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Intro:
We are in a series on the Fruit of the Spirit entitled, [Flesh or Fruit].
The subject of today’s message is [Goodness].
When I hear the word goodness, I think of being good.
When I think of being good, I go back in my mind to my childhood.
I always wanted to be good, but as you know, sometimes it is hard.
On the Sunday night before school started, Pastor Tucker always had the students come to the altar for special prayer.
He came to me and I asked, will you pray for me?
I want to be good in school, but I can’t help but be the funny guy.
He answered, it is okay to be funny, but we will pray God helps you act right and become a good example.
That was my habitual prayer, Lord, help me be good.
As long as I was at church I was good.
It was when I was at school that I wasn’t always good.
By understanding of good was the absence of being bad.
Many people share this understanding.
We will look at someone’s actions and think, what they did was bad, therefore they are probably bad.
Dr. David Jeremiah explains, “Goodness is often misunderstood as the absence of evil.
But in the Bible, goodness is not an absence of anything.
It is the presence of something good.”
We often go through life trying to stop doing bad, when God wants us to invite Him and allow His presence to overflow in us.
We cannot remove the bad without receiving the good.
Should we try to “be good” on our own, we will fail miserably.
We see this played out from the earliest age.
It is good I did not know this scripture as a child.
When I was bad, I could explain, “it is not my fault, there is none who does good?!” I know that would have made my parents proud.
The simple fact is, on our own we are incapable of:
doing good deeds
thinking good thoughts
living good lives
We see it is impossible to be good in our own strength, yet Paul describes goodness as a marker of a genuine Christian.
Goodness is as important as love, joy, peace, kindness, and patience.
How then can we display a life of goodness.
We cannot look within, we must look above for help from God!
Remember, these are the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of the individual.
On my own, I am not very loving, joyful, peaceable, kind, patient, or good.
But I take hope in:
Through Jesus, we can possess goodness.
One author defines goodness as, “moral excellence.”
Our human nature is sinful and immoral.
Yet when we surrender our lives to Jesus and we walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, God enables us to do what we cannot do on our own.
Sure, there is none good, no not one.
However, we have an avenue that will cause goodness to become obvious in our lives.
Let’s see how goodness, moral excellence, operated in the life of Christ.
To see this, I want us to look at Jesus’ interactions with Zacchaeus.
I have three points, [An Immoral Man], [The Moral Messiah], and [The Memorable Message].
Let’s begin
1.
An Immoral Man
Right before Jesus goes to Jerusalem at His Triumphal Entry, He makes a pitstop by the town of Jericho.
We do not know all Jesus did that day, but news of His arrival caught everyone’s attention.
One of these people was Zacchaeus.
The most I knew about Zacchaeus was what I learned as a child:
Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.
And as the Savior passed that, He looked up in the tree
And said, Zacchaeus you come down
For I’m going to your house today, for I’m going to your house today.
I always liked Zacchaeus because they called him a wee little man.
Having a brother that has been six foot as long as I can remember, I often felt like a wee little person in his shadow.
But the fact is, no one liked Zacchaeus.
In fact, he was one of the most loathed men in Jericho.
The reason for their hatred was all to do with his occupation.
He was not just a tax collector, he was the Chief Tax Collector.
They tax system of the Roman Empire was brutal.
They demanded a certain amount from every person and they did not care how they got their money.
The Jews were under the authority of the Roman Empire, but they did not like them or their religious beliefs.
Therefore, the Jews stuck together, doing as little as possible to keep peace with the Romans.
In order for the Romans to get their taxes, they contracted Jewish men to do the dirty work.
These men could charge as much as they wanted as long as the Romans got their cut.
A Jewish tax collector was despised because they took advantage of other Jews.
A Chief Tax Collector was hated because they led the immoral, but legal theft of other people’s money.
Tax collector and sinner were used interchangeably, that is how much they were hated.
Zacchaeus knew this, and he walked around with this stigma.
Not only was he a wee little man, he was also a wee little despised man.
What is worse, this was not the plan his parents had for his life.
The name Zacchaeus means “pure” or “just” (Complete Biblical Library).
There were many men with that name in Jewish history who had sterling reputations.
From the outside looking in, there was nothing good in Zacchaeus.
When he heard Jesus came to town, he had to see him.
The problem?
He was a wee little man.
He would not dare ask the crowd to let him come to the front to see Jesus, so he ran just outside of town to climb in a tree, not just any tree, specifically a sycamore tree.
SHOW PICTURE OF TREE
One author (Kenneth Bailey), who lived in the Middle East for years, explains sycamore trees were on the outskirts of town.
They had large leaves, with branches low to the ground, about seventy-five feet away from the city gates.
While everyone ran toward Jesus, Zacchaeus ran out of town and hid in this tree, hoping to see Jesus, but hoping to stay disguised.
He knew his immoral lifestyle made everyone hate him.
He was not good enough to meet Jesus with all the bad he did, but at least he could say he saw him.
2. The Moral Messiah
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As Jesus made his way out of town, Zacchaeus saw Jesus come and he hoped to see Him go without being caught.
As Jesus got close, He stopped, looked into the tree and called Zacchaeus by name.
SHOW PICTURE OF JESUS
We do not have record of Jesus meeting him prior to this, so we have to believe that the Holy Spirit revealed this information to Jesus.
Zacchaeus had to be worried and confused.
He didn’t know what Jesus would say.
All he probably thought was, here I am an immoral man, there is nothing good in me, and here is Jesus a good and just man, what is coming next?
Those traveling with Jesus and any other bystander might have expected Jesus to scold Zacchaeus.
Perhaps they expected Jesus to say:
Zacchaeus, you are an immoral man.
You work with the Romans to oppress these good and hard working people.
You are thief, you have betrayed your God and your country.
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