Expansive Love – 10/27/24

“Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materialists believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos. Choose your miracle.”

Glen Scrivener has said,

“Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materialists believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos. Choose your miracle.”

What does he mean by that? He means everyone is building his or her life on a miracle. For example, science cannot answer the most important questions.

• Where does matter come from?
• What is the meaning of life?
• What is right?
• What is wrong?
• Where do we go when we die?

But this doesn’t mean we can’t have good reasons for believing what we believe. But what it means is when you go deep enough and you look at what is holding up our beliefs, you’re going to bump into a miracle in every one. The question is which one? It also doesn’t mean that we live consistent with the miracle we claim to believe in. For example, there are super nice atheists, and there are super not-nice Christians. Both are hypocrites. Both are living inconsistent with what they claim to believe. The miracle they claim to rest their lives on.

Heinrich Himmler was consistent, selectively. He was the mastermind of the Holocaust. He said this.

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.”

He believed in the virgin birth of the cosmos. And when you believe that everything comes from randomness, to be consistent, you believe humans are no different from bugs, or birds, or trees. So whether you hug a tree or cut it down is no different from whether you hug a person or cut them down. It’s flowing from the miracle that you rest your life on. Himmler was fascinated with Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his book “The Antichrist,” identified pity as toxic. He writes,

“Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.”

So pity or kindness to the weakest and to the most vulnerable hinders natural selection. And this is one of many reasons Nietzsche hated Christianity, because in Christianity, Jesus teaches us to value the weakest and the most vulnerable. But this is not new with Nietzsche. Way back in the 2nd century, pagan critics like Celsus attacked Christians because, as Larry Hurtado, former scholar at University of Edinburgh, emphasizes,

“[Celsus] alleged that Christians welcomed the worst kinds of people into their fellowship.”

Now, why would they do that? Well, when you build your life on the miracle of Jesus, your life begins to take the shape of Jesus. And we see this so clearly in the section of Matthew we’re currently studying — Matthew 8 and 9 — follows his Sermon on the Mount where he taught this. Now he’s doing it. The very structure of Matthew 8 and 9 is an invitation away from the miracle that people like Celsus, Himmler, Nietzsche, based their lives on.

Look again at the structure. Three Miracles, call. Three miracles, call. Three miracles, call.

Last week we looked at the second set of miracles: storm, demons, paralytic. And we began the call in verse 9 of Matthew 9:9. But I emphasized then we’re not going to have time to expand on that entire call. We would come back this week and do that.

In light of Jesus’ authority over (think about those three miracles) over nature, Jesus’ authority over demons, Jesus’ authority over disease and sin, you would think Jesus would be highly selective. He’s so high, if he’s going to call people to himself, you would think he would call the best and the brightest, right? Only the elite, the sophisticated, the strong, the upper class. What Nietzsche called the “supermen (ubermensch).” Or what Himmler tried to build with the SS. But Jesus does the opposite. He called and spent time with the “wrong” people. He also lived the “wrong” lifestyle.  You’ll see it as we walk through this passage in Matthew 9:9-17, Call of Matthew. So let’s look at these one at a time. First of all, number 1,

1. Jesus called the “wrong” people.

“As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him.”

Matthew, or Levi, was a Custom House official. He would have occupied the Custom House on the outskirts of Capernaum, which was on the Via Maris. The Via Maris was the trade route that went from, if you could look beyond that road up north to Damascus, then through Capernaum, on the top of the Sea of Galilee, all the way down to Egypt. So Matthew’s tax booth would have been on that route. Capernaum, where his tax office was, was just north of the city. And this is a modern image. This is what you would see today when you go to Capernaum. And so north, which would be further away from the Sea of Galilee, would have been his office.

These local tax collectors were especially hated for two reasons. One, they were locking arms with the oppressor, Rome, so they were viewed as traitors. Secondly, they were viewed as crooked thieves because they not only partnered with Rome, but what they did is, they would buy the privilege of being a tax collector. And they would agree on a certain amount they would send to Rome, and then everything they could make above that amount would be their own. Perfect system for corruption.

And so they would come up with all sorts of taxes like ground tax for everything you grew, income tax, poll tax, duty tax, road tax, bridge tax. And so some people, if you added up all those taxes, were paying 50-80% of their income. J.S. Shepard summarizes the view.

“The publicans [or the tax collectors] were classed by the people with harlots, userers, gamblers, thieves, and dishonest herdsmen, who lived hard, lawless lives. They were just ‘licensed robbers’ and ‘beasts in human shape.’”

They were not loved. So Matthew would have been viewed as”

• unwelcome to attend a synagogue or the temple
• unreliable as a legal witness, his testimony would not stand in court
• unclean in business, his money would be viewed as dirty, and anyone who did business with him would be viewed as tainted
• unfaithful as a citizen. He would have been viewed as a traitor, a turncoat, and unredeemable as a person. The “wrong” person.

Yet Jesus calls him. And Matthew responds and follows. Whereas Luke 5:28 says,

“And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.”

Jesus called the “wrong” people.

2. Jesus spent time with the “wrong” people.

Verse 10, “And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.”

We learn from Luke 5:29 that the home therein was Matthew’s home. He sponsored a great feast.

Verse 11, “And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’”

This is more of an accusation than a real question. They are deeply troubled by Jesus’ lack of concern for ceremonial defilement.

Verse 12, “But when he heard it, he said, ‘Those who are well [or those who think they’re 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.’”

So Jesus reveals the heart of his mission. His miraculous power that we just saw displayed in the three miracles do not result with him building an exclusive club of the beautiful and the bright.

“I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

And then he says to the Pharisees. “Go and learn.” Which is just so ironic. They are the learned ones. They’re the ones with all the training. They memorize huge portions, if not all of the Old Testament. And he says you need to learn what the Bible says. And he quotes Hosea 6:6.

“For I desire [mercy] and not sacrifice.”

So Hosea ministered 700 years before Jesus. The people were, in Hosea’s day, faithfully fulfilling their religious duties, but their hearts were cold. Hosea 6:4,

“Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.”

Your love is like morning mist. As soon as the sun comes out, it’s gone. It’s temporary. Your sacrifices are made to impress people and God, not to confess sin or praise. Hosea 6:6,

“For I desire [hesed, that is] steadfast love [faithful mercy] and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

So God is saying, I want you to experience and to express my steadfast love. Go and learn. Essentially Jesus is saying, go and learn who Yahweh is and what he’s really like. Psalm 138:6 beautifully summarizes this:

“For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly,”

That’s the Bible right there. God is great. God is good. Most heresies, most misrepresentations of the gospel, put an accent on one or the other of those two statements and miss the whole. It’s not a balance. It’s the whole. The Lord is high. He regards the lowly. Isn’t that beautiful? It could be the Lord is high, and he only regards people who are likewise high and we’re all doomed. But the Lord is high. And he doesn’t compromise that at all. He is just. And he is the justifier of those who could never justify themselves.

And what’s interesting is, if you gaze at that and then think about Matthew 8:23-9:17, the section we’re looking at right now, the three miracles and the call of Matthew, the Lord is high. Jesus has power over nature, demons, disease, sin. He is high. Jesus is high. Yet he regards the lowly. He came not to call the righteous, but sinners. He calls the “wrong” people. And when he does it, he doesn’t compromise his highness. He’s not saying, yeah, I used to care about sin. I don’t really care about sin now. I used to be holy and all about holiness. No, we’re good with anything. He doesn’t do that at all. He remains righteous and declares righteous through the sacrifice of Jesus.

So we see in that statement the gospel, the message of the Bible. And we see in the passage we’re looking at both in the structure and in the content, the Gospel of Jesus. Jesus called the “wrong” people. Jesus spent time with the “wrong” people. And then number three,

3. Jesus lived the “wrong” lifestyle.

We know from Mark 2 and Luke 5 that both the Pharisees and the disciples of John were fasting, and they came together to ask this question, which is an interesting combo there.

Verse 14, “Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’”

Now because table fellowship was viewed as part of the covenant, a sign of the covenant, fasting was a big deal. All Jews fasted on the Day of Atonement. Pharisees generally fasted when? Two days a week. Remember Luke 18:12, Monday and Thursday. Fasting was forbidden on the Sabbath because the Sabbath is the day of joy. Fasting was what Edersheim, the great Jewish scholar, described as “self-punishment.” It was a kind of sorrow or mourning, sacrificing your appetite so that you could prevent judgment or calamity. This is one of the reasons Jesus warns his followers not to fast this way, like the Pharisees. He says in Matthew 6:16, we saw this many months ago in the Sermon on the Mount,

“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others…”

Notice two things are implied there. One, his followers will fast when you fast and they should not fast in a gloomy, sorrowful manner to impress other people. So we learn a couple of things if we bring all this together.

First of all, Jesus is not anti-fast. He is saying, don’t fast now, while he’s with his disciples. And he is saying don’t fast like they fast. So why? And really, the three images he’s about to give, three illustrations, are in answer to this question: “Why don’t you and your disciples fast?” And he gives three illustrations.

1. A wedding.

Verse 15, “And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.”

Now, Jewish weddings were significant and long, a week long. Collective groaning from the men. You’re talking about not just missing one Clemson game, you’re talking about missing life for a week. And it gets worse. The honeymoon and the wedding were all together. Every young couples’ dream to spend a week with Uncle Fred on your honeymoon. That’s the wedding week. As Edersheim writes,

“During the marriage-week, all mourning was to be suspended — even the obligation of the prescribed daily prayers ceased. It was regarded as a religious duty to gladden the bride and bridegroom.”

So the wedding canceled all mourning, sorrow. And what Jesus is saying, as the bridegroom — Jesus is describing himself — we’re in a wedding. Therefore, all mourning, and the fasting that would correspond with that, are out. That’s illustration number one.

Illustration number two.

2. Cloth.

Verse 16, “No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made.”

In other words, if you try to patch a hole in an old garment with a new cloth, one not having been shrunk, one already being shrunk, eventually the new cloth is going to shrink, and it’s going to rip apart the patch, and you have a worse mess than you had before you patched the garment. It’s illustration number two.

Illustration number three.

3. Wine.

Verse 17, “Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

So in Jesus’ day, wine was often stored in goat skins. And as the wine ferments, it expands. If the skins are already dry and have already stretched, they will burst, and you will lose both wine and wineskin. So three illustrations answering the question, “Why don’t you fast?” Wedding, cloth, and wine.

So what is the point? What is Jesus saying? I think it’s first important to establish what he isn’t saying. Jesus is not saying by these illustrations, we need to be new for newness sake. Avant garde. Out with the old, focus on the new, as if the past is irrelevant. That’s not what he’s saying. I hear some people when they’re teaching this almost sound like he is saying that. Why do we know he’s not saying that? Think a couple of chapters ago, Sermon on the Mount.

“I have not come to [demolish or] abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Matthew 5:17.

So everything Jesus does is grounded on and filling up the Law and the Prophets. So what is he saying? I think we could summarize it this way.

An old lifestyle cannot contain a new life.

An old lifestyle cannot contain a new life. It’s like fasting at a wedding. It’s like patching an old cloth with a new cloth. It’s like putting new wine in an old wineskin. Why is that true? Two reasons.

1. Jesus gives us new hearts.

Think about the promise of the New Covenant.

Ezekiel 36:26, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

And this new heart in contrast to the old heart that was stone-like is pliable, malleable. I like the word supple, flexible, expandable. This week I was talking to a man who had grown up Jewish and then became an alcoholic. He got to the place where he realized he was destroying his life, knew he needed a change. So he tried to go Orthodox and become super rigid in everything he did. And in his words, he said, I couldn’t do it. A little later, he heard about Jesus. He gave his life to Christ. He’s currently a software engineer. But when you talk with him, all he wants to talk about is ways, opportunities he has to share Jesus with the lost, go on mission trips, help people who are bound in addiction as he was.

But you can just see, and this is why it’s so important in answering the question, what is Jesus talking about here? You’ve got to start inside. He starts at the core of our being. He gives us something we could not produce on our own, a new heart. A heart that is expandable, and pliable, and tender, and teachable, and transformed, filled by the Holy Spirit. And you can see this is not merely being reformed or changing a part of us.

Pastor John Gill pastored a Baptist church in London in the 1700s for 51 years, same church that 100 years later Charles Spurgeon would pastor. He wrote of this passage. This is from the 1700’s so some of the language is a little difficult.

“The old garment of man’s righteousness must be thrown away in point of justification; it cannot be mended in such a manner, and if any attempts are made in this way, the rent [or the tear] becomes worse. Such persons instead of being justified, are in a worse condition, for they not only set up and exalt their own righteousness, which is criminal, but disparage the righteousness of Christ as imperfect by joining it to theirs and, while they fancy themselves in a good state, are in a most miserable one.”

What is he talking about? I think we could summarize it this way. Jesus doesn’t use duct tape. He’s not patching together a little of the old and a little of the new, and if he can just, you know, fix us up with patchwork. No. 2 Corinthians 5:17.

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away [the old lifestyle, the old loves];  behold the new has come.”

And these new hearts lead to a new lifestyle. Look where Paul goes next. After verse 17. 2 Corinthians 5:17, now 18.

“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

So he, the high and Holy One brings us to himself through Jesus, and then sends us out to the “wrong” people. To love the lowly. So Jesus gives us new hearts. And then secondly,

2. Jesus gives us expansive hearts.

And by expansive, I mean widening, extending. That’s that ministry of reconciliation. Reaching out to the “wrong” people. Jesus refused to stay confined within a tight circle of acceptable people.

I asked a widow in our church if I could share this story. She gave me permission, and I’m going to change her name for the sake of her neighbors. So we’re going to call her Anna. Anna last spring attended our neighboring class, which was in the second service over in the Community Room, which basically helps us learn how to be a good neighbor.

And so she was practicing, and she was reaching out to her neighbors. And then the storm hit a few weeks ago and it opened up so many opportunities. She had a generator, so she would have her neighbors come in. One family, not believers, would come to charge their phones, eat some food. She had wonderful conversations with them, including sharing the gospel. Another neighbor, very conservative Christians, fundamental Christians, and when they heard where she goes to church, they won’t really talk to her, for obvious reasons. There’s another neighbor, they’re a lesbian couple, and she has gotten to know them well, and they would check on her during the storm. But in some of those conversations, they said, “You know, no one else in our neighborhood will talk to us.”

Now, I want us to let that weigh upon us. Okay, some of the neighbors are not believers. But several are. And none of them will even talk with you? What does that say about us, if we claim to follow Jesus, who loved and associated with the “wrong” people, and we won’t even talk to someone? Perhaps we’re trying to squeeze new life into an old lifestyle, a lifestyle characterized by creating our own caste system, maybe fearing contamination. Or I think for a lot of us, it’s not so much contamination, but it’s fearing compromise. If I associate with someone who has different beliefs, or different political views, or different convictions, different lifestyle, then they might bring something up, and I don’t know how to answer, and so I’m just staying away.

I think that’s a vivid example of what Jesus is talking about. He doesn’t give us new hearts so that we can turn inward and shrivel up, but expansive hearts so that we can turn outward and love the very people who differ with us. The very people whom Jesus reached out to. Anna said this,

“If I don’t show concern, how can I share Christ?”

That is beautiful. If I’m not kind, and reaching out, and showing concern, whether that person agrees with my convictions or not, is regardless. But if I’m not doing that, she’s saying, how can I share Christ? How can I go and share the truth of the gospel if I won’t live the gospel? It’s a contradiction.

And I think that’s what Jesus is getting at. His purpose again for associating with sinners was not to become one of them. He wasn’t compromising. There’s no example where a sinner got him to sin or to lower his standards. But he sure transformed a lot of them, including many of us in here. An old lifestyle cannot contain new life. Why? Well, new life is going to keep growing, and expanding, and extending. An old lifestyle is going to be rigid and rut-like. We’re going to get a rut, and we’re going to be stuck in that rut.

And this is one of the reasons I love the seniors in our church, because Anna is a perfect example. She’s at a stage in life as a widow where she could easily just hunker down, turn inward, think about the past. But no, she’s saying, how can I love my neighbors like Jesus loves me? How can I reach out with the kind of compassion that Jesus has poured out on me? I want to go to the grave or to the coming of Christ with that mindset. A soft heart. An expansive heart.

So here’s where it’s challenging. How do you specifically apply this to where you are right now? I think for some of us, if you don’t know Jesus, you need a new heart. This isn’t a matter of just try to be nice. It won’t work. He always starts inside us first. And so for you, it’s like, go to Jesus, right today, right now. Forgive me, Lord. I cannot earn what you provide. I cannot meet your high standard. I can’t do enough. I can’t be good enough. But you give salvation as a gift, a new heart as a gift because Jesus died for all my sin, rose to defeat sin and death. So for some of us, we need a new heart.

And then for many of us who have a new heart, it’s easy to get in a rut or to go back to old patterns of thinking and living. And the Spirit may be saying to us right now, Lord, de-rut me, get me out of this addictive way of living, scrolling, watching, seeking.

So let’s just take a few minutes now and ask the Spirit to apply his Word to our hearts specifically and personally. Wherever you are. And then I’ll pray in a couple of minutes.

Father, it’s so good to be in your presence with your people. Spirit of God, move freely among us. Convict, Lord, where we need conviction. Lord, may we be ready to repent, to turn from old crusty ruts, habits, patterns of thinking. Father, please freely give new hearts — hearts that are flexible and expandable, not shriveling and shrinking up. We’re not going to try to pour new life into an old lifestyle. And as your Spirit shows us where we’re doing that, we pray that we would repent quickly.

We want to emulate, Anna. No matter how long we’ve known you — to be tender, flexible, malleable in your hand. We want to be like Ello, that guy in Ethiopia, who was teachable. As he saw in your Word, how you value justice, he didn’t want to take things that were stolen through murder, even if it cost him everything. Lord, that’s a different world than we live in. But all of us are going to have similar choices in different areas. Will we be shaped by the patterns of the flesh, and the world, and the devil? Or will we be transformed and renewed by your Spirit through your Word?

May we, your people, live out of the miracle of Jesus, not the miracle of chaos. Give us as a church missional flexibility, not at all to compromise what we believe, but ready to follow your Spirit into even uncomfortable situations so that we might testify of your sufficiency. Thank you for the way you’re doing that, Lord. Please continue. Continue to speak now as we cry out to you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.