Zacchaeus Was a Changed Little Man - Life of Christ Part 65

I want to talk to you about a guy named Zacchaeus. And this is a very familiar story, but the danger is that we sometimes think it's only a kid's story. It isn't a kid's story. It's got great life-changing truth for big people, too.

So let's look at it and see what we think. Ready? Here we go. He knew who Jesus was, but being a short man, he could not because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus since Jesus was coming that way. Now, all of the events of this are summed up in a little song that I want you to sing with me.

And if you know the motions, you can do the motions. We're going to shoot the words up there for you. And ready?

Let's sing together. He looked up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to. Good. And when the Savior came walking by, he looked up in the tree and he said.

Jesus. Good. Because we're going to your house today.

Yes, going to your house today. Give yourselves a hand. That wasn't bad. Okay, Lon, the cheese meter is off the scale here, friend. This is the cheesiest thing I've ever seen. All right, well, we had fun. Say, I had fun.

But regardless of that, the song gives us a real good summary of what's going on, doesn't it? Zacchaeus, he was a midget, a runt, a pygmy, a scrub, a tom-thumb. He was vertically challenged. And so he couldn't see over the crowd, so he ran on ahead of Jesus to climb this sycamore tree.

Now, I've been to Jericho. I've seen the sycamore trees that grow there. They're big and round. The limbs are way high up to start.

The bark is real slippery. And the first time I ever saw one of these, I thought, how in the world did he ever get up this thing, particularly being a short little guy? I mean, I don't know if I could get up that tree all by myself in spite of the awesome shape I'm in.

You understand what I'm saying? So anyway, he climbed up this tree somehow. I don't know how he did it. And there he was waiting when Jesus came walking by. There are two things about Zacchaeus, however, that the song doesn't mention that are very important.

They're both in verse 2. The first one is that he was a chief tax collector. How did the Jewish people feel about tax collectors?

Not real good. If you think of the most despised, despicable person you can possibly think of, who would that be? Say, well, I don't know, maybe a porno shop owner or a pimp or an IRS auditor. Ooh, that'll be close. Or a lawyer, any lawyer, any kind of lawyer.

That'll qualify. Did you hear the story about how the devil came to visit heaven one day and he and Peter were walking around and the devil accidentally knocked part of the pearly gate over? And so Peter said to him, now, before you leave here, you know, you're going to fix that. And he said, I am not. And he said, oh, yes, you are. And the devil said, I am not fixing that. And he said, you are fixing it. He said, I am not.

Peter said, all right, I'm tired of arguing with you. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to sue you. And the devil laughed at him and went, ha ha, sue me, sue me. And where do you think you're going to get a lawyer? You got it now? They were all, you understand.

I hate having to explain jokes, but it's a good one. Now, I don't care how you feel about lawyers, IRS auditors or any of these other people. I'm telling you, you don't feel any way about them the way Jewish people felt about tax collectors. You see, the Romans, when they took over the province of Israel, they assessed large taxes on each district. And what they would do is they would recruit a Jewish man in each district to go around and collect the taxes for him. He would sell his people out for money. And then he would collect taxes, pay the Romans. And the deal was, whatever he collected over and above what the Romans required, he could keep for himself.

Oh, so these people went around, the tax collectors did, extorting money from their own people, overcharging them and keeping the money themselves, being backed up by the Roman army so that the people were helpless. This was Zacchaeus. And look, Zacchaeus was not just one of these. He was a chief tax collector. He was a regional manager.

So he was pretty good at this. The other thing that verse 2 tells us about Zacchaeus is that he was very rich. He was wealthy. Question, how does a tax collector become wealthy? He becomes wealthy, doesn't he, by victimizing people, his own people. That's the only way you get to become rich as a tax collector. And the result is that people, they hate you, they vilify you, they ostracize you, they reject you.

You become an outcast from your own people. And yet Zacchaeus decided that his own personal advancement was worth that. The money was worth it.

His career was worth it. Now, what does that tell us about Zacchaeus? You say, well, it tells me that this God was born and bred to be in Congress. No, no, no, no, be nice.

Be nice. Actually, what it tells us is that Zacchaeus' God was money. His God was money. He was willing to prostitute his whole soul, his relationship with his own people, his standing in the town, everything for money. That was his God.

That's important because it's going to figure a little later. Now, let's go on with the story. Here we go. Verse 5. And when Jesus reached the spot where Zacchaeus was, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, come down right away.

I've got to stay at your house tonight. And so Zacchaeus came down at once and welcomed Jesus gladly. And all the people who saw this began to mutter, and I read them. He's gone to be the guest of a sinner. How come he had to pick the lousiest guy in town to go over a guy's house? Well, we don't know what Jesus said to Zacchaeus at dinner. But what I can tell you is that somewhere between appetizers and dessert, this man's life radically changed.

And look what happens. Verse 8. Zacchaeus stood up, called a press conference right after dinner, and said to the Lord and all the people listening, look, Lord, here and now, I am giving half of everything I own to the poor.

And if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay that person back four times the amount that I overcharged him. Whoa, that's a pretty big change for this guy, huh? This is a guy whose God was what?

Money. And he's saying, I'm going to take half of my money, and I'm going to give it to all those poor people in the community that I've never paid any attention to that need it. And what's more, there's four classes of conditions in Greek language, and you don't maybe know that, and that's all right, I'm telling you. But a first-class condition, which is what this is, it really shouldn't be translated if, it ought to be translated since. In other words, he's not saying if I have cheated anybody as though maybe I haven't. He is saying since I've cheated people, I admit that I have, I'm going to go back, figure out what I cheated them, what I overcharged them, and I'm going to pay them back four times what I took from them.

You say, good night. I mean, this is one of these, if you told me, I never would have believed it type changes. And Jesus said, verse 9, today, salvation has come to this house.

There's a very important point here, let's make very sure that we've got it down because we can get real confused right here if we're not careful. Salvation had not come to this house, to this man, because he promised to go out and do good works. Don't ever think that, that's not what the Bible teaches. Salvation had come to Zacchaeus because during dinner, Zacchaeus had made the decision to switch gods, to reject the God that he had had for years and years and years, the Lord God money, and instead to adopt as his God the Lord Jesus Christ. And because he had made that decision, something happened on the inside of this man that resulted in changed behavior. The changed behavior was not the cause of his salvation, it was the result of it. We've got to remember that salvation is the horse and changed behavior is the cart and we have to always be sure we never get the what? Cart before the horse. 2 Corinthians 5.17, if anybody is in Christ, if anybody has a personal relationship with Christ, there's the horse, they become a new creature, a changed person, there's the cart.

And that's the order it has to be. Jesus went on to say, today salvation has come to this house because this man too is the son of Abraham. This man too is a Jewish person and I the son of man came to seek and to save even Jewish people who were lost.

Man, I don't know how well that went down. First of all, these people didn't want to claim Zacchaeus as a Jewish person, they wanted to get rid of him. But even more than that, they didn't want to come to grips with the fact that a Jewish person could actually be lost in the sight of God. Jesus said, here we got a Jewish person who was lost in the sight of God. Jewish people didn't believe that you could be lost in the sight of God if you were Jewish. That was a Gentile problem. Jesus said, I'm sorry, I hate to tell you this, but being lost is not a Gentile problem, it is not a Jewish problem, it's a worldwide problem. And the only way to fix it is the way Zacchaeus did with a personal relationship with the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Now that's the end of our passage, but of course we got a question to ask, don't we? What's our question? So what?

Ah, that's great, man, I can go 15 more minutes. This is good, I like that. So what? Okay, so Zacchaeus climbed a tree. So Jesus called him down. So he went to his house.

So he gave half his stuff to the poor. So what? Big whoop. What do I care about that?

That didn't have a thing to do with me. Oh, but now wait a minute, slow down. You ever heard the French philosopher, he lived back in the 20s, I won't tell you his name because I can't really pronounce it, but I know who he was, and he coined this phrase, every day in every way I'm what? Getting better and better. You ever heard that? You say, yeah, my therapist says it to me all the time.

All right, well, whatever. I don't know whether it's your therapist or not, but every day in every way I'm getting better and better. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. That's what Bob says when he walks down the street. You see the movie What About Bob? Okay, now this is based on an assumption that way down deep inside of us there's inherent goodness, that way down deep inside of us there is a heart of gold, and if we just look enough and dig enough and work enough, eventually we'll find it in every day in every way. I'll get better and better.

Is that really true? Well, I looked for my heart of gold and I couldn't find it. When I was in college, man, I went on a serious search for it, and I got involved in lots of things, eventually very deeply involved in the drug culture I tuned in, turned on and dropped out, and began trying to use LSD and all kinds of psychedelics to peel away the onion skins in my heart, trying to say, where is that heart of gold?

If it's in there, if I'm going to be a hippie and peace, brother, and love and all this good stuff, where is it? And I believe if you charted your life out on a linear scale, there would probably be a few points in everybody's life where there's a little fulcrum that changed your life, changed the whole directing of your life. One of them happened to me in 1970 as a senior at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, sitting on a wall at 2 a.m. in the morning downtown. I've told you the story before.

Some of you, it bears repeating. I was tripped out on LSD at the time. My buddy sitting next to me was tripped out on LSD, and we were having a conversation, 2 a.m. in the morning, and I said to him, I said, David, you know what? Man, as I keep looking inside of me, trying to find love, trying to become a better person, what I find is that it seems like the deeper I dig, the worse I get. And he said to me, Lon, did it ever occur to you that you're not getting any worse but that you're just getting more honest about what you've been all along?

Man. And what it made me begin to realize is maybe there is no heart of gold in there. Maybe no matter how deep I dig, I won't find it. And maybe I need help from the outside if I'm going to get that kind of heart. Boy, that changed my life.

That cracked my life wide open to help from Jesus Christ to what I wasn't open to before. The great German writer and intellectual Johann Goethe said, I don't know myself, and God forbid that I should. And Mark Twain once said, deep down in his heart, no man much respects himself. Because you see, friends, the deeper you dig, the more crud you find.

Neil Young can keep looking until the day he dies, and if the only thing he's doing is looking deeper and deeper inside of Neil Young, he's not going to find a heart of gold. And the reason for that is explained in the Bible. Jesus said in Matthew chapter 15, arguing with people about what makes you dirty, does it make you dirty to eat with your hands unwashed? Jesus said, no, what goes in your mouth doesn't make you dirty. It's what comes out of your heart that makes you dirty in the sight of God. And Jesus said, for out of the heart, the human heart, comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a person unclean, and it comes out of the heart. And then Jeremiah 17 says, the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, desperately wicked. Who can understand the depth of depravity in their own heart? See, the Bible is telling us, friends, when you look down in there, what you'll find is a heart of lead.

And those of us who've had the courage to go on an internal mining expedition will say, you know, that's right, that's right. You say, man, Lon, I'm really glad I got out of bed this morning and came over here for this. What are you doing? This is depressing. Trying to depress everybody that's here. What is this kind of stuff?

Really glad I came. Well, now, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys pay me to tell you the truth, right? I think that's what you pay me for.

And we can paste it on here and say, every day and every way, I'm getting better and better and better, repeat our little mantra, or we can be real and honest with ourselves, huh? And yet I'm not going to leave you here. A problem's not a problem unless you can't solve it. I can solve this problem. I know a way to fix the problem. For you to admit and for me to admit that there's a heart of lead down in there is not a problem if there's a way to fix it.

And I got a way to fix it. Jesus Christ says he's got a way to fix it. Listen to what he says in the Bible. I'm reading from Ezekiel 36. I, God speaking, will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from your impurities and I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and I will give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit inside of you and I will internally move you to follow my decrees and keep my laws.

You know what Jesus is saying? He's saying that what he did for Zacchaeus was an internal heart transplant. He took out of him a heart of stone and he gave him a heart of flesh. He took out of him a heart of lead and he gave him a heart of gold.

And as a result, Zacchaeus becomes a different man. Suddenly he's compassionate towards poor people. He wasn't that way before. Suddenly he's interested in being right with people that he's wronged. He didn't care about that before. Suddenly pleasing God matters more to him than making money. That wasn't the way he was before.

What happened? Is that God changed this man's heart from the inside out and that's what God wants to do for every human being alive and we all need it. He wants to give us all a spiritual heart transplant. And if you're here this morning and you've been looking for that heart of gold like I was down deep inside and you haven't found it yet, I'd like to suggest to you that maybe you need to change a strategy. Maybe what you need to do is to call off the search for your own heart of gold. Maybe what you need to do is admit that you got a heart of lead like the rest of us have and maybe what you need to do is to turn to Jesus Christ in personal faith for a spiritual heart transplant like I did. I'm telling you that's what will fix the problem. You'll never fix it yourself, but Jesus Christ can fix it for you and I hope you'll think about that. You say, but now, Lon, I got a different problem. I'm already a Christian.

I've already trusted Christ as my personal Savior. So I understand what you're saying, but I got a different problem and my problem is that when I look in my heart even as a Christian, I still see too much lead there. I mean, I see stuff in there that I don't want there that doesn't belong there. I'd like to get out of there. I'm not changing into the kind of person that God wants me to be the way I wish I were. There's too much lead still in there.

How do I get rid of it? Why isn't it going any faster? Oh, that's a great question. And I'd like to finish by answering that this morning. I want you to turn to one other passage in the Bible. It's Romans chapter 12. And let's look and answer that question. If you're a Christian, how do you get the lead out?

Let's look and see. Verse 2, just one verse. The Bible says, do not be conformed any longer. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed. Oh, that's a great word. Greek word here is the word metamorpho.

Does it sound familiar? Well, sure, because we get our English word metamorphosis from this Greek word, to be transformed. All of you guys went through high school science, right? You remember high school science when they bring you all those smelly things and formaldehyde you got to cut on and whatever.

You remember that. And you talked about metamorphosis. What does metamorphosis mean?

It means a total, a radical change in the form, in the character of an animal. It's not a chameleon change in color and then changing back. That's not metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is radical and total change, like from a tadpole to a frog, right?

Like from a caterpillar to a butterfly. This is what God is talking about here in Romans chapter 12. He's talking about a spiritual metamorphosis that should be taking place in our heart from the heart of lead to a heart of stone.

Now you say, well, Lon, that's great, but how do you do that? Well, let's finish the verse. Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed, watch now, by the renewing of your mind. I'm convinced there are churches all over the world who are trying to teach Christians how to be transformed and they're doing it the wrong way, absolutely wrong. They'll come in and preach out, now you do this and you do this and don't do this and don't do the other things you know.

We don't drink or cuss or smoke or chew or hang around with them, which do, you know, and that's on and on and on and on we go. Now is that the way the Bible says real transformed living comes about? No, wrong, doesn't say that. In fact, this is like kind of taking caterpillars and trying to stick wings on them. That doesn't work. That doesn't make butterflies.

If you want a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly, it's got to come from the inside out, right? And this is what the verse is saying, by the renewing of your mind. That's where the change comes. In other words, the hardware is okay, but we need to be reprogrammed in the software. We've got a software problem. How do we do that?

How do we change the software of our life? Well, it takes place, dear friends, in direct proportion to how much we saturate our minds and our hearts with the word of God. How much we saturate our lives with the word of God. And the more we read, the more we study, the more we memorize, the more we meditate on the word of God, the faster and the fuller God can renew our mind, which means the faster and the fuller he can metamorphosize our lives. The word of God just doesn't teach us how to have eternal life.

The word of God goes to work inside of us as Christians, churning and bubbling and changing the very kind of people we are like yeast inside a lump of dough. I was a chemistry major in college. And one of the things we studied in chemistry were catalytic reactions or catalysts. Do you know what a catalyst is? A catalyst is something that makes a chemical reaction go a lot faster than it's supposed to go. Now, you may not know the word catalyst real well, but every one of us lives with catalytic reactions every day, and the most common one is right in our automobile.

We all have a what? Catalytic converter on our car. That's right. And the way this thing works is it takes carbon monoxide coming out of your engine and it turns it into carbon dioxide and water vapor. Now, that's a reaction that happens out in the world naturally, but it happens at a very, very slow rate. The genius of a catalytic converter is that a catalytic converter takes that carbon monoxide and at millions of times the rate normal, it turns it into carbon dioxide and water. The reason it's able to do that is because inside this catalytic converter is platinum. That's why when those things break, they're so expensive to fix because they're full of platinum. And for reasons that we don't understand, platinum, when you put it in the presence of carbon monoxide and air, it takes that reaction and speeds it up millions of times faster than it would normally go.

Even though we don't understand how it works, still that doesn't stop us from using the platinum, right? Now, what the Bible's teaching is that the Word of God is like spiritual platinum, that when we put it in our lives, we may not understand exactly how it works, we may not understand the exact process, but what happens is the Word of God speeds up the process of God changing our hearts many times faster than it would go without the Word of God. And the faster we put the Word of God in and the more fully we put the Word of God in, the faster we get spiritual metamorphosis back out. If you're here this morning and you're a Christian and maybe you're not satisfied with kind of how fast change is happening in your life, too much lead down in the heart there, I would like to ask you to do a quick evaluation of how much quality time you spend putting the Word of God in your life each and every day, huh?

And I'll bet you, I'll bet you if you're not happy with the changes you're seeing in your life, you'll find you're not spending very much time at all. So I've got a challenge for you. I've got a 90-day challenge, not a whole rest of your life thing, okay? 90 days, what I want to challenge you for for the next 90 days is to challenge you to spend 15 minutes quality time reading, studying, meditating on the Word of God, memorizing the Word of God five days a week. We won't even say seven.

Let's just say five for 90 days. And then, friends, if you haven't seen a significant change in the quality of your Christian living, then junk it, junk it. But I'm telling you, you won't.

You won't. Because the faster you put the Word of God in, I'm telling you, the faster God will change your life. You say, but Lon, 15 minutes, you don't know my schedule, buddy.

You don't understand, I get up when it's still dark, and when I get home, it's dark. I mean, you don't understand what 15 minutes is. All right, what's 15 minutes? 15 minutes is probably less than you and I spend reading the paper every day. It's probably less than we spend on coffee and donut break at work. It's half of Dan Rather or half of Connie Chung, although I'm not sure how long she's going to be with us, but however, it's half of that. Isn't the Word of God, isn't changing your life worth more than half of Dan Rather? If you find time to watch Dan Rather and you find time to read the paper and you find time to have coffee and donut break at work, there's 15 minutes in there somewhere. And even if you say there isn't at work and there isn't at home, what about in your car? The Bible's been made on tape, friends. This happened years ago.

You know, this is the 90s. Buy some tapes, put it in the tape player, listen to it on the way to work. Well, I'm in a carpool.

All right, well, they make walkmen. Put your walkman on and listen to it in a carpool. That's rude, Lon. That would be so rude.

No? Well, listen. Just tell the people in your carpool that in order for you to be the kind of Christian that they would want you to be who could really be a good representative for Jesus Christ, you need to do this, and put the headphones on and listen to it. They'll accept that. Listen, I've talked to the people in your carpool. They would love you to do that. Believe me, they would.

They'd be happy to see that happen in your life. I don't know what the answer is for you, but I'm telling you, somewhere in your schedule there's 15 minutes. And if you'll dedicate that to God and fill it up with the word of God, God will take the process of turning lead to gold and he'll speed it up in your life. That's my challenge to you. Try it for 90 days. See if it doesn't help. It will.

And I'll bet you after 90 days you're going to say, man, this is something I need to lock in for the rest of my life. Give it a shot. See what you think. Let's pray. With our heads bowed and our eyes closed, I'm going to ask you please not to start looking around. If you're here and you're a Christian this morning and you're willing to walk out of here and say, God, I'm going to commit those 15 minutes to you five days a week for 90 days and change my life, God. I want my life changed more than it is. If you're willing to make that commitment to God this morning before we rush out of here, I'd like to give you the chance to do that. What I'd like to ask you to do is if you're willing to make that commitment, not to me but to God, with our heads bowed and our eyes closed, I'd like you just to slip your hand up and say, God, I'm going to make you that commitment.

Oh, this is great, lots of hands. That's neat. Anybody else now?

You got to mean it. Anybody else? Oh, that's great.

That's great. I'd like to pray for you. Father, thank you for so many people who raised their hands. Thank you for some folks who made that commitment this morning but they didn't raise their hand. And for others who didn't need to raise their hand because it's already a commitment of their life. For all of those people, dear Father, who are going to give you that special time in their life, I want to pray that you would honor that.

I want to pray not only would you help them to carve the time out and discipline their lives to be able to keep this regimen, but Father, I want to pray that you would make it a life-changing endeavor, that you would demonstrate in such a conclusive way that this is the secret to speeding up change in our lives, that you would have many, many if not all of these folks coming back and saying, God, I've got to work this in as a regular part of my routine just like brushing my teeth. Thank you, Father, that when you asked us to change, you didn't leave us to try to do it ourselves. You gave us Jesus Christ to bring us salvation and the Spirit of God to live inside of us and orchestrate change. And the Word of God is a catalyst to speed it up. Lord, help us take advantage of the things you've given us that we might find the heart of gold that Neil Young keeps looking for. We even pray for Neil Young that you'd help him find you as well. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.