Eating With Tax Collectors And Sinners

Good morning and welcome!

Thank you for sharing your testimony this morning!

Last week we covered the story of the paralytic man.

His friends brought him to Jesus to be healed, but they couldn’t get in because of the crowds.

Rather than giving up, they decided to tear a whole in the roof and lower their friend down in front of Jesus.

Jesus forgave his sins because of his faith, which infuriated the religious leaders.

Jesus asked, “is it easier to tell this man that his sins are forgiven or to heal him, but so that you will known who I am, I will heal him.”

Immediately, the man got up, took his mat, and went home.

I spent a bit of time last week reminding us that our goal in this study is to Know Jesus and to Make Him known.

The passage we are going to read today and learn about is going to create some division among the hearers.

Often when we think of division, we see it in a negative light.

But that is not always the case.

Division is something that benefits us all the time.

For example, if there is a large task that has to be done, if the work is divided among a large group of people and spit into small task, that large task becomes manageable.

We saw that at work when the Fuge teams were here.

We had a huge list of things to get done, we divided the work into small task, and they got a ton of it done in a short amount of time.

In today’s passage, we are going to see Jesus identifying some dividing lines that existed when he was alive and that still exist today.

Rather than looking at those divisions as something negative, God wants us to see them as a way to classify where our hearts are so we can respond accordingly.

As we discussed last week, without truth, there can be no healing.

Sometimes the truth is hard to hear, but sometimes it is the best news ever.

It brings clarity, relief, love, joy, and healing.

Today Mark Westbrook is going to read our passage for us and then we will dive into what God has for us.

Mark, would you please come up and read it?

Luke 5:27–32 NIrV

27After this, Jesus left the house. He saw a tax collector sitting at the tax booth. The man’s name was Levi. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him. 28Levi got up, left everything and followed him. 29Then Levi gave a huge dinner for Jesus at his house. A large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30But the Pharisees and their teachers of the law complained to Jesus’ disciples. They said, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” 31Jesus answered them, “Those who are healthy don’t need a doctor. Sick people do. 32I have not come to get those who think they are right with God to follow me. I have come to get sinners to turn away from their sins.”

Today we are going to look at three things.

When a person feels seen and known by Jesus, they choose to follow Him.

Genuine love draws people.

Repentant hearts receive forgiveness and blessing.

I have shared some of my testimony with you guys about when I gave my life to Christ.

If you have heard it recently, I told you that when I knew I needed to give my life to Christ that I looked at my cousin/best friend Eddie, and told him that we needed to go pray with the preacher.

Eddie didn’t want to because he was afraid we would get in trouble, but I knew in my heart that it would be worth it.

What I want to focus in on this morning is the desire that was in me to know Jesus.

I had never felt something like that in my life.

I can’t remember the words that Bro. Jimmy said, but I remember knowing, more than I had ever known anything, that I needed Jesus.

That need over powered my fear of punishment or ridicule from any of my peers.

The passage that Mark just read to us starts with the same draw from Jesus.

In the first verse, it says...

Luke 5:27 CSB

27 After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow me.”

When Luke says that Jesus “saw” Levi, he is saying that Jesus beheld Levi.

Levi was seen.

One of the elders at the first TGP, a man named Andy Magee, had a way of looking at you but it felt like he is looking into your soul.

His eyes were piercing and you knew that you had his undivided attention when you were talking to him.

Have you ever experienced that kind of thing?

To feel like someone sees all of you and instantly knows all about you?

To be known in that kind of way is disconcerting at first, but then it brings such peace because there is nothing hidden.

You are truly known.

This is what is happening when Jesus sees Levi, and Levi can feel it.

1. When a person feels seen and known by Jesus, they choose to follow Him.

Jesus looks at and instantly knows Levi.

I don’t want to pass by this too quickly.

I want us to think about this for a moment.

We need to see who Levi is so that we can understand how significant this was to him.

Levi was a traitor to his people by becoming a tax collector for the occupying nation of Rome.

On top of that, a tax collector's income was purely based on his collecting more than was required by the Roman government.

In other words, whatever he could get out of a person on top of what they owed was his to keep.

This is very similar to how bill collections works today.

If you owe a debt, the person that you owe it to can sell that debt at a lower cost to a debt collector.

For example if you owe someone $100 and they sell that debt to a collector for $10, if the collector can collect the $100 from you, they can keep the additional $90.

This is the kind of job that Levi has chosen for himself and people knew how that works.

Tax collectors were regarded as dishonest and thieves.

When Jesus sees Levi sitting at the tax collection booth, he knows all of this, but look at what Jesus says to him.

He asks Levi to follow him, to become his student, his traveling companion, and his friend.

Think about how you choose who you want to be your friends.

Is a person who is publicly known to be a liar and a thief on the top of the qualifications that you have for prospective friends?

Most likely not.

But Jesus sees Levi, knows him, and chooses him.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus has done the same for us.

He sees us.

He knows us.

He knows us better than anyone.

He sees our failures.

He sees our sin.

He sees the things we don’t want anyone to know about.

And in being seen and known completely by Jesus, he chooses us.

He chooses you.

He says to us, come follow me, be my son, be my daughter, be my friend.

In this moment of being seen, Levi could feel all this and look again at how he responds.

Luke 5:28

Luke 5:28 CSB

28 So, leaving everything behind, he got up and began to follow him.

In response to being completely known by Jesus, Levi chooses to leave everything and follow Jesus.

The other gospels don’t include this phrase “leave everything,” but Luke does to emphasize here that by walking away from his job and wealth, Levi is making a calculated decision.

This is not a whim.

In leaving his post, Levi is giving up this opportunity for the rest of his life because the Romans would not allow him to take this position again after walking away.

For Levi, to follow Jesus is worth it.

It was worth it because no one has ever loved or known him in the way that Jesus does.

2. Genuine love draws people.

The love of Jesus didn’t just prompt Levi to follow Jesus.

The love of Jesus also prompted him to invite others to experience what he did as well.

This is an incredibly important distinction!

The same love that drew you to Jesus should also draw you to tell others about what you have found! Luke 5:29

Look at how Levi responded publicly to what he discovered when Jesus gave him the invitation to follow.

Luke 5:29 CSB

29 Then Levi hosted a grand banquet for him at his house. Now there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others who were reclining at the table with them.

One of the commentaries that I read this week pointed out that Levi used his influence and skills for Jesus.

He reached out to everyone that he knew and invited them to come to his house for a dinner party so that they could meet Jesus.

Levi used all of his resources to give an opportunity to meet Jesus to his friends, acquaintances, and colleagues.

He reached out to those that he knew.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to share the gospel with people we don’t know, but we shouldn’t overlook the obvious.

God has given us all some strong, trust-filled relationships with people that don’t know Jesus.

It would be careless for us to ignore those people and move towards people we don’t know.

These people that Levi invited over got to experience what Levi experienced.

But it is interesting that not all who heard about this party were as excited.

Luke 5:30

Luke 5:30 CSB

30 But the Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”

This is the moment where we begin to see the division that is happening.

We have two groups of people represented here.

We have the religious leaders, the Pharisees, and the Scribes.

Then we also have the tax collectors and sinners, as Luke describes them.

One group is enjoying the party, and the others are definitely not.

Luke is describing what I bet could be felt in the air.

There is one group that is experiencing the love and presence of Jesus.

There is a different group that is experiencing anger and resentment.

What is interesting is that if I said to you in a conversation one day that there were two groups of people one religious and one sinful.

Then I told you that would was full of joy and love and the other full of anger and malice.

How would you pair those two groups up?

To which group would you assume the love versus the anger belonged to?

The funny things is that depending on what your experience with the church has been, you would probably classify them differently.

How you view those two groups is getting to the heart of the matter.

This is where the division that I spoke about earlier comes into play. Luke 5:31

Luke 5:31 CSB

31 Jesus replied to them, “It is not those who are healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick.

The honest, difficult to talk about, reality is that many times it is the religious that cause the most pain and heartache.

This is precisely why Jesus came and that is why he is at this dinner party.

He is revealing God’s character and showing the people in this area what God really values.

It isn’t religious activity or false righteousness that Jesus is looking for.

Jesus came to love those that the world overlooked.

Let’s look at how the apostle John describes this division.

John 3:16-21

John 3:16–21 NLT

16 “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. 18 “There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. 19 And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. 20 All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. 21 But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants.”

Jesus isn’t here, at this party, to be divisive by turning people away.

His presence is divisive because it reveals the heart and nature of people.

Luke is telling is that those who claimed to know God didn’t know him at all.

In fact, those that the religious would have said were farthest from God were those that were, at that moment, the closest.

The religious were interested in power and control of their own lives and of other people’s lives.

Jesus was interested in bringing people to the freedom and joy that God created us for.

This leaves the most important question we will ever ask ourselves.

Where do I fall in this division?

Am I siding with the religious leaders who want control over their own lives?

Or am I choosing to give up that control so that I can experience the joy and freedom that comes with knowing Jesus?

Robert Munger says: “The church is the only fellowship in the world where the one requirement for membership is the unworthiness of the candidate”

C. S. Lewis once wrote: “Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.”

What both of these authors are talking about is the fact that every person is born a sinner.

All of us have been separated from God by our sin and therefore, all of us are in need of forgiveness.

The pathway to forgiveness is through repentance.

3. Repentant hearts receive forgiveness and blessing.

Repentance is not a word that we use or hear very much in everyday conversation and therefore, there is often confusion about what it is, what it does, and why we need to do it.

So let’s talk about it because if Jesus says that he came to call sinners to repentance, it is obviously important.

Let’s look at it from the OT perspective to give us some context around why it is needed.

We have already established that we are born into sin and that it separates us from God.

So, what did God tell his people to do about it?

2 Chronicles 7:14 CSB

14 and my people, who bear my name, humble themselves, pray and seek my face, and turn from their evil ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.

To repent is to turn from sin.

It is making the conscious decision that you desire to know God more than you desire to rebel against him by sinning.

It has always been God’s desire and intention that we would live righteously.

He created us and we were righteous, but then we disobeyed God and turned to sin.

Jesus came to bring correction to the misunderstanding that exists between man and God.

God wants us to be righteous, but we are unable to do that on our own.

Eze 18:21-22

Ezekiel 18:21–22 CSB

“But if the wicked person turns from all the sins he has committed, keeps all my statutes, and does what is just and right, he will certainly live; he will not die. None of the transgressions he has committed will be held against him. He will live because of the righteousness he has practiced.

This scripture and others like it is what prompted the Pharisees to seek righteousness by trying to keep the law perfectly.

However, in doing so, they took all the focus off of God and put it on themselves and the law.

The law was given to show that we were not righteous and would see our need for God and his forgiveness.

When we see our own sinfulness, the response that God wants is for us to confess our shortcomings which is what we call repentance.

When we repent, by turning from our sin, we are forgiven by God, and our relationship is restored.

Think about a friend who does you wrong.

They say they are sorry and then turn around and do the same thing again.

Were they really sorry?

Maybe that they were caught, but not that they did it.

True repentance is turning from sin with a desire to never do it again.

That is the difference.

Let me show you an example from scripture of Paul and his testimony about repentance.

1 Tim 1:12-16

1 Timothy 1:12–16 CSB

12 I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful, appointing me to the ministry— 13 even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an arrogant man. But I received mercy because I acted out of ignorance in unbelief, 14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 15 This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”—and I am the worst of them. 16 But I received mercy for this reason, so that in me, the worst of them, Christ Jesus might demonstrate his extraordinary patience as an example to those who would believe in him for eternal life.

This is the attitude of a person who has encountered God, had their sin revealed, and has been forgiven.

Paul’s sin was revealed to him, he repented, and his whole life was changed.

He was transformed from a man that persecuted the church to a man who devoted his entire life and even gave his life to build it.

Paul was transformed when his sin was revealed and he changed in response to the grace and mercy he received from God when he repented of his sin.

In Luke 5:32 Jesus tells us that repentance is why he came.

Luke 5:32 CSB

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Jesus is making a statement here that is dividing those who have heard his message.

Those that believe that they are righteous also believe that they don’t need God.

These people will never receive grace as long as they believe this.

But, those of us that know that we are sinners confess our sins to God in repentance, we receive the blessing of knowing God as it was intended.

We experience the joy of a relationship with God that is void of guilt or shame.

We are fully known and fully loved.

We have found ourselves in a place of belonging.

A place where we know that even when we do mess up, God is faithful to forgive.

This is what drew Levi to Jesus.

This is what drew the crowds to Jesus.

My prayer and hope is that if you don’t have that kind of relationship with God that it would draw you to Jesus as well.

If you don’t know how to have that kind of relationship, it would be my great honor to walk with you in discovering what it means and how it feels to be loved by a gracious God.

I want to end and leave us with this final thought this morning.

Jesus sees and knows you completely.

In spite of what you might believe or think about yourself, Jesus loves you and wants you to know how much he loves you.

All that separates the greatest love in the world from you is sin.

But Jesus makes is abundantly clear through this interaction with Levi that He can overcome that sin.

He is faithful to forgive because he loves you so much.

1 John 4:10 NLT

This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

God loved you enough to send his son so that you might know and see how much he loves you.

Don’t miss the opportunity you have been given to experience that love personally.

Let’s pray.

Announcements:

Taste of Interfaith - August 10th @ 6:00 We need to know who is coming, review the menu, talk about the work.

PDC One year Celebration - September 10th @ 4:30 - We are invited to celebrate with them.

LC Quad Bash - August 18th @ 6:30 - Event for new students to find a church.

The Life Group questions are very pointed this week. Don’t just blow through them quickly. Take the time to really consider them and discuss with one another. Don’t sandbag the answers, really dig in together.

Offering