days.”
And He was also telling a parable. “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. Otherwise, he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined.
“But the new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one, after drinking old wine, wishes for new, for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’”
One Story of Transformation
This passage is often treated as two different stories. First comes the conversation about the tax collectors and why Jesus would eat with them. Then the following exchange is treated as a separate story. People will put a division there between verses 32 and 33.
Originally, as I was planning out this sermon series, I had it divided that way as well. But the more closely I examined it, the more clearly I saw that this is one event. The conversation that follows is a direct result of them seeing Jesus eating with the sinners. So for us to understand what’s going on here, it’s best to take this all as one event and as one story.
This is about the transformation of sinners and how Jesus changes us from the inside out. As we read the story, we may wonder why Luke calls him Levi. The other Gospels say this is Matthew. That’s not a contradiction.
A lot of people in that time had multiple names. They were in a multicultural area. A person might use one name among Jewish friends and another among Roman acquaintances. Sometimes you would get renamed. Jesus often renamed people.
Levi and Matthew are names for the same person. Some Bible scholars think his original name was Levi, the name he would have been known by among the people in his life as a tax collector. Luke, writing as a careful historian, may have used his legal or original name.
Those same Bible scholars think that Matthew, which means something along the lines of gift of God, would be a name Jesus gave him to break with the past. It would be a way of saying, “You are no longer the man who sat at the tax booth.” You’ve been changed. Even the difference in names—Matthew in one Gospel and Levi in another—may point to the transformation that took place when this man met Jesus.
This morning, I want to look at a few things this passage teaches us about how Jesus transforms sinners. First of all, who are the sinners? You and I are. All of us are. It’s not just this one guy.
It is not merely a few people He encountered during His earthly ministry. It’s anybody who has ever existed, any human being other than Him, because Jesus wasn’t just a mere man. He was God in human flesh. The rest of us possess a sinful nature. We sin because we are sinners. It is in our nature, and we live according to that nature.
Any sinner who meets Jesus can be transformed by Him. But how does this happen? First of all, Jesus summons sinners to follow Him.
Jesus Summons Sinners to Follow Him
He did this in Matthew’s day. I may call him Matthew out of habit. The text says Levi, but we are talking about the same person. But this happened in Levi’s day, in Matthew’s day. It happened with other people Jesus encountered while He was walking the earth, but it’s still happening today that Jesus summons sinners to follow Him.
It says, starting in verse 27, that Jesus saw him. He saw this tax collector. This is one of those things that I’ve read in this story and the parallels in the other Gospels numerous times, but either didn’t notice before or had forgotten about.
When Jesus notices this tax collector, he’s actually sitting there collecting the taxes. He’s in his booth. Evidently he was somebody who worked for Herod, who would have collected taxes or customs. He’s like the border patrol, I guess, at that time. People would have come into Herod’s territory there in Galilee, gotten off the boat, and had to pay a custom to Herod.
So he was in the act of collecting taxes when Jesus found him. Collecting taxes was not inherently sinful if the required taxes were collected honestly and fairly. But these people who collected the taxes had a terrible reputation. We don’t know if Matthew, Levi, was crooked or not, but whether or not he was, he would have had a terrible reputation that went along with anybody who collected taxes.
There were two primary reasons they were considered such terrible people. First of all, they were collaborating with the Gentiles against their own people. The Jewish nation was occupied by Rome, and the people resented it. Imagine another country occupying our land and some of our own people going to work for that occupying power. We wouldn’t look too fondly on that.
They were working for the Gentiles. They were collecting taxes on behalf of this foreign power against their own people. But even worse than that, they were also, by and large, cheating their own people. If the tax was one coin, they might say, “Today it is two.” They were collecting extra fees, and then they were pocketing those fees.
Because of their cheating and because of their collaboration with these foreign powers, they were considered some of the lowest of the low. No respectable person wanted anything to do with them. I think one of the reasons Luke takes an interest in this event is because one of the themes we see all throughout the Gospel of Luke is that the gospel is for everyone.
Luke frequently records Jesus’ interactions with people whom others would avoid. That is why Luke records Jesus healing the leper. Jesus touched the leper, as a matter of fact. That is why he records Jesus going to Matthew, the tax collector whom no one else wanted to approach. That’s why Luke talks about Jesus granting forgiveness to the thief on the cross.
Luke highlights how Jesus reached out to people whom others would not have stooped to help. If Luke is trying to make the point to his Gentile readers that Jesus came even for you, then he’s very interested in these stories where Jesus goes to the lowest of the low and the furthest of the outcasts to make the point that the gospel is for everyone.
Levi was not the sort of person a respectable teacher or rabbi would have sought out and invited to follow. Teachers commonly gathered students who would spend time with them, walk with them, and learn from them. In that respect, Jesus was doing something other teachers also did. But no one else was going to someone like Matthew and saying, “You—follow me. Become my student. Become my disciple.”
Nobody else was doing that kind of thing, but Jesus went anyway. Already, we see the extraordinary love of Jesus in reaching out to someone so despised by those around him. But we need to be careful when speaking of the love and compassion of Jesus because of the modern idea that Jesus merely accepts sinners exactly as they are.
That is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole story. Jesus loves us where we are. But if what we already are is acceptable to God, there’s no reason for Jesus to have come in the first place. Jesus’ entire goal was to go to the cross to purchase our forgiveness.
Instead, Jesus came to people where they were. Jesus reached out to people and loved them where they were. But all throughout the Gospels, there’s a call to change. The old saying is that He loves us just how we are, but He has no intention of leaving us that way.
Instead of telling Matthew, “You are wonderful just as you are,” Jesus says, “Follow Me.” That does not mean merely accompanying Him somewhere, as though He were saying, “I’m going to the store. Would you like to come?” When He says, “Follow Me,” He is calling Matthew to pattern his life after Him and learn at His feet.
This is what Levi does. He leaves his entire way of life behind. Everything that he knows, his livelihood, he leaves all of it behind to go and follow Jesus and learn from Him. Then, in verse 29, something remarkable happens. Not only that, but he invites others to come and meet Jesus as well.
Levi’s heart was already so changed that, on the very day he met Jesus, he invited other outcasts to come and meet Him. He did not first go to seminary and ask for a few years to learn enough before inviting others to Jesus. That same day, he went to the other outcasts and said, “You have to meet Jesus.” He’s already inviting people to find what he has found.
Jesus is still doing this today. He’s still calling people from every conceivable background. He’s calling sinners of every type. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done in the past. He’s still calling us to follow Him and be transformed. He does not call us to be affirmed in everything, but to be transformed.
Jesus Calls Sinners to Repentance
This passage provides some of the examples of what this looks like. He summons us to follow Him, but He also calls us to repent. We see this in verses 30 through 32. The Pharisees began to grumble when Jesus called this man to follow Him.
When the other tax collectors began meeting Jesus, the Pharisees were not pleased. Jeff and I were listening to a sermon at the State Evangelism Conference on Monday. I am a terrible multitasker. One of the few things I can do simultaneously is listen to one sermon while preparing another. I do not know why, but I can do that.
So I was listening to this sermon while I was looking through this passage, and I was really struggling to come to terms with what’s going on in the passage and how to present it. Then I heard the preacher, speaking from another passage, address the tendency to find fault. My ears perked up because he was describing exactly what the Pharisees were doing. They were there to find fault.
One of the things he said is that we should not be so quick to find fault in what other people are doing and what God is doing in other people. He said it takes no creativity, cleverness, or real effort to find fault and say, “What you are doing is not good enough.” Your performance is not enough. You don’t measure up.
I think sometimes we find fault in others because we understand deep down, when we can admit it to ourselves, that we don’t measure up to God’s standards either. But rather than addressing that fact, we’re going to find all the ways somebody else doesn’t measure up because that’s more comfortable. I realized that I am guilty of that as well.
I am also guilty of letting it trouble me too much when I fail to meet someone else’s expectations, because I never will meet everyone’s expectations. Jesus didn’t even meet everybody’s expectations. The Pharisees came looking to find fault because they were exceptionally religious.
I do not use the word religion as an insult. Religion is a neutral term. It depends on what the religion is. But they were very religious. They were very wrapped up in their practices and their rules because I think they wanted to be right with God. They wanted to be right with God on their own terms.
Their practices and their rituals and their performance were never going to make them right with God. I think that, deep down in a place they would never openly acknowledge, they knew they were not right with God. It was a lot more comfortable to try to point out the places where somebody else wasn’t right than to deal with their own sin.
So they came looking to find fault with Jesus. When they couldn’t find fault with Jesus, they start looking at fault among the people being drawn to Jesus and those who were already following Jesus. They wondered how Jesus could associate with those people. And we’ve probably all had those thoughts.
Perhaps we would not phrase it as, “How could Jesus associate with them?” but we may still think in terms of “those people” or “that person.” Maybe it’s people outside the four walls. Maybe it’s somebody who just doesn’t measure up to our standards. We have probably all had that thought. Why that person? But in reality, we’re all that person.
Why would Jesus eat with sinners? Because sinners are all there are. Why would Jesus save that sinner? Because sinners are all there are. He came to reach out to sinners, and sinners who have fallen short of God’s standard are all there is.
So when they confront Him about this, they don’t want to deal with their own shortcomings. They want to find and point out the shortcomings of everybody else so they can talk to Jesus about that instead of deal with the conviction that’s on their own hearts. When they come and confront Jesus about it, He compares Himself to a doctor. A doctor comes to care for sick people.
The doctor did not come only for those who were well. Today, of course, we practice preventive medicine and schedule wellness visits. I am not an expert on health care in first-century Israel, but I am fairly certain they did not have that kind of system. Pretty sure doctors were going to be very expensive. You went to the doctor because you were sick.
When we’re sick, we still want to go to the doctor. This idea that Jesus would have come to teach and to minister, and He would have done that just to the righteous people, is bizarre to Jesus. He says, you’re asking Me why I go to the sinners. Would you ask a doctor why he spends time with sick people?
He says, I have not come to heal those who are well. I’ve come to heal the sick. Likewise, He says in verse 32, I’ve not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Jesus didn’t come to deal with those who were good enough. First of all, nobody’s good enough. Not one of us in this room is good enough to measure up to God’s standards. But second of all, those who think they’re good enough are not the people who are going to come to Jesus for His help. So Jesus said, I’ve come to call sinners to repentance.
Repentance is the first step of following Him. Repentance goes hand in hand with this transformation. Repentance is not itself the entire transformation. Repentance does not mean that we have cleaned up our lives and will live perfectly from that point forward. Repentance leads to our sins being cleaned up, but it’s not the same thing.
Repentance is not merely sadness over our sins. Repentance means a change of mind. Repentance means that we’ve gone from loving our sin and hating God to now loving God and hating our sin.
We’re still sinners and we’re still going to sin from time to time. But if you’re repentant, you hate that sin. When you are repentant, you say, “God, why did I do that? Please help me not to do it again.”
Repentance means our minds have changed, and now we recognize that God is right and our sin is wrong, and we want to be on His side. In this instance, repentance means recognizing that what they were doing was not good enough and was never going to be enough. It means having that change of mind to recognize they needed God’s mercy.
In that regard, both the tax collectors and the people they had identified as sinners needed to repent, but so did the religious Pharisees. They needed to repent from the idea that they were good enough. Jesus transforms us by calling us to repentance. If we don’t come to that place of recognizing that God is right and we’re wrong, the rest of this transformation does not happen.
Jesus Brings Joy in His Presence
So He says, I came to bring sinners to repentance. That may sound severe. It sounds hard, and it is, but that’s not where He leaves us. Look at verses 33 through 35.
After Jesus answered their complaint by pointing out that doctors care for the sick, they realized that particular attack was getting them nowhere. So they change tactics and try to find fault elsewhere. They were still criticizing everyone else’s failures while ignoring their own.
They said, well, John’s disciples fast and pray. Disciples in our group fast and pray. But Your disciples, Yours eat and drink. How dare they? “How dare they eat and drink?” In other words, why are you all not as severe as we are?
Jesus says to them, you cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? He was speaking about a wedding celebration and the wedding party. In their day, the bride and the others made their preparations while waiting for the groom to arrive. When the groom came, that’s when the wedding started. That’s when everybody celebrated.
He’s calling Himself the groom and saying, well, the groom is here. The wedding party is going to celebrate. He says, there’s going to be joy. There is coming a day, He says, when the groom will be gone, and they’ll do the fasting.
There’s nothing wrong with acts of religious devotion. There’s nothing wrong with taking spiritual things seriously. But He says, while I’m with them, there’s joy and they’re going to celebrate.
Jesus brings joy with His presence. That’s part of our transformation. When Jesus comes into our lives, when Jesus transforms us, He brings joy. His followers are going to live joyfully in His presence because our hearts have been changed.
Joy is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness depends heavily on our circumstances. Many daily circumstances do not make me happy, but joy is different. Joy is found in things that do not go away.
Joy is rooted in our relationship with Him, His presence, the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the knowledge that our hope and future are secure in Him. His presence brings joy that transcends our circumstances.
Believers in Jesus, those who belong to Him, can be joyful in the midst of some of the most heart-wrenching circumstances we face because we know our sins are forgiven. Because we know we’ve been set free. Because we know that He will never leave us or forsake us.
Part of the transformation, yes, is this repentance that takes place, this brokenness over our sins. But on the other side of that is joy in the presence of the Lord. He transforms us by bringing both. He brings us a newfound joy as we’re free from both the condemnation of sin and the dead works of people like the Pharisees.
Jesus Replaces the Old Life with New
Then He replaces old life with new. This is especially important, and I wish I had more time to develop it. In verses 36 through 39, He gives two examples: a patch and a set of wineskins. Both of these examples He gives the Pharisees illustrate that He did not come merely to mix the old and the new.
We often imagine that we can simply fit Jesus into our old life. He becomes a facet or a component of our old life. We imagine that He makes life a little better while everything else remains unchanged.
Some of the Pharisees may have thought, “Here is another teacher from whom we can borrow a few ideas,” unless they first decided to throw Him off a cliff, as some had already tried to do. Maybe we can take some teachings from Him and fit them in over here, but basically our system remains unchanged. Jesus said, I did not come to mix the old and the new.
He explains that if you sew a new patch onto an old garment, the new cloth has not yet shrunk. So the first time you go to wash that garment, that patch is going to shrink. It’s going to tear away from the garment, and both of them are going to be ruined.
He gives the example of the wineskins. Wineskins can stretch only so far. When new wine is poured into a new wineskin, the skin stretches as fermentation creates pressure. The skin stretches with it, and everything’s fine.
But an old wineskin has already been stretched, so when fermentation begins again, there is no flexibility left. There’s no more stretch, no more give left in the wineskin. It bursts, and you have a mess. The wine is ruined. The wineskin is ruined.
Jesus is telling them, I didn’t come to mix the old and the new because when you mix the old and the new, you get a mess. In our lives, Jesus did not come to mix the old and the new. He came to sweep out the old and bring in completely new life.
When it came to their understanding of their dealings with God, He didn’t merely come to add some new teachings to their old system. He came to set it back to what it ought to be. He came to bring something new to them that was really what God had intended all along. He came to give us entirely new life.
So part of the transformation of sinners is that Jesus doesn’t just become a part of our life that sits neatly over here. He does not become something we tuck into one corner of life while everything else continues as usual. Jesus becomes the focus of an entirely new life.
Letting Go of the Old
The problem here is what He lays out in verse 39. The complication is that some people will reject the new because of their taste for the old. I am not an expert on alcohol. I have never intentionally consumed it.
I do understand that people often prefer older wine after it has had time to age and mature. Even in their day, they preferred the older stuff. If you offered somebody a choice between the new wine and the old, they’d prefer the old. That’s what Jesus says in verse 39.
He says, no one after drinking old wine wishes for new. He says the old is good enough. Well, that’s one thing if we’re actually talking about wine, but here He’s talking about the life that He gives. What He’s saying is that the Pharisees and people like them are too busy finding fault and too attached to their old way of doing things.
They’re doing everything they can do to avoid dealing with their sin before God. He says these people are too attached to the old way to embrace the new. He didn’t come to mix. He says it’s got to be one or the other. It’s got to be Him or the world. It’s got to be His righteousness or our self-righteousness, and the two don’t mix.
That’s the complication, whether or not we’re too intent on holding on to the old way to embrace Him. Jesus came, not just to teach and not just to walk among us, but ultimately to take responsibility for our sins and to be punished for those sins in our place on the cross. He shed His blood and died so we could be forgiven. He rose again to prove it and to bring us new life.
He offers forgiveness, salvation, and new life in which He transforms us from the inside out. It’s available to anyone who will believe, who will trust in Him as the one and only sacrifice.
The only complication there is whether or not we’re willing to let go of the old and embrace what He brings us, embrace what He offers, and embrace what He’s paid for. If you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior before this morning, I want to ask you, is there something that you’re holding on to? Is there some old wine that you’re holding on to and you’re saying it’s good enough?
Is there something keeping you from embracing what Jesus offers with all your heart? Whatever it might be, whether it’s sin, whether it’s pride, whether it’s a feeling of self-righteousness, whatever it may be, it’s nowhere near as good as what Jesus offers.
And if you are already a believer, do not go back looking for the old wine. Don’t go back looking for the old way of doing things. Recognize that Jesus came not to mix the old with the new, but He came to transform you completely and make you entirely new.
