Reading assignment: Matthew 9:1-17
Main Idea/Truth: Jesus helps sinners.
Key verse: Matthew 9:13
Matthew tells us three stories where Jesus helped sinners:
1. Paralytic: Jesus forgave the paralytic’s sins, something only God can do. To show that He has power to do this, He does another divine work, healing this paralytic. And He does it, to show that He has the authority to forgive sins. This release from guilt is exactly what this paralytic needed and Jesus helped him with his deepest need.
2. Matthew: Matthew (or Levi) was a tax collector who ripped people off, who was also a religious apostate. But Jesus called him to follow Him. He gladly did so.
3. Reception: Matthew throws a dinner reception for Jesus where He ate with sinners and tax collectors. The religious leaders criticized Jesus for this. Jesus taught them that He came to call sinners unto Himself, not the righteous. Jesus is the great physician who came not for the healthy, but for the sick. He also taught them that their old way of thinking and doing cannot mix with Jesus’ new teaching. They need to jettison the old to embrace the new.
Prayer Suggestions:
1. Jesus, forgive me for my sins. You can forgive, because You have the authority to do so as God the Son.
2. Jesus, You called sinners like Matthew to follow You. May I follow You, too? You came to call sinners, and here am I.
3. Jesus, You are also the physician for all my spiritual ills. You can bring healing to all of my spiritual problems. I ask for Your healing.
4. Lastly, I don’t want to mix the old with the new. If there is any old way of thinking and doing that I’m not willing to let go, give me what it takes to let go of the old baggage. Excise the old man with his old habits and mindset. I want to become the new person that You want me to be.
Transcript
Let me pray for us and we'll begin our time.
Dear Lord, thank You that You love us, and You made that so clear by giving up Your only begotten Son to come to this crooked and cursed world to taste of the sufferings of man, then to give up His precious life for the salvation of man. All of that demonstrates to us that You are not a God who does not care, that You do not stand aloof, looking at our suffering from a distance with no concern. But You love Your creation, and so You sent Your only Son to redeem us from our sins, and all the fallout that came about through our sin, that we might have hope, and that we might come to see that You are the God of love and infinite goodness and that Your wisdom far surpasses that of ours. Thank You for the wonderful gift of Your Son, the reason for the celebrations around this time of the year. We confess that Jesus is the reason why we can call upon You today, because in Him we have a Redeemer, a mediator between us and You, the Holy God, whom we had deeply offended, and yet, through Jesus we can be cleansed of our sins and we can draw near to You and call You our Heavenly Father. Thank You for this and thank You for this time to look at Your holy word. Now we pray that You will teach us and that You will bless everyone here to ever more learn of You and to trust in You more. Guide us we pray. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Next passage to be read is Matthew 9:1-17, and the main idea and the main truth here is that Jesus helps sinners. Jesus helps spinners. The key verse is 9:13, where Jesus says, “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” I did not come to call the righteous but sinners. That's good news. That's good news for me and that's good news for every person who is honest about their own sinfulness before God; for if Jesus came only to call the righteous unto Himself, there would be no one who would be worthy of that calling. But instead, Jesus says, “I came to call sinners.” In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus completes the thought by saying “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Some think that the word repentance is a harsh word, a condemnatory word, calling people to change, calling people to feel bad about their sins. But I believe it's actually a word of hope, because repentance means that we can deal honestly with our sins, call them for what they really are and know that there is grace. God is saying, there's opportunity, there's opportunity to get right with Him, an opportunity to be able to draw near to the Holy God, because God has sent His Son to draw sinners to Himself. Well, this whole passage is an open window into this heart of God in the life of Jesus. Matthew tells us three stories where Jesus helps sinners.
The first story is about a paralytic. The second story is about the author of this very book, the man whose name is Matthew, who is also called Levi. And then thirdly, it's about a reception, a dinner party that took place.
First, the paralytic. In this passage, we encounter a paralytic whose friends brought him to Jesus to be healed. Obviously, a paralytic cannot walk and so could not come to Jesus himself, but his friends bring him to Him for healing. Interestingly, Jesus doesn't immediately heal this man. Instead, He first encourages him by declaring that his sins are forgiven. It's a striking scene. Jesus says to the paralytic, “Take courage, son. Your sins are forgiven.” Now, there were some religious leaders, Jewish religious leaders, in the crowd, and they were quite upset at this thing, because to declare the pardon for sins like this is the exclusive right of God. No man has the right to declare someone's sins forgiven. Jesus was fully aware of this murmuring, and so he asks a rhetorical question to prove that he has authority to do what God does, to forgive sins. He asks, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, [that is to say to this paralytic] ‘Get up, and walk?’.” Of course, the right answer is that both are humanly impossible. No man can declare someone's sins forgiven, and no ordinary human being could ever make a paralytic to walk on the spot. Then, having made this point, Jesus continues, “But so that you may know that the Son of Man (Jesus’ reference to Himself) has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” And in that instant, the man was healed. He got up, he picked up his mat, and he went home. What Jesus demonstrates here is that He is God. He has a divine ability to forgive sins. He forgives sins because He is God the Son. He forgives even as the Father forgives sins. Not only did Jesus demonstrate this divine authority, He also met the paralytic’s deepest need of forgiveness of sins. Why do I say that? Well, in the Jewish society, someone with poor health was deemed to be under the curse of God. So you could only imagine what this man felt like all his life, how people judged him all his life, that he had by some sin of his incurred the wrath of God, and thus he lost his ability to walk. Then comes this miracle worker who claims to be God and He declares all of his sins forgiven. This man, in a sense, had been trampled upon all his life. Everyone looked down on him and he probably at some point started to believe what people had told him, that he was a paralytic because of some secret sin he had committed. Everyone thought of him as a lesser human being. Then Jesus comes to his aid, and He showed him that he is acceptable in the sight of God through the forgiveness of sins which only God can grant. Jesus helped sinners. This is what He did with the paralytic.
The second example is the man named Matthew, the man who wrote the gospel of Matthew. In the story his Jewish name is used, Levi. Here's a story about him. Matthew was a tax collector. Now, a tax collector has hardly any analogy to IRS agents of today. In the first century world in Israel, tax collectors were cheats. They were scoundrels who robbed people of their money. The tax system in the Roman Empire worked this way. The Roman government collected taxes through hirelings from among the locals. They didn't want to do the dirty job themselves through their own Roman officials, because people would revolt and riot against that. Instead, they hired people from the locals. To incentive them to be their tax collectors, they gave them permission to add to the Roman tax any margin they wanted for their own benefit. So then, if the Roman tax was 10%, then the tax collector was permitted to levy a tax of 15%. They'll turn over the 10% tax to the Roman government, and they'll pocket the remainder of the 5%. Of course, depending on the scrupulousness of the tax collector, they can add as big of a margin as they want, gouging the people for their personal gain. Beyond all of this, tax collectors were hated all the more because they were collaborating with Gentiles. That meant that these were religiously compromised. They were unclean and unfit for worship of God. They were not only ripping off their own countrymen and enriching themselves at their expense, they were also apostates in the sight of the religious community. So, the tax collectors were deeply hated in Jesus’ time. Well, here's Matthew. He's a tax collector, sitting in his tax booth doing his dirty work, collecting taxes. Then Jesus comes along, and He calls this man to become His disciple. Jesus calls Levi to follow Him. Levi must have been ecstatic. He must have known about Jesus, about His teaching, because when Jesus called him, he immediately left the tax booth and followed Him. It's an amazing story. The person that everyone deemed as a scoundrel, Jesus called him to become his close ministry companion. This is Jesus; He helped sinners.
The third story is about a reception. It’s a dinner reception put on by Matthew. He did this for Jesus and he invited all his sketchy friends. And so there is this big party and Jesus is there and so were all of Matthew’s friends, all the evildoers and swindlers. Now, Jesus wasn’t just mingling with them. He was there to teach them. But the scene from the perspective of the Jewish religious leaders was an eyesore, because here is Jesus, a respectable rabbi, eating with a bunch of sinners, the sort of people that no godly person should ever associate with. Eating together in that culture was deeply significant. I don't think it's very much different in our culture either, because you don't typically invite people over to your house and serve them a meal unless they're your friends or family. And that's the way it was in the Jewish culture. You don't dine together with someone unless they were your friends. So the Pharisees criticized Jesus. And they don't seem to have the guts to confront Jesus, so they bring this up to His disciples. They say, “Why is your Teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus, of course, is always aware of this discussion, and so He tells them those words from the key verse. He says, “I didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners.” Jesus also adds a short parable to this. Actually, He prefaces it with the parable in verse 12 where He says, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.” What Jesus shows is that we are all spiritually sick, and that those who know they’re sick can come to the great physician and find healing from Him. But the religious leaders don’t understand any of this, because they didn't see themselves as spiritually sick. They didn't see their own sin in the sight of God. They were puffed up, self-righteous, and blind to their own sin. At the end of the story, there's another confrontation by the religious leaders who were upset that Jesus' disciples didn't fast like they did according to their own religious customs. Jesus's answer was simply this, that the old and the new do not mix. When a person becomes a disciple of Jesus, they need to part ways with the old way of thinking and doing things, and follow Jesus with the freshness of His new teaching. What all of this shows is that there is hope for sinners. And Jesus has come to help sinners. We don’t need to have been raised with the right traditions. We all start afresh. The old and new do not mix. This means everyone starts at zero. This means there is hope for me no matter where I’ve been or what I have done. I can start afresh at zero. I find all of this to be so heartwarming, that the God who created the world, the second person of that triune God, came into the world to help us. That's exactly who Jesus is. He came from heaven to help sinners.
There are lots of things to pray about here.
Jesus has power to forgive sins. We can pray to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins because He has the authority to do that. Jesus call sinners to follow Him, even sinners like Matthew. If in your heart you really desire to honor Jesus and to follow Him, then you can express that to Him. Thank Jesus that He came for sinners, that He is the spiritual physician, that He can bring healing to all of our spiritual ills. And then lastly, if there's anything in your heart that says I want to mix the old with the new, that I'm not willing to let go of the old way of doing things and the old pattern of thinking, you can pray to Jesus about that and ask Him help you let go of this old baggage. Ask Him to help you to excise the old man and his old habits and mentality, so that you would become the new person that Jesus wants you to be. We can ask Him, because we can be assured that Jesus helps sinners. That's the wonderful lesson from this section of the Gospel of Matthew. I hope that that’s a helpful guide to this next section. May the Lord bless you and enrich your time in Scripture as you continue to read and meditate and respond to the Lord in prayer. We’re done for today. Good bye.