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Well, it is Sunday, December 5th, which means that the Christmas season is officially upon us. And somewhere in the midst of all of the lights and Christmas trees and cookies, decorative sweaters, we’re going to celebrate the greatest gift that this world has ever seen. We’re going to celebrate the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So today I thought I’d give a Christmas message. But this isn’t going to be a typical Christmas message. I say it’s not going to be typical, because I’m not going to focus on the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. I’m not going to focus on Mary and Joseph and the shepherd and the manger and all that stuff, but rather why Jesus was born, why the one true God would come down into human history and live a perfect and sinless life, and ultimately to be nailed to a Roman cross as a sacrifice for sinners. And the Bible tells us that he came for his enemies, for the ungodly, as Paul says in Romans five, so that we may be made right with God. And as I was thinking about this on my way to work one day this week, I heard a Christmas song come on the radio, a song that beautifully communicates the main idea and the point that I want to make today. And because I’m tone deaf, as Carol would say, I’m not going to sing it for you. I’m just going to read it so you can sing along in your own mind if you want.
Hark! The herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn King. Peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners reconciled. You see, I believe that these words capture the heart of the Christian gospel and gives meaning behind why Jesus was born. And this is a substance of the Christmas season, which is to make peace and in mercy reconcile sinners like us to God. You know, there’s a passage of Scripture that I think exemplifies this teaching, and it’s found in the Gospel of Matthew. So if you have your Bibles, please open with me to Matthew. We’re going to be looking in chapter nine. And today we’re specifically going to be looking at verses nine through 13, which is the call of Matthew, the tax collector. And we’re going to get there in just a minute. But in order to get our minds from 21st century America and into first century Israel, let’s go through a little bit of background and context. So Matthew, the writer of this gospel, is trying to showcase to us that Jesus is the promised Messiah. He’s the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. And Matthew’s doing this under the divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And he’s trying to show us this in every possible way. He goes through the lineage, the Old Testament prophecies, etc. and then as we get into chapters eight and nine, he starts to focus in on the miracles of Jesus.
And these aren’t just random miracles. These each have been purposely selected because these miracles teach us something about the character and nature of Jesus. For example, if you recall, he cleanses a leper and he heals a centurion servant who is paralyzed, showing that he has a power over the physical body, disease, pain, and sickness. He calms a furious storm while in the boat with his disciples, showing that he has the power over the natural elements, nature, the wind, and the sea. He drives out demons of two possessed men into a herd of pigs, showing that not only does he have power over the physical realm, but he has power over the spiritual and even the demonic realm. Then we get to the miracle that’s directly relevant to the text that we’re going to be looking at today. And it starts at the beginning of chapter nine. And this miracle is going to help us see a transition into the call of Matthew. And starting in verse one it says, and getting into the boat, he, meaning Jesus, crossed over and came to his own city. And behold, some people brought to him a paralytic lying on a bed. And at this point, Jesus ministry is becoming well known in all the land, and he’s drawing huge crowds. And in Mark’s account it says that the crowds even got so large that his friends had to climb over and get up on the roof and dig a hole so they could lower their friend down to get to Jesus.
And it says, When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven And behold, some of the religious people said to themselves, this man is blaspheming. And again, in Mark’s account, it adds, for who can forgive sin, but God alone? Which is another testament of the divinity, the the deity of Jesus. And it goes on. But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, or to say, rise and walk? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He then said to the paralytic, rise, pick up your bed and go home. And he rose and went home. When the crowd saw it, they were afraid, and they glorified God who had given such authority to men. You see, this group of men, the friends of this paralytic, cared about him so much that they they went to Jesus the healer, and they dropped him down in there. Jesus said, your sins are forgiven. But then he proved it to these crowd around him that he had the authority to do this because he healed the paralytic. Jesus has the power to forgive sin again. Miracles they always show, always show us something about the nature of Jesus. Here it shows his deity and his power to forgive sin, but also notice the response of the religious people.
They begin to grumble. And this is going, all of this stuff’s going to carry forward as we look at the conversion of Matthew. But for now, Jesus has the authority to forgive sin, and he demonstrates this by his healing power. But now the question becomes, just how far will Jesus go to forgive? Whose sin does he forgive? And how does a person receive this forgiveness? Well, this now leads us into the focus of today’s text. In verse nine. It says, as Jesus passed on from there. Meaning from this event that just took place. And you can imagine the crowds were probably pretty big. And he was most likely at Peter, the disciples house, and they began walking along the shore of Galilee, the Galilee Lake. And he saw a man called Matthew sitting at a tax booth. And he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. You know, this is the conversion story of Matthew. And I’ve been a Christian now for a few years. And one of the things that just never gets old is to hear people’s conversion stories. You know, one of my greatest joys that I’ve seen in my walk with God is to see somebody that has just encountered the true and living God. Amen. Amen. I mean, it’s one of the most amazing things that you’ll see. You see that transforming power. But here we see in verse nine the conversion of Matthew.
It says that he saw a man called Matthew sitting in a textbook. And he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. That’s all it says. This is the entire conversion story of Matthew that we get in the accounts. Matthew doesn’t go into a lot of details. I’m sure there was other conversation that took place, but something that this tells us about Matthew right off is that Matthew was a humble person. He knew how bad off he was. And what mattered is that when Jesus said, follow me, he went. He knew that he was broken. He knew that he was separated from God, and he knew that he needed a Savior. God had prepared Matthew’s heart, but still, the person that was most shocked by this was probably Matthew. I mean, can you imagine this Jewish rabbi walking around and he approaches Matthew? This is so shocking and just unthinkable to the Jewish mind Mine is scandalous beyond comprehension because a tax collector was the worst of the worst. A tax collector was the dregs of human society in Israel. Now, when you and I think about tax collectors, we may think of an IRS agent or an auditor or someone who likes to take your money, or a person that you just avoid at all costs. You know, most people today still have a negative perception of taxes in general. Tax collectors just get lumped into that because of the nature.
But a tax collector in Christ’s day was way worse. They were downright despised and hated. Now we know that Matthew was a tax collector because it says that he was sitting at the tax booth. And the way the tax system worked was Rome, which pretty much dominated everything in that time by sheer force and Power offered tax franchises and they were sold to the highest bidder. So you had, first of all, you had to have some money to get one, but once you got one, it was a way for you to make a bunch of money. Now, most scholars also agree that Matthew was Jewish, which makes things even worse for Matthew, and even more despised because not only was he a tax collector, but he basically sold his soul to the Roman government in order to extort money from his own people. He was a traitor in their eyes. You know, the Romans were also despised by the Jews because they were Gentiles. They were pagans, they were unclean. And Matthew is now in league with these guys. He switched teams, and now he’s getting money from the Jewish people. You know, you see the disdain for tax collectors throughout the Bible. But one historian says in the Mishnah and the Talmud, though written later, registered scathing judgments on tax collectors, lumping the tax collectors with thieves and murderers. The touch of a tax collector would render a house unclean.
This is kind of the mindset that people had for tax collectors. You know, we’re going to we’re going to take this thought just a little bit deeper and see what kind of person Matthew was and what a tax collector meant to these people. And I got some of this stuff from John MacArthur, which I think is just fascinating. It says he meaning Matthew is sitting at a tax booth. Now, what does that tell us? Well, in that time, there was sort of a complex system of taxes and sort of like there is today. There’s many, many taxes, all sorts of taxes out there. But the bottom line was Rome established a certain Amount. And you as a tax collector, as long as you paid Rome that amount, whatever you got. Beyond that amount was yours to keep. And so this literally opened up the door for every kind of corruption imaginable. It became sort of like a Galilean mafia made up of tax collectors and their thugs. It involved crime, larceny, extortion, exploitation and so on. It was a totally corrupt system, and all the tax collectors and all the people who worked with them, and these guys were barred from the synagogues. They were unclean. They couldn’t testify even in a court of law. They were lumped with murderers and robbers, except for they were thought to be worse because of their treason. Now there was two kinds of tax collectors, because there was two kinds of taxes.
The first kind of tax collector collected a general tax and this would come down to land tax, property tax, income tax, state tax, those kind of things that we’re familiar with still today. But then there was other taxes. These would be duties. We’re familiar with that too right. We would pay an estate tax when we die. We pay income tax every year. We pay property tax. And these all go under the general category of fixed taxes. They had a set amount to them. And the people that collected these taxes were called the gabbai gabbai. And they collected the fixed taxes. But then in addition to the gabbai. There was also another group of tax collectors. And these tax collectors were called the Mochis. And they put tax on everything. They taxed import export, they taxed transport, they put tolls on the number of wheels you had on your cart, the weight of your cart, the animals, the packages, the letters. Kind of like today, right? I mean, you just tax everything. And that’s how it was back then. It was nothing new. And these guys were the worst because their taxes weren’t fixed. The taxes that they collected were flexible taxes. And the criminal element found its way into this tax group very quickly into the mochas group. The mochas, we learn, had no regard whatsoever of what people thought of them. They had one goal and one goal only, and that was to take people’s money.
And if you had the right kind of thugs, you could get it out of people. You could get it out of them through intimidation or physical harm if need be. But these people reaped the hatred, the vitriol, the scorn of the people in that society. They despise these people. Nobody in their right mind would be associated with someone from the tax collector group, let alone the moca’s tax collectors. But Jesus did. He called a moca’s named Matthew to be his disciple. Matthew was this kind of tax collector. He was a tax collector. He was hopeless. He was doomed, and he was on a pathway to hell. But God gave Matthew a new heart. In that moment, Matthew needed forgiveness and he knew it. And all Jesus had to say was, follow me. And he got out of that tax booth so fast, Jesus came along. He said, follow me. And that’s the words that Matthew was waiting for. That’s the words that Matthew wanted to hear. You know, in that moment when Matthew heard those words. Follow me. Everything that had power over him had lost its grip. Money had no more meaning. The power. The world lost its grip. The old ways had lost their charm. Under conviction, all he wanted was forgiveness. And Jesus was the one that could provide it. He had a new heart, a new mind, new longings, new desires. And Matthew never looked back. Matthew the trader, the extortioner, the robber, the outcast, the greedy, abusive sinner.
He became a disciple, an apostle, and he became a writer of the history of Jesus. You know, there was no waiting period here. There was no getting his life cleaned up first. No. Jesus called the worst of people and the worst of circumstances. And that’s an amazing encouragement for me and for us and for the people. Because you don’t have to have your life together. You don’t have to be super religious. You don’t have to be super talented. You don’t have to have a good reputation even. But Jesus calls those that the world casts off. He calls those with broken and messy lives. He calls those who don’t have it all together. And those who can’t do it on their own. You know, as is the case with Matthew, the amazing thing about this conversion story is that Matthew woke up that morning, the most hated of all sinners and pursuing the things of this world. But he went to bed that night, wrapped in the love of God and fellowship of Jesus as a redeemed apostle. You know, but the story doesn’t end here. And because, like so many new believers, so many people that have been changed by Christ, that have encountered the living God, the first thought that Matthew had was to go win his friends to Christ. And this carries us on to verse ten, where we see the call of Matthew now leads to the community of sinners.
And as Jesus reclined at the table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. Now Matthew is filled with gratitude, and he’s thrilled about what the Lord has done with him, and he’s going to have this lavish banquet. He’s going to invite over all of his friends, and he’s going to put on a feast. Now, the point of this feast is to honor Jesus, to hear the story of forgiveness, and to have Matthew share Jesus with his friends. You know, the party consists of all the dishonorable, despised rejects of Galilee, because that’s all that Matthew knew. That’s all that he was associated with. It uses the broad term sinners. What it’s talking about is all the thugs, all the sideline professions of crime, prostitution, all the things that you can think of. But then it also pulls out tax collectors and it pulls out tax collectors. It says tax collectors and sinners, because tax collectors were considered worse and because of the case of Matthew. Here, the Mishnah, which is a Jewish book written a little bit later, it defines sinners as this gamblers, moneylenders, dove, erasers, you know, whatever that means. Sabbath violators, law breakers, shepherds. Shepherds were considered filthy as well. Tax collectors, thieves, thugs, enforcers, drunkards, prostitutes. All the dregs of human society. It literally the word that they use for them meant the people of the dirt. The people who would never get to heaven.
But through Jesus they did, and the religious people did not. The lesson for us here in this community of sinners is this don’t confuse separation with isolation. You know, it’s true that as Christians, we’ve been called to be separate from the world, that we can’t engage with the wicked deeds of others, but we must not isolate ourselves. Sure, if a brother is erring, we could withdraw ourselves from from that brother. But we can’t withdraw ourselves from the world. While not of the world, we have been sent into the world, and we’ve been called to be a light in darkness. This doesn’t mean that Jesus or us as Christians, we condone sin in any way, or that we embrace sin or that sin is minimized. It simply means that we go like Jesus into the world, and we reach the people who are broken, who are afflicted with the words of hope, with the good news of the gospel, that Jesus is the friend of sinners as he was called. This brings us to the last point, which is the opposition of the religious people and Jesus. We’ve seen now has the authority to forgive sin. He calls sinners wherever they’re at, no matter how messy their lives are. And the natural tendency of many new Christians is to win their friends to Christ. But now we see the opposition Christians face opposition. That may come as a surprise, I don’t know.
You know, we see a lot of people teach that you accept Christ and your life becomes perfect. Um, I don’t see that anywhere in the Bible. What I see is opposition. And here we see the opposition of some religious people that come to the party that Matthew is putting on for Jesus and his gifts. And so you look at this party, and Jesus and his disciples would have been there the sixth that he had already called. And now you have Matthew to the mix and maybe other followers in the group as well. And then you had all of the outcasts and dregs of human society. And the common description here is that they were all following Jesus because he was the friend of sinners. These people had never known anyone like Jesus. There was nobody in that culture like him. There was nobody that would bring to the broken, to the sinners a message of reconciliation, a message of hope, and a message of healing rather than a prideful, condemning and judgmental heart. Religious people couldn’t deal with this, and they couldn’t let it go. And you see this all over. They wouldn’t leave Jesus alone. And they were absolutely relentless to him. And it says, and when the Pharisees saw this. They said to his disciples, why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? You know, this was the scandal in their mind. They were just shocked beyond words. They were stunned. They couldn’t believe that Jesus would be eating with tax collectors and sinners.
And so they asked him why? You know, because in that culture, eating symbolized acceptance. Welcome even more. It symbolized friendship. You had meals with people that you wanted to associate with, people that you were friends with. Their question why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners was intended to be a stinging rebuke to Jesus, an indictment of Jesus’s ministry. But really, what this did was it exposed the distinction between all false religion and the true gospel, the gospel of conflict between Race and all other religions which are a form of law. Faith and all other religions which are a form of works, divine accomplishment, and all other religions which are a form of human achievement and a means of salvation. Paul says that God justifies the ungodly. And that while we were still dead in our trespasses and sins, Christ died for us. Not the people who earned it, not the self-righteous. And this is the scandal of grace. It’s offered to sinners everywhere who repent and believe in faith. You know what is the response of Jesus to these party crashers? Well, it gets really interesting here. And this drives home the point of what the message is about. So we’re going to end here. We’ll read this, and then we’re going to break down the response that Jesus gives to the religious people, he says in verse 12 and 13, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice, for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. Jesus gives here a threefold answer. First, he answers these guys from analogy. He says those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. You know, the analogy that Jesus is giving is simple. Doctors can be expected to go to sick people. So a forgiver, a healer should be expected to go to people that need forgiveness, that need healing. Sinful people. And his defense to the religious people is simple. He went to the people with the deepest need. The problem with the religious people is they couldn’t see their own need because their sin was pride. It had blinded their eyes. And pride, as we learn, is probably the most dangerous sin of all. Jesus wasn’t saying that they were okay and that these guys weren’t. He was acknowledging that they’re sinners. But the Bible tells us that we’ve all sinned. That there is none righteous and that nobody seeks after God. The reality is that Matthew and his friend recognized their need, and they embraced the offer of grace through Jesus, where the religious people didn’t see that and they didn’t embrace it. So first, Jesus answers with an analogy. Second, Jesus answers with Scripture. He says, go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice.
You know this statement go and learn as you study the rabbinical writings and Jewish tradition. It’s a statement that rabbis would say to someone when that person wasn’t getting it, they had gotten off track somewhere, and it would be the modern equivalent of you’re having a conversation with someone and you tell that person, look, you need to go check your facts. And then when you do the research, come back and then let’s talk. This is what Jesus was saying here. He was saying that you’ve gotten off track. You need to go back to the writings and reform your thinking. And when you understand what this means, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Come back because Jesus here quotes from Hosea six six in the Old Testament prophet. And if you read the context of that, God is saying there that he’s not concerned with ritual, he’s concerned with a merciful heart. Jesus is telling these guys, look, you’re doing all this stuff. You’re you’re attending all these activities, you’re doing these ceremonies. You’re you’re outwardly doing all the right things. But where’s your compassion? Where’s your heart? How do you respond to those that are tangled in sin? Jesus says the same thing in the Beatitudes. He says, blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. All of the Old Testament sacrifices the systems, the commandments, the ceremonies, all of that stuff was intended to show the people of Israel their need of a Savior.
It was intended to show the holiness of God and their dependence on him. They were never intended as a way of earning their own righteousness or salvation. So the religious people didn’t understand this point, and Jesus tells them to go and learn what this means. So first Jesus answers them with an analogy. Second, he answers them with Scripture. And thirdly, he answers with authority. He says, for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. And in Luke’s Gospel, he adds at the end of that to repentance. So how do you tell a person who thinks that they’re righteous, that they are in need of grace? I mean, how do you tell a person that it’s not about what you’re doing, but it’s about what Christ did for you? Paul, who became another apostle, probably exemplified this better than anyone in the Bible. And Paul had all the credentials that these guys did or any other religious person. He shows that he came from the right lineage, that he had a zeal, a true zeal for God, that he obeyed the commandments better than most. But when he encountered Christ, everything changed for Paul. He said that he considered all of that garbage in comparison to knowing Christ. And it’s funny because you see these nicknames, these titles that are being given the religious people gave the title to Jesus, the Friend of Sinners, but Paul nicknames himself the chief of sinners. The truth is that we’re all sinners.
We’re all in the same boat. Whether you’re leaning toward the way of Paul, wrapped up in your own pride and self-righteousness, or you’re like Matthew, where you’ve pursued the things of this world and lived a self-centered life. God offers everybody an invitation into his kingdom by grace alone, through faith alone. Why did Jesus come? Well, he came to reconcile sinners to God. And just how far will Jesus go to forgive? He went all the way to the cross. And whose sin does he forgive? Well, he forgave the worst of sinners, Matthew. He forgave Paul and he forgave me. How does a person receive this forgiveness? Well, forgiveness comes to those who recognize that they’re sinners, and they put their faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ and what he’s done for him. And I’m going to end by reading a parable and against the backdrop of everything that we just looked at here, just listen to the words of Jesus. And it’s in Luke 18. It says he also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt. Two men went up on a temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus God, I thank you that I am not like other men extortioners, Shares. Unjust, adulterers or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give a tithe of all that I get.
But the tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven. But he beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. Jesus did not come to make bad people good or good people better. He came to put broken people back together. He came as a friend of sinners to reconcile us to God. He came to make dead people live. This is the heart and soul of the gospel message. And this is the reason for the Christmas season. Let’s pray. God, we’re grateful that you’ve left us with a witness that we can know you. And, Lord, we’re grateful in this Christmas season that you came. That you left your throne on high. That you humbled yourself as a servant. And Lord, that you weren’t ashamed to associate yourself with sinners. And God, we are grateful for that. And we pray that as a church family, that we can go out to the people that are hurting. To the brokenhearted and share the change that that God has done within us, and that we can bring hope to the people that need it most. Lord, that we could follow in your footsteps, that we too could be known as a friend of sinners. And Lord, we pray these things in your name. Amen.