Luke 19:1-10

Let's let's stand together for the reading of God's Word.

Luke 19.

Luke 19, 1 through 10.

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through.

A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus.

He was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.

He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short, he could not see over the crowd.

So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, come down immediately.

I must stay at your house today.

So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, He has gone to be with the guest of a sinner.

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, Look, Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.

Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham.

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

God, we pray that you would speak to us through your word this morning.

You are intimately aware of our own story and our own life.

And Lord, how that story, this story here, intersects with our story, we give your spirit permission to speak to us on those things.

Lord, we ask that you would correct us where we need correction.

We pray that you would reprove us where we need to be reproved.

We ask that you'd instruct us in righteousness where we need that instruction.

God, we surrender our lives to you and we have our ears open for your word.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So for the last few weeks, we've been going through this particular text.

I want to just bring to your remembrance a few things here.

We've been looking at stories, a series of stories and teachings about entering the kingdom of God.

The parable we saw back in chapter 18, 9 through 14, we saw the parable of the Pharisees and the tax collector.

The parable of the Pharisees and the tax collector.

Then we saw a series of teachings on entering the kingdom in chapter 18, verses 15 through 34.

And then we saw the healing of the blind man in chapter 18 through 35 through 43.

And here today we're looking at the story of Jesus meeting Zacchaeus.

If you go back over those texts, one of the recurring themes that we see is this entrance into the kingdom.

The entrance into the kingdom.

You'll recall, if you've been with us for a while, that we've been saying about Jesus that he is not looking to draw a large crowd.

He is looking to provoke out of the crowd followers who are adherents, who are dedicated to following Jesus wholeheartedly.

So big numbers are not impressive to Jesus.

What he is impressing upon those in the crowd, and he's calling out of the crowd, is disciples, those that will follow him wholeheartedly.

And so if you've been with us for the last few weeks, we've been seeing these individuals that are called to enter the kingdom of God.

And there's been some surprises, some aspects that have been surprising about the entrance into the kingdom of God.

He's pointing out, Jesus is pointing out that it's not the super religious that are entering into the kingdom of God.

In fact, there are people that are sinners, very sinful, that are being given entrance to the kingdom of God.

It's that humility, the attitude of humility, that is allowing them entrance into the kingdom.

Let me pause for just a second.

Is it cold on this side of the room?

Are you cold?

You're bundled up.

I've made it so that for eight months we've done church where that door has to stay open because it, but I've made it zip tied so that the door can be closed.

So if it's cold, just so you know, in the future, if it's it's because it's about to get cold, right?

It's gonna be freezing cold here in the next month.

We can we can pull that door shut as long as the zip ties on the crash bar.

Okay, back to our story.

So Zacchaeus, we're going to see, is one of these people who's given entrance into the kingdom of God.

We find some things here in the story of Zacchaeus.

First of all, he's a resident of Jericho, or he's located in the region of Jericho.

The last story that we looked at last week with Bartimaeus being healed, he too was a resident of or um residing there outside of Jericho.

It's just kind of a crazy story of Bartimaeus being healed.

Zacchaeus also seems to be one of those people that's there in Jericho.

Now, we know that the that Jericho is one of the major trade routes in the Roman Empire.

A lot of goods were transported through Jericho.

And so it was a key location for a tax collector to be located.

In fact, the text there calls him a chief collector, a chief tax collector.

He had this leadership role.

He was, because of this career, he was wealthy.

We also see that he was short.

He wasn't able to stand in the midst of the crowd and to see Jesus.

Um and the crowd, his his own peers or the the society where he lived considered him sinful.

But do you notice there in the text it says that he wanted there there's literally there's a but he wanted to see Jesus.

Do you see that?

It's in verse 3.

He wanted to see who Jesus was.

Can you repeat that after me?

He wanted to see who Jesus was.

He wanted to see who Jesus was.

He he he doesn't know, or rather, doesn't he know that he's a sinner?

Doesn't he know that he is his sin separates him from God?

Doesn't he know that his sin is his livelihood?

Doesn't he know that he can't continue cheating people out of his money and be a friend of God?

But yet the text says there he wanted to see who Jesus was.

Let's talk for just a second about the sinful state of Zacchaeus.

Or maybe we could use a term that kind of finishes up this pericope.

Let's talk about Zacchaeus' lostness for a second.

Being a tax collector at this time, um here's how it would work.

The Roman Empire would auction off um the collection of indirect taxes.

In other words, tolls, tariffs, and customs.

In our day, you can kind of think of uh like your easy pass and the express lane, or like uh the clear at TSA.

That whole idea of a of a third party that is able to charge for something.

But but in Zacchaeus' day, there was no competition.

He had monopoly, the monopoly on this um indirect taxation, and could charge whatever he wanted.

There was there's some record that we have in Rome of crazy abuses being um uh adjudicated within the Roman Empire.

But for the most part, these tax collectors had um a lot of um room.

They had a lot of space to charge high fees.

Now, by farming out the collection of these taxes, the Roman government, and this kind of gets a little bit um nerdy here, you can tune out if you want for a second, okay?

But by farming out the collection of these taxes, the Roman government could hedge against the flux fluxation of the fluctuation, sorry, that's the word, of the tax amounts.

The government could count on regular tax revenue by using these middlemen, and the tax collectors would be expected to absorb the loss at a local level if there was some type of economic downturn.

There was no set tax rate.

These tax collectors they could charge exorbitant fees.

There was no protection for, um, there was no mechanism for protecting the local people.

So it worked for the government, um, but it was not very democratic, right?

There was not um checks and balances.

You would think of like the Thirteen Colonies and the early formation of um the United States and how the outcry of the Thirteen Colonies was taxation without representation.

Well, in this system here, Rome was had a system that served its governance so that it could kind of count on the income, but it left room for wild abuses.

And that's and that's really how Zacchaeus gained his wealth.

His career separated him from society.

By practicing this abuse of his role, um, he became ceremonially unclean.

So the Jews disliked tax collectors, um, they had disdain for them because they um subjugated the people to these high fees, but they also interacted with Gentiles on a regular basis.

So ceremonially, the tax collectors were considered to be an unclean people because of their work.

They also were kept from observing the Sabbath day, and so that also was a factor in them being kind of just considered ceremonially unclean or not kosher Jews.

So we see that culturally they were considered token sinners in Matthew chapter 9, verse 10, 11, 19, and on throughout the scriptures, Jesus refers to being extremely sinful, and he talks about the tax collectors and sinners, right?

Matthew 9:10

So you have sinners, but then you have also tax collectors lumped in there.

In Matthew 21, 31, Jesus talks about um the harlots and the tax collectors.

That's how bad the tax collectors were viewed within society.

And last of all, these these tax collectors were separated from the historic story of redemption.

We're learning sociologically how important it is for us to place ourselves within a greater narrative, right?

We derive our own identity based off of a bigger story that's going on around us.

And so we like to place ourselves in a story that has kind of big themes, the meta-narrative.

Well, Zacchaeus was really cut off from an inherited story that's beautiful of God's redemptive work on behalf of the nation of Israel because of his career.

But he was not just cut off from society, Zacchaeus was also separated from God because of his career.

Zacchaeus could not participate in temple worship because he was perpetually unclean and had violated the civil law.

So in Leviticus 6, 4 through 5, it says, when they sin in any of these ways and realize their guilt, they must return what they had stolen or taken by extortion or what was entrusted to them or lost property they had found.

So within the civil law that the Jews had inherited at the time of Moses, it makes it clear that the work that these tax collectors were doing, like Zacchaeus, that it was that it was wrong.

It was a violation of the law.

And yet this was how Zacchaeus made his money.

He was basically living in a way that transgressed against the law of God.

So when we encounter Zacchaeus, he is separated from God, he's separated from the history of the Jewish redemption, he's separated from his fellow Jewish brothers and sisters, he's separated from the garden work that God commissioned at creation and was instead engaged in a career that damaged society.

Work, we see, is not something that came about because of the fall.

God commissioned work before at the very beginning of creation, right?

God gave Adam and Eve work to do.

He said, tend the garden, name the animals, be fruitful and multiply.

So before there was any eating the forbidden fruit and falling and being ashamed of nakedness, before that part ever transpired, God gave humanity work to do.

Now God could have just made the world work without work, right?

He could have just provided everything without this institution of work, and yet he created work for a purpose.

So work is good, but sometimes it's not good, like in the case of Zacchaeus.

Being a tax collector itself was not bad.

In fact, John the Baptist had these people that were coming out to him to be baptized before Jesus started his ministry.

And some people were coming, and this was a baptism of repentance, and people were coming to John the Baptist saying, What does repentance look like in my life?

You'll recall that John says to the soldiers, the centurions, he says to them, Don't use your ability, your authority to extort people for money.

And then he says to the tax collectors, don't charge more than you ought to charge.

So it's a functional role.

Tax collection is not evil in itself, but using this position of authority to extort high fees is where there was sin.

But again, I love this phrase.

He wanted to see, he wanted to see who Jesus was.

We go over to verse 7.

It says this.

So let's talk a little bit about this crowd, right?

Jesus, Jesus is coming along, the crowd is following him, Zacchaeus climbs up in a tree, Jesus goes specifically to Zacchaeus and invites himself to his house, which is interesting.

He doesn't just say he wants to come over for a meal.

Literally, the language here is Jesus wants to go and stay over.

Maybe live or stay the night at Zacchaeus' house.

This is not just, hey, can I come and do like a visit for a few minutes?

No, this is I want to, I want to be your guest, your formal guest.

So Jesus hops, or Zacchaeus hops down and he's participating in bringing Jesus to his house, and the crowd says this he has gone to be the guest of a sinner.

The crowd always has an opinion about sinners.

And they don't hesitate to make that opinion known.

Here in our story, the crowd understood that God hates sin.

Imagine this crowd following Jesus.

They understand the basic framework of morality, that God hates sin.

They understood that Jesus was on God's team, to kind of put it crassly.

They understood that Zacchaeus was not on God's team.

Therefore, it was simple.

It was oil and water.

The two cannot mix.

Jesus can't hang out with Zacchaeus.

He'll get dirty.

It sets a bad precedent.

People will think that God's okay with sin.

People will think that sin really isn't so bad.

What about the law that Jesus came to fulfill?

Isn't Zacchaeus unclean?

How can Jesus save the world if he goes and hangs out with Zacchaeus?

Is he misrepresenting the gospel?

You see, the crowd in Jesus' day had a basic framework of morality and immorality, and their response makes sense at a kind of a rudimentary level that oil doesn't mix with water, that the holiness of God cannot be in the presence of sin.

There's a tension that exists there.

There's a need for sin to be dealt with.

What the crowd is missing is Jesus.

Who is Jesus?

Jesus is the answer to that very tension.

He's the one who makes the people clean.

Let's talk about the crowd today for a second.

There is a prescription by society on how sinners ought to be treated.

I'm not just talking about the crowd, the church crowd.

I'm talking about society as a whole.

Right?

Western society, the air that we breathe when we're born in America and we eat and sleep democracy and free markets and capitalism and Republicans and Democrats and going to Target and shopping at the grocery store and living, you know, in Baltimore.

I'm talking about that society.

It has a prescription on how sinners ought to be treated.

Who is immoral in our society?

I'm sure it's easy to identify.

First of all, some just thoughts here is as in our society, first of all, as much as you may look at our society and say, well, it's not very Christian.

It's moved away from maybe a Christian sense of morals.

We live in a very moral society.

Morals is like the debate.

You go on Facebook any any um day, you'll see a debate over morality.

It's very moral, maybe just not a Christian morality.

I would say this is kind of some of at least three of the ways some three of the things that are immoral within our society.

First of all, it's immoral to be deeply opinionated, to be black and white, or to have a binary view that there's either A or B are the options.

That's too simplistic.

You're too opinionated.

If you kind of have a view like that, then you're typically viewed as immoral.

Second, anyone who limits sexual freedom is seem to be immoral.

Now there's some fringes to sexuality that are being challenged.

For example, adults with kids, adults with animals, but the kind of the framework for sexuality is pretty large.

And then another aspect of morality is just politics.

Do you realize that the other party, whatever party you identify with, is not necessarily immoral?

They have just different answers to the problems that you experience and I experience on a regular basis.

But they're not immoral.

But you would think, you would think being on Facebook or watching, you know, cable news networks, that the other side is immoral.

That's the air that we're breathing.

And how does our society, how does the crowd deal with immoral uh the immoral?

Well, if you violate one of these um codes, you're shamed, you're silenced, or you're isolated, right?

That's that's how we deal with immorality within our culture.

It's interesting.

I showed you um, I think a screen capture a while ago, and it just it still is so in my mind.

Um Logan Paul used to be, I think, a vine star, um, and then he moved over to YouTube, and then um Logan Paul did this YouTube video where he went into a forest in Japan and um Showed the bodies of people who had committed suicide and made light out of it.

And he was readily condemned by the crowd, right?

He had done something that was immoral.

But what was fascinating was what does redemption look like once you transgress against society's moral code?

He was shamed, he was silenced, and then isolated, but then society tried to wrestle with this.

He wanted to be redeemed.

He wanted to be brought back into the good graces of society, but there was no map within society of how that should be accomplished.

The great thing about Christianity is that it has a map.

It tells you what's right and wrong, so it's very binary.

And then it says what is the map for redemption.

So we don't have to wrestle with or come up with kind of out of thin air what redemption looks like.

We're able to know what the source of justification, that some good work that we do is not what earns us the good graces of the crowd.

So here we have a story where a man is rejected by society.

He is immoral according to society.

He's also immoral according to scripture.

But the crowd does not have, they don't have a rudder as they deal with his sin.

They don't know how to properly handle him, or rather, they don't know how to handle Jesus' interaction with him.

Here in our story, we have the Jesus crowd muttering about Jesus keeping company with this man.

Somebody needs help getting in the front door.

Let's move over, though, to the redemptive work of God.

The redemptive work of God.

But just remember, right?

This whole story, this whole story unfolds with this man who has been rejected by society.

He is wanting to see who Jesus was.

Is he allowed?

Will you let him be curious?

Will you permit him to be curious in this setting?

Just a couple of um weeks ago, we looked at this passage.

Look at it up here on the screen.

Luke 18, 24 through 27.

Look what Jesus says.

Jesus said, now he's talking to his disciples.

He says, How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.

Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

Those who heard this asked, who then can be saved?

And Jesus replied, What is impossible with man is possible with God.

What is impossible with man is possible with God.

Here we have a rich man, don't we?

We have a rich man who wants to see who Jesus is.

Isn't that incredible?

He's curious about Jesus.

And yet Jesus has said, this is an impossible thing unless God has his hand in it.

What is God doing here?

God's seeing Zacchaeus up in a tree, Jesus comes to him and invites himself over to his house.

The impossible is transpiring before our eyes.

Zacchaeus, what happens in his life?

What does he say?

He makes this declaration of repentance.

He calls Jesus his Lord.

Do you see that?

He says, Lord, I want to give back half of my possessions to the poor.

And then he says, I want to pay back four times what I have cheated anybody.

This is an amazing demonstration of repentance in his life.

And then we have Luke 19, 9 through 10.

Luke 19, 9 through 10.

Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

And that's really the point.

Jesus came to seek and to save the lost.

That's really what this story leads up to.

The Bible portrays humanity, society, in its state of lostness.

Zacchaeus was lost in his sin.

He was estranged from his kin.

He was estranged from his created purpose, the created purpose of work and career.

He was estranged from God and spiritual life.

Some in his state of wealth envied him.

Others condemned him, considered him a lost cause, and yet Jesus sees him as the object of his mission.

He sees him as, you're the one.

You're the one that I've come to save.

Jesus sees lostness and knows he came.

He came.

He was sent on a mission to seek and to save people in their lostness.

Right?

We're the Jesus people.

We want to follow Jesus.

And we are, as we follow him, are we operating according to the roadmap he's given to us or to the roadmap of society?

As we take in life around us, what God wants to do when we follow him, it says in Romans 12 that he wants to transform the way that we think so that we will know what is right and wrong.

He wants to transform our minds.

He wants to help us think differently.

This is one of those ways, right?

We interact with morality on a regular basis.

Social media connects us quite a bit.

Some of you, I know, are um hermits and you don't get on social media at all.

That's fine.

That's fine.

The rest of us, we are there, and it's a mess, right?

There's a lot of things that are going on in the midst of uh this world of social media, and people are um they're either operating according to God's map for morality, or they're operating according to society's map for morality.

And I'd encourage you to let God transform your thinking about um the world you're taking in.

It's lostness, right?

This is the bottom line, right?

You are interacting with people in work, on social media, neighbors, family members.

They're either lost or they're not.

And as you interact with them, there's this whole swirl.

The more like we're connected online, things are becoming more and more political.

I don't know if you've seen that politics have like creeped into almost everything, right?

You gotta, it's like the toilet bowl, right, that swirls, right?

You gotta not get in, not get, don't get swirled, don't get sucked into it, right?

It's it's a toilet, that whole world.

Go back to what scripture says.

Are you looking at people through this lens of lostness and recognizing that Jesus came to seek and to save lost people?

Again, the idea of somebody who's lost is that they're off, they've lost the plot, like they're not on the map.

They need help finding their way back.

And here's Jesus, here's Jesus interacting with the impossible, and he is saying, he's saying to this crowd, or really saying to probably the in the crowds hearing of Zacchaeus, I have come to seek and to save those that are lost.

Notice, notice how Jesus is participating in society not to condemn it and not to indulge in it.

He's participating in society to seek and to save the lost, right?

The temptation when you when you um hear the message of God's grace, that he's come into the world to save you from sin and that he wants to help set you free from sin, is you start walking with God and you can quickly become judgmental of like, look at me, I go to church on Sunday.

Not only do I go to church on Sunday, but like I help set up, right?

I must be a really good in God's book, right?

It's easy to fall into that way of thinking, that somehow that we're better than everybody else.

But the reality is that us as Christians, we are not a better people.

We're not better than anybody.

What we share in common is that we are forgiven.

That's who that's that's our common ground, right?

Not a better people, a forgiven people.

We don't want to be interacting with society to condemn it, nor do we want to interact in it, interact to indulge in it.

In other words, in the alternative, the third way, is to go in, engage the world around us with this mission mindset to seek and to save the lost.

Can I close with two other scriptures?

Luke 5, 30, earlier on, way back, like a year ago in our study of Luke, it says that Jesus, or but the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect, they complained to Jesus' disciples.

They said, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?

And then in Luke 7, 34, it says, The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

Do you see, Jesus had a reputation of spending time with people that were immoral, even to the detriment of his own reputation.

Here is the glory of God.

Come in the flesh, like showing the Father to humanity is what it says in John 14.

I've come to show you the Father.

And part of showing humanity the Father is going and having dinner with the most sinful people in society.

It's because of the mission, it's because of the mission of God that Jesus came into the world to seek and to save those that are lost.

We talk about it every week, right?

We're a new baby church that's nine months old, right?

We're tiny.

We just got a worship leader four weeks ago, which we love.

We're so grateful that Nick's here to lead us in song.

But we gather, we gather as a people that are forgiven and are on mission, right?

We care about this neighborhood.

We care about what God's doing in Southeast Baltimore.

Um, this your tithe, right?

We have the bulwark.

This week, we're gonna be able to give back from 35% of our tithe that we we put our money together on Sundays.

35% of that is gonna go back to three families that live here in the neighborhood that we care about, right?

That are a part of what we're doing.

Um we're we're in this together with our money, with our time.

Um, we're meeting in small groups because Jesus came into the world to seek and to save those that are lost.

So I want, let me encourage you with this text, right?

This is your Jesus, right?

He came to rescue you in your lostness.

If you came in this morning feeling lost or beat up, this is your Jesus.

This is Jesus who came.

You may feel impossibly separated from God, but Jesus, who just earlier, less than a chapter earlier, said to us, it's impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, here Jesus is seeking out that impossible person, inviting himself to that person's house, and saying, I've come for you, I've come to rescue you, I've come to help you be found.

Man, when you consider all of what lostness meant for Zacchaeus, separated from even the very concept of work, being separated from family, being separated from his very history, his rich history, the rich history of Judaism.

All that he separated, and yet Jesus says, I've come to seek and to save you and to help you be a found person.

That Jesus extends himself to us this morning and says, You, put your name in the blank.

I have come to save you, to rescue you.

I was praying for you this um week, praying for us as a church.

One of the things I was praying is that your life and my life would be this public demonstration of the rescue of God.

You you all come, and and I've you've told me some of your stories, I know.

And um some of you are going through very difficult things, very painful things, either relationships or health or finances, or and um, and my prayer for you, I I I think one of the greatest church planting methods, right?

My my job is to is to help form a new church, found a new church here in Southeast Baltimore.

And as I was praying for you, I was thinking, you know, the most attractive thing about a church is a church where God's answering prayer.

Where the where we come in the door with these impossible um just settings where we're we're broken.

There's there's things that are going on.

Wouldn't it be attractive if we are a gathering of people who have experienced the rescue of God in the mundane, in the regular parts of our life?

I'm hoping that God put that in my heart because he's gonna do that in your life.

You know?

I'm I'm trusting that that God, that that's what God wants to do.

Right?

So let me pray in that in that vein.

Pray for you, pray for myself, but I'm also gonna pray for our neighborhood, uh, that the Lord would work.

There's a lot of people out too.

Let me let me say this.

The other thing I want to pray for is there's a lot of people still with family as we go kind of finish out the holiday season.

And um, and they've asked for prayer.

Uh Don also mentioned he um on Slack, he's asking for prayer as well for his brother.

So, Lord, we just um we thank you for seeking and saving the lost, like Zacchaeus.

We're no better.

We're no better.

We need you to look at us and to seek us out and to rescue us this week.

Lord, would you have mercy upon us?

Would you have mercy upon us?

Lord, as we look for you, kind of just wanting to see Jesus this week, wanting to see you, Lord, this week.

Lord, we bring you the mess of our life.

We say, Lord, would you just demonstrate your power in the midst of our story?

Lord, would you manifest your power in our life?

Would you make the name of Jesus great through the context of our life?

Lord, we do pray for the missionaries, Lord, that are a part of our church and are out with their friends and family this week.

We pray that you would speak through them, that their witness and their testimony would be strong and powerful, that you would make yourself known.

Lord, would you would you work, would you work in this neighborhood to seek and to save those that are still lost?

And however you want us to participate in that work, Lord, we we just um we want to obey.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let's stand and we will sing this last song.