THE CHARMS OF THE SAVIOR – Luke 5:27-32

Preached September 18, 2011
from
Luke 5:27-32

Theme: This passage shows us why it is that even the most hardened sinners felt drawn to Jesus.

(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)

I had a wonderful lunch last week with a dear friend who’s a pastor on the other side of town. It’s always good when I get a chance to be with him; but what made this lunch particularly wonderful was our subject of conversation. Without our planning for it to happen, most of our time was spent just talking about Jesus.

It wasn’t a heavy discussion, either. There were no doctrinal agendas or theological controversies. We just sat and ate and relished together how good and gracious Jesus is to those who love Him. We opened the Bible and looked at some stories from the Gospels; and talked about how Jesus was always kind to those who needed Him most. We admitted that there are times in the Bible when Jesus got very angry with some people; but, almost always, it was with the kind of self-righteous, super-religious people that looked down on others and thought they themselves had no need for salvation. But we took note of how Jesus never made genuinely broken, ‘sinfully aware’ people feel bad or condemned for coming to Him. Even if they were the biggest moral messes they could possibly be, He was always approachable and made them feel welcomed and safe and loved by Him.

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I don’t know if you’ve ever had a conversation with someone like that—where you just talked about Jesus for a while. But that one was very refreshing to me. And it did two things for me. First, it made me even more fascinated by Jesus’ gracious relationship with sinners. It made me ask, “What was it about Jesus that drew sinners to Himself? Why was it that immoral people didn’t hide themselves from the holiest Man who ever walked the earth? Why was He so attractive to them? Why did they feel so happy and eager to be with Him?”

I’m certain that one reason was because of the sovereign grace of God toward those that Jesus saves. Just before He went to the cross, Jesus had said, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself” (John 12:31-32). Romans 8:30 says of God the Father that “whom He predestined, these He also called . . .” I’m quite sure that, whatever other reason it may be that someone comes to Jesus, it’s—most of all—because they were graciously moved upon in their deepest inner-being by divine grace to come to Him.

But I also believe that there was something about the way Jesus treated sinners that drew them to Himself once they came. And this leads me to the second thing that my conversation with my pastor friend did for me. The more I looked at Jesus—how gracious He was to some of the worst sinners that He met; and how they loved Him and were drawn to be close to Him—the more ashamed of myself I became. I began to wonder if I haven’t—in my misguided zeal for righteousness—done some things, or said some things, or treated people in some ways, that has actually turned-away some of the very sinners that Jesus was actually wanting to welcome to Himself. Jesus was “a sinner-magnet”; and yet, I wonder if I haven’t sometimes behaved more like a self-righteous, super-religious “sinner-repellent” in His cause.

I want to change. I want to be more like Jesus. And I can’t think of a passage of Scripture that shows me better what to change into than the story of Jesus that we find in Luke 5:27-32;

After these things He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he left all, rose up, and followed Him. Then Levi gave Him a great feast in his own house. And there were a great number of tax collectors and others who sat down with them. And their scribes and the Pharisees complained against His disciples, saying, “Why do You eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered and said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance” (Luke 5:27-32).

This morning, dear brothers and sisters in Christ; I invite you to look with me into this passage, and to see if we can’t learn together what it was about Jesus that made even the most hardened sinners love Him and want to follow Him. And let’s also have the humility to allow what we learn to change us, so that we can become better representatives of Him in this world.

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This story begins with the words, “After these things . . .” Those words are very important. As we look backward in Luke’s Gospel, we see that the “these things” Luke spoke of were the marvelous miracles that Jesus had been performing in His public ministry.

In Luke 4:31-37, for example, we read of how He was teaching in a synagogue; and of how people were astonished at His teaching. And right there in the synagogue, He cast a demon out of a man. In verses 36-37, we read, “Then they were all amazed and spoke among themselves, saying, ‘What a word this is! For with authority and power He commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.’ And the report about Him went out into every place in the surrounding region.”

Then we read, in verses 38-39 that He went to the house of Simon Peter and healed Peter’s mother-in-law of a severe illness. Word got out; so, we read in verses 40-41, “When the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to Him; and He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying out and saying, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of God!’ And He, rebuking them, did not allow them to speak, for they knew that He was the Christ.” When it was time for Him to go, the crowds tried to keep Him from leaving them.

The crowds got so big that He was getting pressed-in by them. So, He found the fisherman Peter, sitting in His boat, mending his nets, grumbling to himself about what a lousy days’ catch he brought in. Jesus got in the boat and told him to push out into the sea. And so, Jesus fascinated the crowds along the shore with His teaching. Then, in Luke 5:4, He told Peter to launch out into the deep water for a catch. And Peter drew in so many fish that the nets were tearing and the boat was sinking! Jesus proved that He even had control over fish!

After that, in verses 12-16, He healed a man with leprosy—which caused an even greater crowd to be drawn to Him. Then, in verses 17-26, He healed a paralyzed man in a crowded house before the eyes of everyone—causing people to offer up one of the greatest ‘understatements’ found in the Bible: “We have seen strange things today!” (v. 26). And what all of these things had in common was that they were demonstrating who Jesus was. They were demonstrating the truth of what the angel had told Mary in the beginning of Luke’s Gospel—“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.”

All of this is important to remember when we come to the first verse of our passage this morning. In verse 27, we read, “After these things He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax office.” What an encounter!—the Man who was manifestly the Son of God in human flesh, and a man who was as despised a sinner as a sinful man could be!

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This man Levi had been given a very honorable name. He was named after the tribe in Israel, out of all the twelve tribes, that was honored with the priestly service in the temple. But he himself was far from “priestly”. He was a tax collector—or a “publican” as he’s called in some translations of the Bible. A tax collector, in Jesus’ day, was a Jewish man who collected taxes from his own Jewish kinsmen on behalf the Gentile Roman government. He was a man who made his living by collecting not only the required revenue appointed by the Roman government, but by also collecting a percentage above that required amount as his own personal cut.

A tax collector in Jesus day was considered to be a despicable traitor to his own people. He was a sell-out to an occupying Gentile government. And he was doubly despised by his fellow Jews, not only because he collected taxes from his own people for the Roman occupiers, but also because his collection of that tax was characterized by greed, graft and abuse. If you want to get an idea of how people thought of tax collectors, just think back to what Jesus said in the Sermon on The Mount. Do you remember how He taught that we should love our enemies? Jesus said, “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?” (Matthew 5:46-47). Tax collectors were classified as the lowest of the low; among the very worst of sinners; placed in the same category as harlots, gamblers and thieves. They were considered social “lepers”—moral “untouchables”. From a strictly human standpoint, there was no hope for a tax collector to ever find favor with God. He was not even thought worthy to be considered a normal sinner, but stood in a category all his own; which is why the Bible often quotes the phrase “tax-collectors and sinners”.

Now; you can be very sure that Levi would have heard all the talk that was going around about Jesus. He would have heard all the stories of the miracles He had been performing. It may even be that he understood that God’s promises to the Jewish people were being fulfilled before his very eyes; and that the long-awaited Messiah had truly come. But if I may engage in a bit of speculating, I imagine that Levi had hardened his heart to much of what he was hearing. He had chose a life of sin. He had given himself over to the Roman authorities, and had betrayed God’s chosen people for money. I strongly suspect that Levi had come to believe that there was no hope of heaven for someone like him. The Messiah may well have been right there in his own home town; but he himself worked in a tax collectors booth—and there’s no way that the Messiah would even give someone like him the time of day.

I believe that Levi would have thought like many unbelieving people today—people who are sinful and know it, and who feel utterly hopeless in their sin. Like them, he had simply resolved himself to the fact that he was going to die one day and go to eternal judgment; and that there was nothing left for him to do now but just go through the motions of living—to just carry on with his sinful way of life, and squeeze the most out of it that he could.

And that’s when this amazing meeting occurred. Look at verse 27 again: “After these things He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax office.” The word in the original language suggests that Jesus, as He was walking along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, stopped and looked intently at Levi—that He “gazed” at him deliberately. I believe it was love that made Jesus do that; but I wonder if it didn’t make Levi feel a little uncomfortable. “Why is that holy Prophet looking at me? Is He about to do what others have done before?—stand up on a nearby stump, preach a sermon about the wickedness of sin, and use me as an object lesson?”

What a complete shock it must have been to Levi—and probably to everyone else who saw it—when Jesus walked up to his tax office, looked him warmly in the eye, held out His hand to him, and said, “Follow Me.”

And I’d like to suggest to you that this one of the first things that this passage has to teach us about what drew sinners to Jesus. It’s that . . .

1. HE FIRST DREW NEAR TO THEM IN LOVE.

If Jesus had waited for the poor, lost, wicked, sinful tax collector named Levi to come to Him, it never would have happened. Levi wouldn’t have dared to come to someone so manifestly holy and say, “Let me be your follower.” But instead, Jesus graciously took the first step and went to him.

And the impact was immediate and profound. We’re told, “So he left all, rose up, and followed Him.” To say that he “left all” means that he left all his tax records and his debt sheets and the trays of money. We’d probably be safe in assuming that he had already paid the Roman government what he owed to it; but what he left behind was all his own personal profits. And to say that he “rose up” suggests that he never came back. He completely left his lucrative life of sin behind and became a follower of Jesus from then on. (As you probably know, he truly did follow Jesus from then on; because he was also known by the name Matthew—and he went on to write the Gospel in the Bible that bears his name.)

Now; stop for a moment and think. Is there someone in your life right now that you consider an “untouchable”? Is there someone, dear brother or sister, who is so immoral and hell-bound and hopeless in their sin that you’re almost tempted—I shudder to say it!—to just forget them and let them go hell? I can’t lie: I have, I’m ashamed to say, sometimes felt that way. But that’s not Jesus’ way at all. Jesus took the initiative of love. He once said that “the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

And I want to be more like Jesus; don’t you? May God help us to resist the temptation to be so repulsed by the sins of others that we turn away from them. May God help us to follow our Lord’s example, actively go to them, extend a gracious hand to them, and offer them the invitation to come along with us and follow our Savior!

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As we read on, we can see that Levi was truly a transformed man. He loved this wonderful Jesus who had first loved him. In verse 29, we’re told, “Then Levi gave Him a great feast in his own house.” Levi had become a wealthy man through his sinful work as a betrayer of his own people. He must have had a large house to be able to have such a great feast in it. And we can imagine that it was a pretty expensive feast! But it was a feast that he had put on in Jesus’ honor. And Jesus didn’t say, “Oh no, no, no! I am a holy Man. I’m the Son of God. I can’t come to the house of such a sinful man; and eat food purchased with such dirty money. What would people say?” Far from it; Jesus went gladly to accept Levi’s expression of love.

And we read further, “And there were a great number of tax collectors and others who sat down with them.” Do you suppose that Luke was being a bit gracious when he wrote about the great number of tax collectors “and others”? What kind of “others” do you think might have come with a bunch of tax collectors to the house of a tax collector? Well; we’re not really left to guess. Mark, in his Gospel, tells us “that many tax collectors and sinners also sat together with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many . . .” (Mark 2:15). And Mark also makes this remarkable observation; “and they followed Him”.

Someone might have looked at it all and thought that the Lord Jesus had really opened the doors to trouble. He allowed just that one notorious tax collector Levi into His circle of acquaintance; and the next thing you know, a whole mob of crooks, and prostitutes, and thieves, and racketeers, and extortionists came rolling in! There goes His reputation! There goes His ministry! In fact, it got so bad in time that the religious leaders of the day would point at Him and say, “Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Matthew 11:19). “Who’d want to be the follower of that Man?” they might have said. “Look at the kind of company He keeps!”

But this is where we discover another thing that this passage has to teach us about what drew sinners to Jesus. It’s that . . .

2. HE WELCOMED THEM INTO HIS LIFE.

He was not embarrassed that sinful people drew close to Him. They loved it that He wasn’t ashamed to be with them. And I don’t believe it was because they didn’t know that they were sinful. They clearly did. But He loved them enough to allow them to come up close into His life. He even went to their house and ate with them—which, in the ancient world, was an act of deep, personal fellowship. I even suspect that it deeply moved Levi that this wonderful Jesus—who was so gracious to him and loved him—would also be gracious to his friends and love them too.

And again, let’s stop and think about ourselves. Aren’t there times when we might be willing to go to where sinners are, and share something of the love of Jesus with them; but that we then make sure to get away from them as soon as we’re through? We’re willing to share the gospel with them; but we’re not willing to share our lives with them and allow ourselves to become identified with them. After all, we might get contaminated by them if we do! But that’s not how Jesus did things. He hinted at the Father’s sovereign grace in drawing sinners to Himself when He said, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me”; but He then added, “and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out” (John 6:37).

May God help us to be more like Jesus in this! May He help us to follow our Lord’s example, welcome needy sinners into our lives, draw up close to them without being afraid of what ‘the righteous people’ might think, and genuinely love them as He did.

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Oh; and speaking of ‘the righteous people’, this is the point at which they come into the story. Luke goes on in verse 30 to tell us, “And their scribes and the Pharisees complained against His disciples . . .”

The Pharisees were the religious ‘super-stars’ of that day. Historically, they started off with a noble intention. They wanted to be careful to honor the law of God in every aspect of life. But in doing so, they set up a complicated set of rules and regulations for life that would help keep anyone from breaking any of God’s laws. Over time, they became insufferably proud of their spirituality and their rule-keeping. Luke also mentions “scribes”; and these were the religious scholars. They were the experts in all the practical applications and interpretations of the law. Some ancient texts have it that they were the scribes and Pharisees of someone else—either of the mob of sinners, or of the disciples of Jesus. But other ancient texts have it as it’s translated in the New International Version—”the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect . . .”—and I believe that that’s the more accurate representation of what Luke actually wrote.

In any case, they looked upon this scene and were outraged by it! “What kind of a prophet is this? He couldn’t possibly be of God! He has fellowship with the worst kind of riffraff in town!” And so, they came and complained to Jesus’ disciples, saying, “Why do You eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” They certainly wouldn’t do a thing like that! And do you notice that they didn’t go to Jesus directly? Maybe they didn’t want anyone to think of them as having any association whatsoever with the kind of crowd Jesus ran around with.

Well; you just can’t speak something into the ear of one of Jesus’ followers without Him knowing it. And so, as Luke tells us, “Jesus answered [What a shock that must have been!] and said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick’” (v. 31).

What a great response! Could you imagine going to the hospital, stopping a physician, and saying, “Hey—what’s the matter with you? Are you some kind of freak or something? Why is it that you insist on hanging around sick people all the time? Don’t you have any friends who are healthy?” That would, of course, be a ridiculous thing to ask! Physicians always seem to be hanging around sick people precisely because it’s a physician’s task to make them well. Who else would we expect a physician to be associated with but people who needed a physician? And in the same way, who else would we expect the Savior from sins to be associated with but sinners who need to be saved? Who else would we expect the Physician of souls to be associated with but people whose souls need to be healed? That’s why, in verse 32, Jesus then said to them, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

One of the things I have learned over the years as a pastor is that it’s very hard to convince someone to turn to the Savior who doesn’t think that they need to be saved. The Pharisees and the scribes thought that they themselves were righteous; and they looked down their noses at the tax collectors and sinners. They didn’t think that they themselves needed a Savior from anything. But by contrast, it was the tax collectors and sinners who knew that they were not righteous and needed to be saved; and they were the ones who flocked to Jesus.

And this leads us to a third thing we learn from this passage about why sinners were so drawn to Jesus; and that is that . . .

3. HE DEFENDED THEIR EFFORTS TO FOLLOW HIM.

The ones who thought that they were righteous because of their religious ceremonies and sacrifices didn’t see how wonderful it was that hopeless sinners were drawn to Jesus. But when Levi himself later told this story—when he wrote under the name of Matthew—he said that Jesus quoted a verse from the Old Testament to those indignant Pharisees and scribes. He referred to Hosea 6:6; which says, “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

That’s the way Jesus is toward sinners who seek Him. He’s merciful to them. And I want very much to be more like Jesus; don’t you? May we have the humility to remember that we too are sinners who needed to be saved; and may God help us to rejoice when sinners are drawn to the same Savior we were drawn to. In fact, may God help us to stand joyfully with them in their doing so!

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What a wonderful Savior! How welcoming He is! How gracious! He never makes any sinner—no matter how sinful—feel condemned for drawing near to Him. He even takes the initiative and draws near to them first in order to call them to righteousness! He welcomes them into His association; and isn’t the least bit afraid of how they make Him look! And as they come falteringly to Him, He lovingly defends them against the complaints of the self-righteous!

Dear brothers and sisters; let’s make it our resolve to be more like Jesus in this world; so that others will be drawn to Him too!