"Jesus Calls Matthew"

Hi there, this is Lon Solomon, and I'd like to welcome you to our program today. You know, it's a tremendous honor that God has given us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's Word as it is uncompromising and straightforward. And I'm so glad you've tuned in to listen and be part of that. Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio.

And now, let's get to the Word of God. I went to a college down at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And when I was a freshman there, I decided to join a social fraternity. The one I actually ended up joining was called Pi Lamb Defy, and it was about 80 guys, 50% Jewish and 50% non-Jewish and 100% degenerate.

We were everything that the movie Animal House portrayed and much worse. I wouldn't even want to go into it, some of the things that went on in my fraternity house. I got heavy into drugs in 1967 and 1968 looking for some answers to life. And in the process, I turned on to drugs a large number of my fraternity brothers trying to convince them that some of the answers might be found in drugs. Then in the spring of 1971, I found Jesus Christ, or maybe to be a little more theologically accurate, he found me. And suddenly, I had all the questions answered to my life.

All the questions I'd been asking were answered. I found the joy and the peace and the supernatural wholeness for my life that I'd been looking for, that I'd never found in drugs, but I found in Jesus Christ. And immediately, I made it my goal to go back and tell all 80 some of my fraternity brothers about what I had found in Jesus Christ.

Before I left Chapel Hill, that was my goal. Jesus Christ had changed my life and made me whole. And I wanted other people to share in that. I wanted them to experience what I had experienced. Now, it was kind of like you win the Publishers Clearinghouse.

You know what I mean? I knew that something had happened to me in 1971 that was better than winning the Publishers Clearinghouse. I knew that. And I didn't want to keep quiet about it. I wanted to tell everybody I could find.

People on the street, people in my fraternity house, everywhere I went, I wanted to tell people. Now, in our passage for this morning, we're going to see a fellow named Matthew find Jesus Christ just the way I did. And we're going to see him try to do for his friends exactly what I tried to do for mine. There's some great lessons in our passage this morning about Matthew and how he responds to Jesus Christ. And I hope God will use the passage we're going to study this morning to touch your heart the way he did mine this past week.

Let's look at it together. It's in Luke chapter five, beginning at verse 27. It says, After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi. This is the same fellow as Matthew, sitting at his tax booth.

Follow me, Jesus said to him. Now, Matthew was a tax collector. He was a publican is the word that King James will use to translate this. What's the most despicable occupation you can think of? Well, whatever it is, I guarantee you, none of it even compares to how the Jewish people of Jesus's day felt about people like Matthew about tax collectors.

And let me explain to you why. You see, at this time, the Romans controlled the land of Palestine, and they taxed it heavily. But they didn't collect the taxes themselves.

What they did is they took each district and they set an amount that they wanted in taxes, and then they farmed it out to some local Jewish person who was the highest bidder. And that Jewish person had the responsibility of collecting the taxes and paying off the Roman authorities. But the deal was that whatever he collected over and above the amount that he owed the Romans, he could keep for himself. And the Romans didn't care how much he collected over and above what they were due.

As long as they got what they were due, they were happy. He could assess anybody, any amount, without any regard to fairness or equity or anything else. He could do whatever he wanted to. And people were completely helpless against a tax collector because, as I said, he was backed up by the Roman army.

So what could you do? Tax collectors were not even allowed to enter the synagogues in Israel. Tax collectors could not even give testimony in court.

Their testimonies were inadmissible in court. In fact, the rabbis taught that Jews were not even allowed to ask a tax collector for change if they met them in the street. Matthew was one of these tax collectors. Now, Jesus passes Matthew sitting at his tax collecting booth, and he says to him, follow me. You see, Matthew's tax booth was set up down by the sea so that he could catch incoming ships and get all the taxes that was due. And many times, Matthew must have sat in that booth, and he must have listened to Jesus as he taught the crowds right down there on the seashore and near Capernaum. Matthew had had lots of time to hear Jesus's words and to think about Jesus's words. And Jesus had passed him before. I don't believe this is the first time he's walked past Matthew. But now it's time for Matthew to make a decision. And Jesus calls him and says, Matthew, you've listened long enough.

Are you going to follow me or aren't you? Verse 28. And Matthew got up immediately, and he left everything. And he followed Jesus Christ. Verse 29. Then Matthew held a great banquet for Jesus at his house. And a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. I love this part. You see, Matthew wasn't just interested in getting up and following Jesus himself.

No, more than that. He wanted all of his friends to experience the same joy and the same peace and the same forgiveness of sin and the same life changing salvation that he had found in Christ. He wanted to tell all his fraternity brothers what had happened. Matthew gathered the hardest hearts in all Israel together to hear Jesus Christ. And Matthew realized that hard-hearted people didn't need condemnation. They needed Christ, just like soft-hearted people. And he realized that there wasn't any heart anywhere so hard that God couldn't touch it because God had touched his heart. And at some point during this party, Matthew rose to speak and maybe to begin, he told a few tax collector jokes.

I don't know. But then he got very serious and he said, Now, friends, the reason I invited you here is because something happened in my life a few days ago that has totally revolutionized my life. I committed my life to Jesus Christ. I embraced him as my Messiah.

I've given up being a tax collector. God's given me a whole new life. And the reason I invited you here tonight is because I want you to listen to him. And as Jesus rose to speak, I guess those tax collectors probably brace themselves, expecting to hear some more of the same rejection and threats and deprecation that the rabbis poured on them. But that's not what Jesus said at all. Jesus got up and he told him about how much God loved him. And he told him about how much God wanted to forgive them. And he told him about the new life that God wanted to give them. And the Bible never tells us how many of them or how many of the ladies with them that evening made the same decision as Matthew had made. But I'll bet when we get to heaven, we're going to find a whole lot of tax collectors there that were at this party that night at Matthew's house.

I believe that Bible doesn't tell us for sure about that, but it does tell us how the rabbis were feeling. Let's go on verse 30. It says, but the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belong to their sect complained to Jesus's disciples and they said, why do you eat?

And why do you drink with these kind of people? And why does your leader hang out with this kind of riffraff with tax collectors and sinners with the dregs of society, with the outcasts and the bums? Don't you know better? Jesus heard about it and look what he said. Verse 31. He said, it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call righteous people, but I came looking for sinners to call them to repentance. I love what Jesus said here.

Jesus just draws on simple human logic to make his point. He said, Hey, look, a doctor's for sick people, right? Doctors aren't for well people. Doctors are for sick people.

I came as a doctor for sinners and if I'm a doctor for sinners, it only makes sense I go where my patients are. Now in presenting himself as a doctor, or we would even say as the great physician, what distinguishes a good doctor? Number one, a good doctor really cares about people who are sick. A good doctor is really available. He's really interested. He's a man or a woman of compassion. Number two, a good doctor accepts his patients right where they are.