Well each week during this Advent season, we are listening to Jesus Himself tell us why He came into the world that first Christmas, in the conviction that if we are really to understand the meaning of Christmas, we cannot do any better than to listen to Him. As you may recall, we started the series in John 18:37 where, in His interview with Pilate, Jesus said, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” And then we looked at Matthew 5:17 where Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come into the world to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” Then last week, we looked at John 12:27 where Jesus said, “For this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” And now this week we are going to look together at Luke’s gospel, chapter 5, at verse 31 where Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
The words we’ve just mentioned together come in the context of a dinner party held by Levi, the tax collector, who has responded personally to Jesus’ call and invitation to Him to “Follow Me.” And now having been converted in his great joy, Luke tells us he invites a large company of tax collectors and sinners to his home. The scribes and the Pharisees, for their part, grumble at Jesus’ disciples because Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. These people are riffraff. Tax collectors, as you may know, in those days were viewed as immoral collaborators with the Roman occupying forces. They were dishonest and unscrupulous, running their franchise like a protection racket for the Romans, always skimming a little extra off the top to line their own pockets. And so they were generally despised. And now as a former tax collector himself, at this point, tax collectors and sinners are likely the only people Levi could ever call friends. No one else really wanted anything to do with him.
But now his life has changed completely. He has met Jesus and Jesus has turned his world upside down. And so now as a follower of Christ, he wants nothing so much as to share what he has found in Jesus with those he knows desperately need Him too. But the religious elites, the Pharisees, they’re not at all impressed. A holy person in their mind, a holy person as Jesus claims to be, would not be seen dead with scum like this. And to that attitude, Jesus responds by explaining His purpose in coming into the world in the first place. The mission upon which the Father sent Him, the reason for which He was born, is “not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Christmas happened – do you see – so that Jesus might call sinners to repentance. And as we reflect on that together this morning, we are going to think about three things. First of all, the invitation itself. The invitation Jesus was born to make. Then secondly, we’re going to think about to whom Jesus issues that invitation. Who is the invitation for precisely? And then finally, to what are we being invited? There is an invitation. Whose name is on the invitation? Who is being invited? And what is it this invitation is actually offering? What are we being invited to? How we answer those questions might actually push us to reconsider both the meaning of Christmas and how we respond to Jesus Christ who is at its very heart.
Before we get to all of that, let’s pause and pray and then we’ll read the Scriptures together. Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, how we pray now that by the ministry of Your Spirit among us, we might hear in the reading and preaching of Your Word, Your voice, Your call, Your invitation and be given grace to respond with glad faith and trust in You, perhaps for the very first time or anew here this day. So come to us, we pray, and work by Your power in our hearts by Your Word. For we ask it in Your name, amen.
Luke chapter 5 at verse 27. This is the Word of God:
“After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.
And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.’”
Amen.
The Invitation
Well this is the season for invitations, isn’t it? You may have sent a fair few yourself already. No doubt you’ll have received your share of Christmas party invitations in the last few weeks. Just here at First Presbyterian Church we’ve had staff Christmas parties and Sunday school class parties and D-group parties just to name a few, and invitations have gone out for all of them. Maybe you’ve had a Christmas party at work to which you’ve been invited. Neighbors and friends will send out their invitations to join them in their festive celebrations. It’s the season for invitations. And appropriately enough, our passage that we read a moment ago is full of invitations. Did you see that? It starts, of course, with Jesus’ invitation to Levi in verse 27. “He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax booth and He said to him, ‘Follow Me.’” That’s an invitation, a call.
And then there’s the invitation that is at least implied in verse 29. When having come to Christ, begun to follow Christ, and having been changed forever by Christ, Levi now invites all his tax collector friends to a great banquet at his home that they might also meet Jesus. And of course the whole passage is building to the climactic invitation that, as it turns out, actually describes the very reason for Jesus’ birth on that first Christmas morning. This is what Christ’s coming was all about. Verse 32, “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Jesus came, He was born – do you see this in the text – to issue a call, an invitation. Christmas is about God’s great invitation. And I pray that however many other invitations you might get this Christmas and however you might respond to them, my prayer is that you will answer this particular invitation with the same eagerness and joy that we see in Levi in our passage. So there is an invitation here. That’s the first thing I want you simply to notice.
The Invitation is for Sinners
But then, to whom is the invitation extended? Who is being invited? Who is on the list? Well look at the text. The Pharisees and the scribes, they are not at all pleased, are they, that Jesus is at a dinner party with His disciples when there is a guest list that looks like this. And look at Jesus’ reply. Verses 21 and 32. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Jesus isn’t denying for a moment the characterization that the Pharisees and their scribes have made about the guests at the party that night in Levi’s home. These are, in fact, tax collectors and sinners, every one of them. But why is Jesus there? Are these really the kind of people a holy man ought to consort with?
You might know that the name, “Pharisee,” actually means, “set apart one.” Pharisees sought to lead lives distinguished by exacting obedience to all the ritual and moral requirements of the laws and traditions of their fathers. They sought to be holy and devout and pure. “Surely Messiah, when He came, would naturally gravitate toward people like us, not people like them.” That’s what the Pharisees thought. And in His reply, Jesus reminds them that sick people are the ones who need doctors and sinners the ones who need a Savior. The healthy don’t need a physician and the righteous don’t need to repent. The Pharisees are quite right, aren’t they, in their diagnosis of the problem among all the guests of the party in Levi’s home. They were sick and in desperate need of a physician. They were sinners who badly need a Savior. I’ll bet the doctors in this room will tell you one of the more difficult things they have to navigate these days with patients is the tendency made all the more common and complex because of the internet to self-diagnose. All these hypochondriacs showing up, certain that some terrible fate has befallen them because of a blemish on their elbow or an unusual cough.
Well in this case, the Pharisees’ diagnosis of others is sound, but their diagnosis of themselves is dangerously inaccurate. Levi and his pals were sinners; that’s true enough, but not us. “We’re not sick and we don’t have any need of a physician. We are fit as fiddles.” That’s what they thought. “Strong as a horse. Nothing wrong with us! What need have we of a doctor?” That’s their mindset. And of course we recognize immediately the danger in that line of thinking, don’t we? They could not have been more wrong about their condition before God. Not only were the Pharisees sick, their disease is terminal. They were not righteous as they claimed. They too, yes, even they, are sinners. The key difference between Levi and the Pharisees wasn’t their sin or their need of a Savior. The key difference was their awareness of their sin and their need of a Savior.
Listen, Jesus extends His call, this invitation He was born to make, He extends it to every single sinner. He came to be a spiritual physician to everyone who is sin-sick. “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” He came to extend His invitation to a world of lost people. Not one person can say, if they have the right diagnosis of their heart, not one can say, “I have no need of a Savior.” And so Jesus came to extend His call. He was born in order to bring God’s invitation to every single sinner, every one. That means He came to invite you. You have need of His call because, guess what, bad news – you are a sinner. Me too. And you have need of the good Physician’s treatment plan because you and I, we are by nature mortally ill.
The problem is, that just like in Jesus’ days, too many of us still look at the likes of Levi and we find ourselves saying, “God, I thank You that I am not like other people – extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” We get the invitation alright. It comes in the mail, as it were. We’ve received the invitation; we just don’t recognize our name on the envelope. We just assume the invitation doesn’t apply to me. It’s been wrongly addressed. “I don’t need Jesus quite like this. I’ll take Jesus on my terms, as an accessory to my life, but I don’t need Him desperately as though I were dying, in need of a physician. This is for other people.” That’s our assumption very often. But no, Jesus was born – “I came that first Christmas,” He says, “to invite you, you, me.”
But you know, in order to find a place among the guests, you have to qualify. So suppose you show up at the venue listed on the Christmas party invitation and there’s a man at the door, a big burly man, a bouncer at the door checking names. You know, he’s got one of those clipboards and he’s got the list of names of everyone invited. And he’s checking the names at the door before you can be admitted to the party. And next to each name are the words, “wicked sinner.” And you hand the man your invitation and he runs his finger down the list – “Mr. Strain. Mr. Strain, let’s see. Mr. Strain, I have you here, sir. David Strain – wicked sinner. Is that right?” “Oh, no, no. There’s been some mistake! That’s not a fair description of me at all. I mean, I’m not perfect, to be sure, but I’m a pretty good chap. I’m a decent bloke. I’m not a wicked sinner; that’s not me.” “Well then, sir, I’m sorry but you can’t come in. Only wicked sinners are invited.” And you watch as he holds open the door to admit wicked sinners of every stripe ahead of you. The gossip and the drunk and the cheat and the liar, the immoral – they’re all welcomed in. And then he closes the door in your face and leaves you out in the dark because you insist you’re not a wicked sinner and the invitation doesn’t apply to you.
Jesus was born to extend the invitation of God to every sinner, but only to sinners. And unless and until you come to yourself in Jesus’ description of who gets invited, you never will come in. What a tragedy it would be if poor ignorant sinners of every type would enter ahead of you, responding in faith to Jesus’ invitation while you in your pride and your blindness resist Him and reject His call. Jesus came, He was born that first Christmas that He might deliver in person, as it were, God’s invitation to sinners.
What God Offers in the Invitation
The invitation. And then those to whom the invitation comes. And now in the third place, what is it to which we are being invited exactly? In the coming of Jesus Christ, what is it that God is offering? If you received an invitation in the mail and you recognize neither the sender nor the location to which you were being invited to attend, nor even the type of event you’re being invited to participate in, I very much doubt that you would respond favorably to the RSVP. If Jesus came that first Christmas to issue an invitation, before we’re able to decide on how best to respond, we need to know to what we are actually being invited.
An Invitation to Repentance
And I think we can say at least three things about the invitation that Jesus issues. First of all, it is very clearly in the passage an invitation to repentance, isn’t it? It’s an invitation to repentance. “I’ve not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance,” He says. And there’s two parts of repentance. We’ve got to get both of them. First of all, there is the turning from sin and self that is implied in Jesus’ words here. Repentance means to change the set of the mind, to turn one’s self around and to go in a new, moral direction. That’s part of the heart of what repentance involves. And it necessitates a full ownership of the sinfulness of sin, of the depth of our spiritual need, of our utter helplessness and lostness. You are not repenting yet if all you ever say is, “Opps, messed up again! Sorry, Lord!” and then you bounce quite happily along on your merry way. That is a trivial apology; it is not heart repentance. Repentance means facing my sin, in all its ugliness, seeing and hating and fleeing it along with all necessary steps to make changes in my way going forward.
But there’s another part of repentance. That’s the first part – turning from sin. But there’s another part without which we haven’t yet fully answered Jesus’ call, His invitation. Not only must we flee from and face and turn from and mourn over our sin and seek to leave it behind us, we must also not only turn from sin, we must turn to Jesus Christ. All too often we get stuck in the first part of repentance and do not sufficiently practice the second, with the result that our sin looms so large in our own eyes that we find it hard to believe in the possibility of pardon. It’s the opposite problem from the Pharisees, isn’t it? The Pharisees don’t believe they are sinners but sometimes as we begin to repent and our consciences sting and we’re being convicted of our sin, the sight of the sinfulness of our hearts can loom so large and we feel the bite and sting of our remaining wickedness so keenly and we are so ashamed and then we stop there. We sort of stall there and our repentance is incomplete. You see, we need to not only turn from sin, we need to turn to Christ. Jesus did not go to Levi and say, “Levi, stop sinning!” He said to Levi, “Follow Me!” Repentance is a turning from sin and self to Christ and His grace and then, by His grace, to a life lived for His glory.
I wonder if you’ve failed really to own your sin and never really repented at all. Or has your repentance, perhaps, gotten stalled and stuck as the enormity of your sin and your need grips your heart and now you struggle really to believe you are forgiven or that you are even forgivable? Do you see how Christmas sets before you a new opportunity? Christ was born to offer an invitation to full, thoroughgoing, real-deal repentance. You must stop minimizing your sin on the one hand, stop trivializing repentance in order to avoid ever feeling guilty, stop it, but on the other hand you must make sure as you begin to face your sin that you know where to turn with it. You turn with it to Jesus who calls you to, “Follow Me.” He comes to you today as surely as He did to Levi so long ago with that invitation. It’s not a call to mere behavior modification. It is a call into fellowship with Him and to a life that will increasingly please Him. “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.” This is a call to repentance. Are you repenting? That’s how you answer the invitation.
An Invitation to Renewal
Secondly, of course, it’s also a call to renewal. That’s involved in Jesus’ language when He talks about “it’s not the healthy who need a physician but the sick.” Now the particular sickness there is the sickness of sin. It’s the sickness of guilt in the sight of God. We need to resist the temptation toward the therapeutic as though our main problem is that we are internally dysfunctional and Jesus has come to fix us. That’s not the heart of the Gospel and it’s not what Jesus is saying here. No, our main problem, the real disease of our soul, is that we have transgressed the law of God and we continue to do so by habit and instinct and preference and choice and we are desperately in need of His mercy. And yet nevertheless, implied in what Jesus is saying is that when you come to Him, He makes the wounded whole. He makes the blind to see. He heals the brokenhearted. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” When you come to Jesus, He makes you new! What a gift God wrapped and offered to us that first Christmas. A whole new you in Jesus Christ!
An Invitation to Joy
That is what you are being invited to- an invitation to repentance, to renewal, and finally, of course, is an invitation to joy. That’s what we see exemplified in Levi, isn’t it? This has happened to him. Jesus said, “Follow Me.” He answered the call. He turned to his old life of sin and wickedness and he’s been made a new creature and now he can’t help it. He wants to share it with everyone who will listen. All his tax collector and sinner friends are crammed into his house for a massive banquet so that they could meet Jesus. This is a celebration and it has Jesus as its heart.
There is, of course there is, a kind of sorrow that ought always to mark every single Christian. A sorrow for what we see of our own remaining sin still festering in our heart; a sorrow for the many all around us who are ignorant of the love of God in Jesus Christ or resist still His gracious invitation. That ought to always be part of our Christian experience – appropriate and godly sorrow. But there should also always be this profound joy because we know, having come to the great Physician, He has made us well, and now indeed it is well with our souls.
Why should Christmas be a season of great joy for you? Well I hope, and I’m sure you will rejoice in friends and family and in all the happiness and wonder and magic of the season. But really, the reason, the reason that Christians rejoice, we have reasons for it that not even the angels who split the skies over the shepherds’ heads knew anything about as they sang their “Gloria in excelsis Deo.” They could not penetrate into this. We have more reason for joy even than they. After all, Jesus didn’t come for them; He came for us. He didn’t come for the angels, He came for you, and that’s the reason for our great joy. The living God has come in person in Jesus Christ to invite you into fellowship with Himself, a fellowship that will be utterly transforming; it will make you new and be the spring of joy in your heart that will well up forevermore. “Come to Bethlehem and see, Him whose birth the angels’ sing. Come adore on bended knee, Christ the Lord, the newborn King!” That’s the invitation. I wonder if you will answer it today? If, like the Pharisees, you think you don’t really need Jesus, you’ll use Him well enough. You’ll take His name on your lips, you’ll play religion when the need takes you, but you don’t really believe that you’ve got to have Him, that your sickness is a sickness unto death, that you are a sinner in need of a Savior. Dear friend, I want you to hear His invitation. It’s an invitation to you. You need to get your self-diagnosis correct. You are a sinner. You are. And Jesus is calling you, “Follow Me.” He came for you! Today’s the day to answer His invitation.
Let’s pray together.
Our God and Father, we are, all of us, every one of us, sinners. How we praise You that You sent Your Son to invite sinners, to invite us into fellowship with Yourself. We know that fellowship was provided at the extraordinary cost of Christ’s obedience and blood. He died that we might be pardoned. Thank You for Christ and for the glorious invitation extended to us, all of us this Christmas. Please give us the grace we need to answer it that we may know that renewal You give to every repenting sinner and that great joy that we see exemplified in Levi that day who could not contain himself, but wanted to tell everyone about Jesus. Do that in us, we pray, for Your own great glory, in Jesus’ name, amen.