Matthew 9:9-13
The Calling of Matthew
9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Luke 18:1-8
Parable of the Persistent Widow
1 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2 He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
4 “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Being disobedient to God is a sin...So sin hasn't changed much in all its time...So sin has been around for a very long time...Sin started in the Garden of Eden...And sin is still with us, we have not been able to get away from sin or temptation...God would send His Son to help us with our sins...God sent Jesus to earth to pay for our sins with His death on the cross...
We still sin today two thousand years after Jesus' death...We haven't been able to overcome temptation and sin...Therefore we need Jesus...So sinning is not something new...Sin started with Adam and Eve and disobeying God...So from the oldest of days man has sinned...So when Jesus came to earth, we were still sinning...But Jesus came for sinners, and to call on them...But have we forgotten this after two thousand years?...Do the words that we sin have any meaning anymore to us?...Do we just go through the motions of living with sin and do we pay enough attention to Jesus who comes for us and our sins?...Have we put Jesus up on a shelf in our closest and have we forgotten about Him?...Have we forgotten that we sin, and is it absent from our minds that we do?...Do we today have a sense of guilt that we sin?...
Jesus is our Savior from our sins, even today...He is our only Salvation from the sins we have committed yesterday and today...When we talk and listen to people today, there is not much talk about the sins we commit and how we struggle with our sins...Modern man seems to go about his busy day and his daily activities...Because he has much to do in his routines does he have less regards to his sins?...We seem somewhat immune from what Jesus said about coming for sinners two thousand years ago...In His Parable about the persistent widow He talks about a man who neither feared God nor cared what people thought...And this persistent widow kept coming to him wanting justice...The judge did not care about the woman and her receiving justice...But she persisted in her seeking of justice, and what she thought was right...Jesus makes it clear that He will return to earth...And He asks all of us in this same Parable of the Persistent Widow (and her persistence in finding justice), when the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the earth?...Will we be persistent in keeping the faith?...He seems to ask, are our thoughts and our persistence of keeping the faith and needing salvation waning as the future unfolds?...
Back years ago, the dock was a place in the courtroom where the prisoner stood or sat during his trial...Have we become so complacent, routine, and in our daily habits placed God on trial and somehow unbeknownst in our apathy placed Him in the very dock where we should be (for our sins)?...Have we lost our persistence to keep the faith in our Father and His Son?...
C. S. Lewis wrote in God in the Dock, “The greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin...The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt...(That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.)...Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News...It promised healing to those who knew they were sick...We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy...The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge...For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed...He is the judge: God is in the dock...He is quite a kindly judge; if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it...The trial may even end in God’s acquittal...But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God is in the dock.”...