Apostles Church

Luke 5:27-32 Levi's calling. Tax Collectors collected taxes from the Jews for Rome. Rome was the enemy. Occupied territory, oppressive nation that committed gross indignities against the Jewish people and exploited and oppressed them financially taking their lands from them. Sinners were the morally indecent, swindlers, drunkards, the promiscuous, the prostitutes, and others who made their living in morally questionable ways. Large gathering of tax collectors and sinners. Religious, moral, upstanding people saw these tax collectors and sinners as those whom God despised. In their minds, God's intentions toward them were only judgment and wrath. God's love was reserved for those who were good, moral, religious, respectful, etc. Jesus shatters their presuppositions as to who God really loves. Jesus, who has established himself already as one who has a direct line to God, is choosing to share a meal with these thieves, drunks, and whores, the outcast that were despised by the religious elite of the day. Sharing a meal, table fellowship, was a big deal. It was a sign of your acceptance of another, of your desire for friendship. Jesus is befriending these outcast. He loves them and has a deep respect for their sacredness as individuals made in the image of God. He is deeply concerned for their well-being, and their condition before God.  So he gets authentically involved with them and enters into their lives to know them, befriend them and reveal God's love to them. He dines with them to invite them to experience God's grace. He wants to be with them and wants to be involved in their lives and hear their stories and transform their stories.

The Pharisees, religious leaders and moral police of the day, grumble against this. It goes against everything that they believe about God's posture toward sinners. God would certainly not endorse eating and drinking with these people.  In His response to the grumbling of the Pharisees, Jesus reveals his mission - to heal people who are sick - to bring life transformation to those whose lives have been shattered by the fall and who acknowledge their brokenness and need for God's grace and renewal. His response lines out three kinds of people for us and how those three kinds of people experience God.

The Sick - Jesus says that we are sick; there is something wrong with us in the deepest places of us. There is something deadly in us that is controlling us and killing us.  We are ruined by the fall and our lives are diseased by sin. We feel our sickness deep inside if we are honest. We are people whose hearts are filled with ill motives, anger, lust, lies, greed and pride. But, with all our guilt, God loves us and Jesus has come for the sick. We are all beauty, made in the image of God, beauty that is broken, and bruised, and marred by our bad choices, moral failure, and private shame. We have so many skeletons in our closets and secret sins we conceal that we hope will never be found out.  And God loves us; he wants us and has sent Jesus to heal us. He has come to befriend the sinner and to die for their sins, taking on the Father's wrath against their sin so they the sinner could be recipients of the Father's love. He shows the full extent of that love by laying his life down for his friends. This is the Indiscriminant love of God. He extends that love to all of us. Brennan Manning: "Whatever our failings may be, we need not lower our eyes in the presence of Jesus. Unlike Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, we need not hide all that is ugly and repulsive in us. Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace. As we glance up, we are astonished to find the eyes of Jesus open with wonder, deep with understanding, and gentle with compassion." We respond to that love with repentance. Repentance is the total reorientation of life. It is not a call to simply acknowledge Jesus but to reorient all of life to him and his Kingdom in response to his grace. To place all of your life before him in humble trust so that he can forgive you, heal you, continually transform you. This is Jesus' mission, the very thing his heart throbbed with, to seek and save those who were lost, distant from God, indifferent, and at risk; to call sinners to repent. Maybe some among us that are in this category. You thought you had to be well to come to God, you thought you had to have it all together. You just have to come broken and in need.

The Well - the self righteous who think they have no need for God due to their morals, merits, or their affluence. Don't see their need for God's grace. They don't desire healing, because they are not aware of their disease. Illus: "Student on a Caribbean holiday dies from leukemia she didn't know she had." There are some that just do not feel the weight of their sin because their lives are filled with anesthesia. The irreligious numb their felt need with pleasures. But Jesus says the religious numb the felt need with morality and ritual. All the while failing to acknowledge they are sick with sin and need grace and forgiveness. Jesus says, this kind of person never hears the call to re-orient their life to him and his Kingdom. They never entrust themselves to him for his forgiveness and life-renewal. They are proud and self-righteous and self-sufficient. These are the Pharisees. The very people you would think are in, are actually the ones that are out.

The Healed - Those of us who have experienced the grace of God in Christ and are being transformed by him in the deepest places of our lives. We are sent into the world with the same mission as Jesus. John 20:21. With the same compassion and love and willingness to suffer and die that others might be restored to God and experience a total renovation of their lives and restoration of God's image in them. Are you living as one who is sent? One who is being so transformed by the Gospel that you truly desire for others to experience it.

To live out this mission: We must embrace our identity as a recipient of grace, one who was utterly sick, but is being healed. This saves us from the Pharisaical heart. IF we get our identity we cannot be sectarian - self-righteous, isolated from anyone outside the faith community; retreating into our own community and subculture and condemning those outside of it. Picket signs and bumper sticker wars, launching God grenades, telling the world what they believe God is against. The world has seen enough of this and the Gospel does not let us take that approach.  But, We cannot be syncretistic either - those who so embrace the culture that we look just like it, sharing its values, ethics, practices, and patterns, getting in sync with it. Jesus perfectly carried out all that was in God's heart for him; in motive, thought and deed he order his life completely by the desires and designs of the Father all the while eating and drinking with those who were sexually promiscuous, greedy, and vulgar. Syncretism is a failure to see God's holiness; Sectarianism is a failure to see God's grace. We have to avoid both and be missional. People faithful to Jesus and his mission, order our lives after God's desires for us. Those who love our Lord so much we obey Him with our whole hearts and those who love the people he came to save so much that we serve them with our whole hearts.

We must be responsive to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit longs for people to know Jesus. The Spirit is sent into the world to draw people to Jesus through the faithful witness of his people. If we are sensitive to the Spirit, we will sense him prompting us, urging us to address people God loves with the story of Jesus. What I am learning right now about living on mission in our city - prayerful posture. To live on mission as one sent by Jesus means you are cultivating a prayerful posture toward our city and readiness to address people when the Spirit prompts us.

We must have Authentic Involvement and Invitation. The normal way that God connects people to Jesus is through personal relationships. Levi loves his friends and desires them to know Jesus. Levi has been accepted by Jesus as a friend and wants his friends to share in that experience. He invites them to his house and introduces them to Jesus over a meal. They weren't projects; they were his friends. Levi cared about them. Are we as a community authentically involved in people's lives? Do you genuinely love people and care for them. Illus: Julia Youngblood. Genuinely involved in peoples lives because she cares for them and she compassionately introduces  Jesus to her friends in natural ways. Challenge: Table fellowship. Be involved your friends lives and seek to involve them in this community that is being transformed by the Love of God in Christ. And, hold out that invitation to a total reorientation of their lives toward Christ, a complete renovation of their vision of reality and life pursuits. I was recently reminded of having a big vision with a real simple strategy. We talk about seeking the renewal of our city. What part of the city has God entrusted to you? Pray for your circle; your friends; your co-workers. Not treating them like a project as if your love and care for them is contingent upon their conversion, but treating them like people, authentically involved, caring, loving, serving, helping, and as you do, inviting them into an encounter with Jesus.  Illustration: "Why does Jesus love sinners?" The answer, "Someone has to and his followers won't." If we are to look like our Lord, we must be a people who genuinely love others and are involved in their lives. Losing our selves in the love of God and in the love of others. Forgetting about our reputations and self-preservation and truly loving people enough to share with them what we believe is the most important thing in this world - that God love us, sent his son to save us from our selves and from our sins and to bring us into his family forever.