Luke 5 part III: The Call of Levi
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Handout
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.
Tax collectors in the first century were typically seen as dishonest, thieves, and traitors to their nation. Judea had a natural opposition to the Roman empire and several times tried to liberate themselves from Roman rule. One such time led to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. In a culture that was altogether hostile to the Roman occupation, tax collectors filled an interesting seat in the day to day operation of the Empire. Matthew (or Levi) was Hebrew in culture and nationality. Yet, he served the Roman empire and aided in the collection of taxes from the Jewish people. It is generally understood that tax collectors would collect what was required from the people by Rome but would charge extra of the people so they could take some for themselves. We see instances of dishonest tax collectors like in the story of Zaccheus, but there is no clear declaration of Matthew as dishonest. Although it is probably likely to be the case and as a result Matthew was probably a wealthy man.
So here is Matthew. A wealthy man, despised by his own countrymen, working in his booth managing the people’s taxes and along comes Jesus. Jesus walks up to his booth and says “Follow Me.” Almost as if Matthew had been waiting his entire life for this moment, he stood up, left everything behind and began to follow Jesus. That’s how the call of God feels in our life isn’t it? Sometimes we come to Christ reluctantly or gradually, but when it clicks, when we come to that place of surrender, we step into something that we have spent our whole lives searching for. The forgiveness and freedom of Christ create within us a peace in the storm. I think for all of us, we long for that sense of being that only God can satisfy. And so here we see. Jesus is calling. “Follow Me”
What is Jesus calling you to?
God calls all of us to something. There is a general call that God makes in the life of His people.
There is a call to salvation in Jesus Christ
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ;
All people are called to be followers of Jesus set apart for the gospel of God. Being set apart for the gospel means that it not only changes our lives through salvation, but that it motivates us in every decision we make after the fact. Answering this call means declaring ourselves to be followers of Jesus. It means picking up our cross daily and following Jesus.
There is a sense in which all believers are called to ministry.
for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ;
This call is to acts of service. We are all called to outreach. To be the hands and feet of Jesus. We are called to share the Gospel with the people around us, to love others, and to serve others.
There is a specific call to vocational Christian service
Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Not all people are called to ministry. This is a unique call of God to serve in the church professionally.
Whatever the Lord is calling you to there is a purpose of the call and answering is a decision you have to make for yourselves.
I grew up in church. I was a pastors kid and was always the first person to church and the last person to leave. I felt a lot of pressure to perform and to seem like I had everything together. I felt like I needed to be perfect. When I gave my life to Christ and when I surrendered to ministry those were decisions that I made. Nobody made those for me, and it was important that I was the one that made those decisions. Nobody can answer the call for you. It is a decision you have to make.
How will we answer the call God has put on our lives? When we look at the story of Matthew, there is an immediacy in which Matthew follows Jesus. He leaves his entire life behind and follows Jesus. But the call to follow Christ is not without conflict. There is a confrontation that takes place inside of us. There is often times a war between who we were before Christ and who we will be in Christ. There are two conflicting voices that are calling for our hearts affection and we must choose. Will I do what I want or will I do what God wants. For Matthew I’m sure this conflict existed, but the call of God was stronger than the concern and the cost of following Christ was worth the risk. Matthew did not avoid or run away from the call of Christ. He was obedient to the call. Answering the call in our lives means a life of obedience to God. How we live our lives and how we respond to the Holy Spirit’s influence in our lives is important. Answering the call to follow Jesus, to be on mission for Him, or to serve vocationally in the church all begin with saying yes to Jesus. All the skills, talents, and opportunities come later. We see from church history that Matthew had served in Judea and Ethiopia, he wrote one of the gospel accounts, and he ended up dying a martyr. These things didn’t happen all at once. Matthew had no idea where following Jesus would take him, but it all began with a yes.
Answering the call means leaving the past behind in exchange for something greater. That is the hope of Jesus. He is inviting us into a relationship with 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?”
Matthew decides he would celebrate this new change in occupation. He invited all his friends and people he worked with and they all sat down to eat a meal together. When the Pharisees saw who had come to eat with Jesus, they began to grumble. “Why do you eat with sinners?” (as if the Pharisees and scribes had risen above such revelry) They saw these people and thought they were less than. Why would Jesus hang out with these dirty rejects. These outsiders.
The pharisees were governed by their self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is a moral self-confidence and superiority arising from satisfaction in one’s own achievements. Meaning: feeling like we are better than other people because we are good people who do what they are supposed to. We feel like we are perfect, like we don’t need Jesus because we are good religious people and have this thing figured out. I struggled with this throughout childhood, and as a teenager, and even as an adult. When I was living morally and doing what I was supposed to I was arrogant. I felt like I was superior theologically than anyone else I talked to. Nobody knew the Bible as well as I did. Nobody could lead worship like me. Nobody could teach like me. But then when I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to, my life was in turmoil. I had a works based theology. When I performed well I was Jesus Himself. When I performed poorly I hated myself, thought I was worthless, and thought I was just wasting my time. I was drowning under the weight of pride and people’s expectations. I knew the Gospel. I had been transformed by the Gospel. I was a Christian and yet I had allowed this works based view of the world to control how I saw the world around me. I had rejected grace and was determined to earn salvation for myself. Little did I know I was doomed to fail every time.
My friend Mike passed away yesterday from Pancreatic cancer. There isn’t much you can do for pancreatic cancer. He was expected to live I believe about a month by the time they found it. He lived about six months but passed away. I think sometimes when we look at sin we see it as a headache. It’s an inconvenience. Not a big deal. I’ll get over it. I’ll take an Advil and just ignore it. That isn’t how sin is. Sin is a cancer that has already killed us. Like my friend Mike, there isn’t much a person can do about their condition. There is no amount of chemotherapy that will bring my friend back to life. No amount of treatment can restart his heart or put air in his lungs again. Such was our story. Without Christ we are dead in our sins. No amount of good works can undo that.
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
Enter Jesus our Great Physician
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.”
Like any good doctor, Luke understood that to be free of an illness you had kill it completely. We have a sickness that leads to death, but Jesus is a healer leading to resurrection.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
C.S. Lewis says that it can be a scary thing to believe God is good. When bad things happen in our life it is easier for us to believe that God is evil and unjust and how could He allow this hurt in my life. It is easy to ignore the consequence of our sins and sins effect on the world around us and place the blame solely on God. God must not be good because I have this hurt in my life. What C.S. Lewis comes to understand is that it is because God is good that He allows our pain to bring us into a deeper trust in God as good. God is able to work every pain for good and where there may be pain in the night we can trust that joy will come with the morning. This quote is from a book by Lewis called, “A Grief Observed”. It was written after his dear wife passed away after a difficult battle with breast cancer.
The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed — might grow tired of his vile sport — might have a temporary fit of mercy. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. Either way, We’re for it. What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist? Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles — ‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’
Jesus is our great physician. Following Him is at times painful. The cost of following Jesus can be great, but it is always worth it. There have been times in my life when saying yes to God’s call on my life was the last thing I wanted to do. I had idols in my life that I was holding onto tightly. I had plans for my future. I had pride that I was unwilling to relinquish. Lust that ruled my heart and thoughts. But by the grace of God, Jesus loves me and cares for me enough to pull me up onto the surgeons table, and with every cut of his knife He is healing my brokenness and making me healthy.
We see Jesus commitment to our spiritual health in Jesus’ sermon on the mount.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. “If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. “If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.
Jesus wants to cut out your brokenness. Will you let Him?
Martyn Lloyd Jones physician turned pastor
Martyn Lloyd-Jones was one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century. He pastored the Westminster Chapel in the heart of London for nearly three decades, and by the end of his ministry he was one of the most influential ministers on earth. But before Lloyd-Jones was a great preacher, he was an accomplished physician. After earning his medical degree, he came under the tutelage of Lord Horder, caregiver to His Majesty, King George V, and enjoyed one of the most promising medical careers in all of England.
In considering God’s call to ministry, Lloyd-Jones wrestled with his “physician’s dilemma”—giving up medicine to pursue preaching. Ultimately, it was a war of desire, and his desire for ministry won out:
“We spend most of our time rendering people fit to go back to their sin! I want to heal souls. If a man has a diseased body and his soul is all right, he is all right to the end; but a man with a healthy body and distressed soul is all right for sixty years or so and then he has to face eternity in Hell.”
Jesus calls the Pharisees out. He says your self righteousness isn’t good enough. Recognize you are sick, come to me, and I will heal you. The Pharisees are unimpressed with Jesus’ response. Instead of responding to Jesus they accuse Him of not making His disciples be religious enough.
Jesus had just gotten done explaining how being more religious isn’t the solution to sin, yet the Pharisees couldn’t break free from their worldview. Jesus says this in response.
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; and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.” And He was also telling them 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 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.’ ”
Jesus does not want behavior modification He wants life transformation. Using the analogy of a wine skin Jesus is teaching us that you can’t just patch over what is broken. Putting a band aid on a dead person will not help the dead person. There needs to be new life. Trying to patch an old wineskin leaves it worse than when you found it. Jesus is teaching the Pharisees and us that to heal our sin sickness we must be born again. Before we ever answer the call to vocational ministry, before we ever answer the call to serve others or go on mission trips, we must first answer the call to follow Jesus. If you are looking for something fresh. A chance to start over. A chance to reconnect. The door is open. How will you respond to the call?
What does it look like to live according to the call?
It means walking by the Holy Spirit.
How do we get the Holy Spirit?
Well He is a person and He isn’t achieved by hard work. God gives us the Holy Spirit freely to us when we become Christian. He is our helper guiding us to obedience. He is our assurance, that our salvation is for real and that we have a place with God in heaven for all eternity.
Living according to the call
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.