Jesus came to seek and save lost people from all walks of life; everyone who will surrender everything to know and follow him.

Well, last week I spent time telling you about two men, and today I’m going to share with you the story of a third. The first man was a rich ruler, a man who had everything. He was moral. He was God fearing. He had success in his career. He’s like the vast majority of people who call Calvary home, actually. We have very successful people in this church. Some of you are pioneers in your field. Most of you are soaring. We have very bright futures or very solid legacies or both. And that’s what the rich ruler was. He came to Jesus and asked how he could be sure that he would have eternal life. And that’s a fine question. And it’s the sort of question that we fully expect from a person who has been carefully planning his steps and achieving success throughout his life. The problem that he had was Jesus answer. See, Jesus could see that this man’s wealth and his success were the thing that would keep him from following Jesus. Why? Well, it’s because following Jesus requires getting rid of or subduing all of the things in your life that you prize more than Jesus. The idols. It requires bringing everything that you have under the rule of Jesus so that it can be used for his glory. And this guy, this guy just couldn’t do that. He was honest with himself. He knew he loved his wealth far more than he could ever love Jesus.

And so he walked away. The second man was a blind beggar, a man who had nothing. He sat on the on the roadside, completely dependent on the kindness of the people who walked by. We don’t have the same level of connection with this man that we do with the rich ruler. I feel fairly confident in saying that none of us have ever been physically and economically hopeless, with no chance of any help coming to us. And yet, at the same time, if we could see somehow a picture of our own spiritual state prior to knowing Christ, we’d see that we were this man. We were blind in the darkness of our sins. We were without hope in pulling ourselves out of condemnation. We were desperately in need of the mercy of God to come to us when we could not go to him. And for those of us who have cried out for God’s mercy and when Jesus came near to us, our spiritual eyes were open, and we rose up and we became worshippers and followers of Jesus. And life has never been the same for us. If you follow Jesus, you know that you’ve experienced that. Two men. Two men. Luke gives us two men who could not be more opposite from each other in every way, to show us what it means to inherit eternal life. But there’s a danger here. There’s a danger in these stories.

There’s a very subtle error that we could make when reading these accounts side by side. We could make the error of thinking that no person with any wealth at all can follow Jesus. Now, after the rich ruler walked away, Jesus did say to his disciples that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into heaven. There is an advantage to the poor in understanding and receiving the kingdom of God. If you don’t have wealth, it is easier not to worship wealth. An eternal kingdom with God forever is more easily received if you do not have the means to make this world your Paradise. But we can easily take these stories and come to the conclusion that wealth is bad, that poverty is good, that anyone with any wealth better get rid of it, because it’s bad to be wealthy. And that would absolutely be an error. That would be a biblical error. And it’s a common error to make today. To prevent this error and to give us a magnificent picture of salvation among the wealthy, Luke gives us a third man. And this guy, he splits the difference between the first two. He has some remarkable things going for him and going against him. He’s wealthy, but he’s not honorable. He’s physically limited, but it’s not impossible for him to move. We’re going to see a guy today who could have made other choices, unlike the blind beggar, but whose heart is no longer gripped by his wealth, unlike the rich ruler. But here’s the thing about this guy. Okay, church, here’s the thing about this guy, and it’s unavoidable. And I feel like we should just go ahead and address the elephant in the room right from the very start this morning. This guy has a very famous name, and he also has a very famous physical limitation, we’ll call it. And because he has this very famous name and this limitation, a very famous song was written about him that has echoed through the minds of the church, young and old, from something like 1950 forward. That man’s name is Zacchaeus. You’re already singing it in your head right now, aren’t you? You’re just, you’re singing in the head. I say the word Zacchaeus, and you’re already like, you know. Yeah, Right? You’re already. It’s already going in there. This story is so important, church. I can’t tell you how important this story is. This is a very theologically deep and important story for us. But thanks to VBS 1982, I cannot read this bit of scripture without this goofy soundtrack running through my head. By the way, if you are new to church and you don’t know what I’m talking about, blessings. God’s face has shined upon you. But for the rest of us, we will try to power through. Like when you’re trying to say the ABC’s without singing the ABCs.

Okay. So what you’ll see is that the song,it ends before the most important part of the story. This very profound and transformational story that we all need to hear because Jesus is showing us what true salvation looks like. Jesus came to seek and save lost people from all walks of life. Everyone who will surrender everything to know and to follow him. So let’s get into this story. We’re in Luke chapter 19, verse one this morning. The story has a longer setup than some of the other accounts that we’ve seen in Luke. So we’ll work through that, and then we’ll get to the main point of the story in the later verses. So let’s meet the man. He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. So Jesus has now entered the city of Jericho. And here we meet Zacchaeus and we learn three things about him. The first thing we learn is that he is a chief tax collector. This means that he works for the Roman government to collect taxes from the people for the empire. The Romans called people like this the Publicani. They did more than just collect taxes. These publicans, they cared for public buildings, for instance. They also got supplies for the Roman armies, got the supplies out to the fields to care for them.

So mostly what they did, though, was they collected taxes. They called their work tax farming. And it’s just like it sounds. What does a farmer do? A farmer tries to get the largest crop out of a field. Right? Well, that’s what these tax collectors did. These tax farmers worked the people to get the largest crop to get a job like this you had to bid for it. It was a type of contract work back then. So when there was an opening, you would go to the officials and you would pitch your plan for why you should be the one that would get the job. And the guy who gets the job is the guy who can extract the most money out of the people. So tax laws back then were a little bit more fluid. The Romans did set taxes, but the collection of those taxes left a lot of room for the publican to extort money from the people. So any money that he made above and beyond the amount of money that he had to pay to Rome, he was able to keep as pure profit. And so, as you can imagine, tax collectors were hated by the people. But Zacchaeus isn’t just a tax collector. He is a chief tax collector. This this probably means that he was in charge of a fleet of publicans. And he got a cut of everything that they made like a giant pyramid scheme. And Zacchaeus would have been hated even more than normal for the two other things that we know about him, that he’s rich and that he’s Jewish.

And you say, well, why would they hate him for being Jewish? Everyone was Jewish, right? Yes, exactly, exactly. Imagine being occupied by foreign invaders and then having your taxes collected by one of your own people who now works for them. And you know that he’s incentivized to get the most out of you, so you know that you are a target of this man. His team’s job is to lie to you, to muscle you, to threaten you with punishment, to get every bit of money out of you. And we know Zacchaeus was really good at this because of the third thing. He’s rich. He’s a very good tax collector. When people pass his house, right, they look over, they see Zacchaeus house. They can see that their taxes have made Zacchaeus a great life while they struggle to get by. We probably can’t overstate how much this man was despised. See, tax collector back then was another way of saying sinner. They’d often put them together. Sinners and tax collectors. They were synonymous. And Zacchaeus is the captain of that team. So Jesus is passing through Jericho. Here’s what happens. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd, he could not because he was small in stature. Can we just all agree that this should read wee little man? A wee little man was he.

For those of you who are not, Scottish wee means small. Okay. And we need to get. I think we need to get the translation changed, quite frankly. I mean, I think it’s worked its way into the Christian ethos enough, right. For us to get the. What does the message say? Does it have wee little man in there? Small in stature. Small in stature. Why is this included? Church? I don’t know. I don’t know why this is included. Maybe Luke thought it was kind of funny. I mean, he is about to climb a tree to see Jesus. That’s sort of funny, right? I can tell you, though, that details like this are one of the many indicators of the historical veracity of the Gospels. Remember, Luke told us in chapter one that he carefully researched eyewitness accounts to create this book. And because Zacchaeus is named in this story, he is probably the eyewitness account that Luke talked to. A detail like his height and the tree situation that we’re about to look at here in a minute are the sorts of details that people tend to include when they’re telling a story about something that happened to them personally. But notice how Luke describes what Zacchaeus is trying to do. He was seeking to see who Jesus is. Zacchaeus is limited in his ability to get to Jesus like the blind beggar was. But unlike the blind beggar, Zacchaeus doesn’t yet know who Jesus is. He’s not calling out Son of David, right? Clearly, he has heard the rumors. He’s heard something about Jesus. He wants to see this celebrity who’s on tour. He likely knows some of the claims about Jesus. That he did miracles, that he taught with an authority that comes from God himself, that he shows people how to have eternal life. But Zacchaeus isn’t yet bought in. That’s what the language shows us here. He’s not yet bought in on Jesus. He’s not crying out for mercy, probably because he doesn’t even know he needs mercy yet. Zacchaeus is what we might call today spiritually curious. He’s interested in what Jesus has to say. Already God is working in his heart, and I wonder how many here this morning are in the same place. I wonder how many this morning are here because you’re spiritually curious. You’re interested in Jesus. And maybe that’s because, as we’ll see with Zacchaeus here in just a moment, that the pursuit of things in this world that the world says are important, haven’t given you the joy that you long for. Well, being short and not seeing Jesus is just isn’t going to do. This, by the way, this next passage is the part that I have to resist singing while I read it. Okay, you’re going to see just the language is so close. The words are so close.

Okay, here we go. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today. When my wife sings this song to little kids, she always changes ‘Zacchaeus, you come down’ to ‘Zacchaeus come on down’ like he’s the next contestant on The Price is Right. Because, she says the other way of singing it makes Jesus sound too mean, which I think is great. So Zacchaeus runs right. He’s not going to, he’s trying to see, he can’t see behind the crowd, right? So he runs to a tree and he climbs up and he sits there and he’s waiting to see Jesus. I want you to note that this is the extent of the effort that Zacchaeus puts into his interaction with Jesus. This is all Zacchaeus does. He doesn’t run up and introduce himself to Jesus. He’s just elevated above the crowd. That’s not a fault, by the way. That’s just a fact. For Zacchaeus, getting a glimpse of Jesus was the plan. It’s Jesus who stops in the right place and looks up to Zacchaeus and calls him down by name, notice. And invites himself over into his house. How does he know his name? How does Jesus know Zacchaeus name? And how does he know that he has a house big enough to host Jesus? The blind beggar didn’t.

How does he know the identity and the situation of the man in the tree? Well, that’s because this isn’t a chance meeting. This is a divine appointment. Who is the one who seeks? Is it God or is it us? Do we go and we find God? Or does God come and find us? I want you to look down at the end of the story. Look down at verse ten if you have your Bibles open. Jesus says, I came to seek and save the lost. There’s our word again seek. It’s only used twice in the story. This seeking isn’t like hide-and-go-seek, where one person goes out and isn’t sure what he’s looking for or where to look. No, no, no. This is the fulfillment of a promise. God’s promise that he’s made throughout Scripture. That’s the language. That’s the structure of the language that we have here. The prophet Ezekiel tells us exactly what the Lord is going to do. In Ezekiel 34:11, God says, behold, I, I myself. See the emphasis there? Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. So the Lord Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, becomes a man and enters our world so he could seek out God’s lost sheep from among all the nations of the earth. That’s what’s happening here right now.

This is Jesus seeking out his sheep. Jesus said in John chapter ten, verse 27 and 28 that when the gospel is proclaimed, quote, my sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. It’s Jesus who seeks. How can Jesus call this man’s name out and know his situation and invite himself into his life? Well, it’s because Zacchaeus is one of Jesus sheep. Even though Zacchaeus doesn’t know it yet, he doesn’t even know it yet. Jesus isn’t just looking up at Zacchaeus and saying, whoa! Well, look at this guy. He’s very eager. I choose him because he’s eager. No, no, no. Jesus came to get Zacchaeus. God used Zacchaeus curiosity to get him into the perfect position for Jesus to encounter him. But it was for this divine appointment. If you’re here this morning and you have only a mild curiosity about Jesus, I want you to know that I prayed for you this week. I prayed for you this week that this was your divine appointment. I asked the Lord to call you out of your tree, figuratively speaking. I asked Jesus to move into your house like he moved into mine 28 years ago. See, the gospel is the grace and the mercy of God who forgives us of our sins because Jesus paid for them. That’s how God can forgive us.

He doesn’t forgive us just because our sin doesn’t matter. He forgives us because our sin matters so much that Jesus died in the place for them so that we would be set free. The gospel is the grace and mercy of God, and your life will be forever changed. If you move from a distant curiosity about Jesus into a full-blown, live-in situation with him. If you are ready to be done with your rebellion against God and the stranglehold of sin on your heart and you and you want new eternal life, you are hearing the voice of your Shepherd. That is the Holy Spirit at work in you. And it’s time to let Jesus come stay with you. But you might think that your sin disqualifies you from your salvation in Christ, either because of the amount of sin that you’ve done in your lifetime, or because of the severity, which seems unforgivable. Well, it’s a very common way to think. So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they, the crowd, when they saw it, they all grumbled. He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner. See, as people we naturally are inclined to think of in terms of good people and bad people. There’s good people in the world, there’s bad people in the world. And we have this sort of invisible spectrum in our mind. And at one end of that spectrum are all the fine, moral, successful, upstanding people.

And at the other end of the spectrum are all the evil, loathsome, lazy, worthless people. And in our minds, the people on the higher end of that spectrum should avoid the people on the lower end of that spectrum. In fact, if you associate with the people on the lower end of that spectrum, maybe you’re not as high in the spectrum as we thought you were. In some cultures, this has been systematized and it’s official, right? In their culture, like in the caste system in India or in the class structure system of the United Kingdom, which is a holdover from feudalism. Sorry, James and Jamie. But really it’s everywhere. Really. It’s everywhere. But every place has this. We certainly have an unofficial class system in the United States with ways of determining who is acceptable and who isn’t. That’s just how humans think in our broken, sinful minds. That’s where we categorize people. And when we bring this spectrum into our understanding of God, it looks like this. We say, holy, righteous people do not associate with sinners. There’s this category of really holy, really pure, really righteous folks. And we do not associate. We do not go down the spectrum to these sinful people. And for Jesus to invite himself to stay with such a despised character as Zacchaeus would certainly get this crowd in a stir, because that’s how they thought.

A righteous teacher of the law wanting to come and stay with the chief tax collector? How can Jesus come into our city and stay with the captain of the sin team? Well, let me go back to you who don’t know Jesus, but you’re curious here in the room. The quantity and severity of your sin does not keep you from Jesus. It’s why he came. Jesus came because of the quantity and the severity of your sin. If you’ve been given the impression that you are too far gone, I want you to understand something this morning. The very system that sold you that idea is part of the broken world. The people who made you feel that way and gave you that spectrum, that thing is sin. That’s part of the brokenness. Romans 3:10-12 says this. No one is righteous. No. Not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. That is the universal human condition apart from the saving grace of Christ. There is no spectrum. There never was a spectrum. There are no good people. You have never met a thoroughly good person. Now there are varieties of sins, of course. Some have more damaging results, some break human laws. Some have greater public stigma. But no one is righteous. No one is justified in God’s eyes as a good person on their own. Everyone, from the most hardened criminal right down to your sweet old grandma, is desperately in need of God’s grace.

We are all sinners. And when you experience the grace of Christ, okay. When Christ comes in, when he moves in and he takes up residence in your heart. Look at what happens. And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. How did this not make it into the song? This is the most. This is the most amazing part of the whole story. In verse six it says, Zacchaeus received Jesus joyfully. And then there’s a time jump. Okay, so now here in verse eight, we are now in Zacchaeus home. And there has clearly been some discussion. Interestingly, we are not told what Jesus said to Zacchaeus to bring about such a radical transformation. And I believe the reason that Luke leaves this out is that Jesus message to a man like Zacchaeus is the same message that he had for the rich ruler that we have just up there in chapter 18. You need to come follow me. You need to come follow me, but you need to get rid of the stuff, the idols that are holding you back from following me. And instead of repeating that again, Luke. Luke doesn’t share that here because he wants to focus on the difference. On the difference between what happened with the rich ruler and what is happening here. And the difference is stark.

It is stark. You could not have a more opposite, a more different outcome. Because that’s because true faith truly transforms. Zacchaeus makes two vows here. And with each one, think of what it says about Zacchaeus heart, okay? First, he says he’s going to take half of his net worth, and he’s going to give it away to the poor. I want you to think about this afternoon, going home, liquidating all of your assets, cutting it in half and just giving half of that away. We don’t know if this is Jesus instruction. We don’t know if Zacchaeus was told to do this. All we know is that this Zacchaeus pledge. Why would he do this? Well, he’s acknowledging something about what wealth has done to him, what it has done in his heart. His wealth is the treasure of his heart. Money is the idol of his life that had to be moved so that Jesus could be his treasure. The money isn’t bad, it’s just got its hooks in Zacchaeus. Okay? It’s got its hooks in him. And so he repurposes a vast quantity of it to make sure that that idol doesn’t fight for Jesus place. You know, from my perspective, church, and now I am speaking just from me, just from my perspective here, I would say that the idolatry of wealth is probably the greatest obstacle to faith in Jesus in the United States. Probably, probably the biggest, particularly in places like Rochester where there’s so much of it.

You know, I worry about this for our church. This is one of the worries that I have for our church. One of the idols that I think is out there. There are probably some of you here this morning with an untreated sickness called the love of money, that is truly the thing that you want more than Jesus. And it’s tough to know. It’s tough to know if that’s the case. See, the money itself isn’t evil. But how do you know what it’s doing to your heart? I’d say to you, take a cue from Zacchaeus this morning. Are you sacrificially generous to the point that it costs you? I’m not just saying, do you give some things away? I’m saying, are you sacrificing to the point that it costs you? It changes your life. If your life is substantially different because of the amount you’re committing to the kingdom work and to caring for others, it probably doesn’t have its hooks in you. Next week we’re going to talk more about what investing in the kingdom looks like. But for now, I’d say to you that if you can’t point to the places in your life where you are joyfully, sacrificially giving for the sake of God’s kingdom, there’s a very good chance that you’re more like the rich ruler and less like the transformed Zacchaeus that we see here.

And this could be a salvation issue for you. I don’t know that it is, but this could be a salvation issue. See, because you cannot have two masters. Jesus is your treasure or something else is. It’s one or the other. It cannot be both. But notice the second vow. Notice the second vow here. It looks similar, but it’s different. Zacchaeus says that he’s going to refund fourfold anybody that he has defrauded. And the assumption here is that this will be out of the half that he has remaining. So he’s going to split his wealth, right? And give half of that away. And then from the remaining portion, he’s going to repay all of the people four times what he took from them. And he’s going to live on whatever remains. And we don’t know how much that is. We have no idea what will remain after that. But this is different from the first vow. See, the first vow said, I’m going to undo what wealth has done in me. Okay. In my heart, the way wealth has affected me, I’m going to I’m going to undo that. But the second vow says, I’m going to restore what my sin has done to others. Can you imagine how many families were harmed by Zacchaeus corruption? How many lives were transformed because he took from them? And now he’s going to go door to door.

He’s going to look the same people in the same eyes. When he showed up to take their money, he’s going to show up and look them in the eye with a big basket of money, four times what he took. And he’s going to say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did. He’s going to look their children in the eye and say, I’m sorry I hurt your family. God’s grace covers our sins. It does church. It covers our sins past, present and future. Praise God for that. But the harm left in the wake of our past sin is an opportunity for us to go and right those wrongs. It’s an opportunity for us to go right the wrongs. Church. I encounter people all the time who will gladly make a change to their own behavior. They will gladly set a new course. They will say, I’m a new man. I’m going to live a different life. But who will then not acknowledge what their sin has done to other people? Because it’s so much easier to say, I’m a new man with a new direction. I’m letting the past go. I’m going to live for the Lord today. It is so much easier to say that than to say, I need to go find the people that I’ve wronged and do everything I can to make things right again. That is much harder. The destructive impact of your sin is your responsibility.

That’s what we see here. But praise God, it is not just your responsibility. It is also an opportunity. It is an opportunity for you to testify to God’s great generosity in your life by being sacrificially generous to the ones that you’ve hurt. It’s a way of you saying, God’s grace has been poured out on me, and now I gotta pour it out on others, and I gotta make up for some of these things, and I gotta step in and I gotta make these situations right for God’s glory. Now, I get sometimes that things are so far in the past that they can’t be made right. I get that. But that’s not most things, actually. A lot of times we give ourselves an excuse. Oh, it’s just too far in the past. You know what? For most things, we can contact people. We can admit what we’ve done wrong. We can generously make it right. You may not want to, but you can. And what we see here in our passage is that the saving, transformative love of God in Christ compels us to do just that. Jesus said to him, today salvation has come to this house, since he is also a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. Jesus didn’t come to give salvation to people who are willing to sacrifice and do the right thing. Jesus came to seek out his lost sheep and to call them by name, and to change their hearts so that they’d become the people who do the God-glorifying thing.

Three men, a rich ruler, a blind beggar, and a rich ruler who came to learn that he was a blind beggar. I’m going to ask you, where are you in these stories? Where are you? If you’re among the spiritually curious this morning and you’re hearing the call of Jesus, your shepherd, I’d say to you, respond. Respond to him. Invite him in. Invite Christ into your life. Be transformed, but do so with the full knowledge that once you do, every other idol must go. You won’t go away unchanged. Every idol must go. Jesus doesn’t share space with other treasures. It’ll mean abundant generosity and a repositioning of every priority in your life. But you know what? That’s okay. That’s okay. Because all that other stuff, it was all leading you to death. It’s all false idols. It’s all lies. Jesus is the one true God who can save you. You get the greatest treasure of eternity when you put your trust in Jesus. And if you’re among those who say that I’ve invited Jesus in as salvation has come to this house, praise God. That’s a wonderful thing. But I would challenge you this morning to do a rugged spiritual inventory to make sure that Jesus is truly your treasure, as reflected in your generosity and your sacrifice and your willingness to make things right with other people. Would you pray with me?

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