5-14-06 Matthew
5-14-06 Matthew
Who Christ calls “Sinners”
Continuing with Who Christ Calls we are moving onto;
MATTHEW (Person) Son of Alphaeus; a tax collector by occupation;
Matthew served King Herod Antipas in Capernaum of Galilee, collecting tariffs on goods passing on the road from Damascus to the Mediterranean Sea..
To function in this capacity he would have sat at a toll-booth and would have been an educated man, acquainted with the Greek language as well as the native Aramaic. He may have been a man of wealth.
This occupation also caused him to be despised by the Jews and to be considered among the lowest of people or sinners because he worked for the Roman Gov’t.
Chosen by Jesus to be one of the 12 apostles; credited with the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew.
Before Christ’s call, he is referred to as Levi
The Calling of Levi LK 5:27-32 27 After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, 28 and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. 29 Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” 31 Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Levi had been a tax gatherer. Tax gatherers in Jesus’ time were swindlers, money-hungry, and despised as collaborators with a foreign occupying force.
He was hated, because in those days men paid the government for the right to collect taxes, and then collected far more than was really due.
Levi was one of these men, and undoubtedly deserved his reputation as a “sinner.”
Then one day Jesus came up to Levi and said, “Follow Me.” And Levi followed!
And what happens when Jesus touches the life of a sinner like Levi?
His life changes, his desires change, his actions change.
What happens when a sinner accepts forgiveness, and chooses to follow Christ?
He wants to share Christ with others who were lost,
SO Levi gave a party to introduce Jesus to his friends, who were outcasts like himself.
He invited his sinner friends to meet the One who showed him life
Interestingly the leaders of the church did not like that Jesus was actually associating with a common sinner and his friends
This is where Jesus tells them He is there for the sick and not the healthy. Or He is there for the sinner not the righteous one.
If we had known Matthew in his days as Levi, would you and I have despised him too?
But what a great God we have! We have a God who cares about the despised.
A God who can touch the hardest hearts with His forgiveness, and can transform the most warped personality.
Through Jesus, the sinner can become a new person.
How has Jesus changed your life? What evidence of change do you see in your life?
Jesus’ fraternizing with disreputable people remains a scandal in the predominantly middle class, suburban, Western church.
Many of us, like the Pharisees, at best ignore the outcasts of our society and at worst continue to discriminate against them
We would do well to consider substantially increasing our spiritual, evangelistic, and social outreach to minorities, the homeless, prostitutes, addicts and pushers, gays and lesbians, AIDS victims, and the like.
Also to the more hidden outcasts such as divorcees, single parents, the elderly, white-collar alcoholics, and so on.
We must get to know them as intimately as Jesus did
Only close and trusted friends shared table fellowship over meals.
We dare not join with sinners in their sinning, but we may well have to go places with them and encounter the world’s wickedness in ways that the contemporary Pharisees in our churches would cry out against.
If you have not seen change, or do you look down upon others, do you need to allow Christ to change your life?
If we come to Jesus, confess our sin, and receive His forgiveness, Christ will begin a change in us that ends in personal transformation.
Share the transformer with someone else.
In Jesus, our life too can become new as Matthews did.
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