A New Recruit

Tom Shrader walks through Matthew 9:9-17 in a harmonized Gospel study, focusing on Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector, a man despised as a social and religious outcast, to follow Him. Jesus then dines with tax gatherers and sinners, drawing the Pharisees' criticism and prompting His response that He came not for the righteous but for the sick. Shrader applies the passage by calling believers to recognize their own sinfulness before God, share the gospel naturally with friends and family, and understand that genuine conversion always produces a desire to bring others to Christ.

“He lost a career but gained a destiny. He lost his material possessions but gained a spiritual fortune. He lost temporal security but he gained eternal life.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: A Study Of The Life Of Jesus Christ (2003/2004)

Recorded: 2004 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 52 min

Themes: calling, evangelism, grace, repentance, outcast, sinfulness, following jesus, sharing faith, feeling unworthy, new believer, struggling with shame, seeker, young adult, person with a sinful past, skeptic, someone questioning their faith

Scripture: Matthew 9:9-17, Matthew 4:18-22, Matthew 6:1-17, Matthew 5:21-43, Mark 2:13-22, Luke 5:27-39, Luke 5:28-29, Leviticus 20:5, Romans 3:10-12, Philippians 3:7, Hosea 6:6, Isaiah 6:1-8, Acts 1:8, Ephesians 2:8-10

Theological Themes: soteriology, doctrine of salvation, effectual calling, discipleship, conversion, gospel proclamation, incarnation, justification

Full Transcript

but the sinners. Now when we come to verse 9, I want you to notice a few things as we begin to break this down. But first, let me remind you again of the context. In chapter 8, Jesus came down from the Sermon on the Mount. He's been healing. He's been teaching. He's been demonstrating to everyone around Him who He is. The crowds are growing. The opposition is growing. The Pharisees are watching. And now, in chapter 9, Jesus is going to do something that will absolutely infuriate the religious establishment.

The Call of Matthew

As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office. Now, to understand the weight of what's happening here, you have to understand who Matthew was. Matthew was a tax collector. And a tax collector in first-century Israel was not simply a man who worked for the government. He was a man who was considered a traitor to his own people. The Jews despised tax collectors because tax collectors worked for Rome. Rome was the occupying pagan empire. The tax collector was seen as a collaborator with the enemy.

Not only that, but tax collectors were notorious for corruption. The system worked like this: Rome would set a tax, and the tax collector was free to collect above and beyond that set amount and keep the difference for himself. So tax collectors routinely extorted their own neighbors, their own countrymen, and made themselves wealthy at the expense of their own people. They were despised on two counts — as traitors and as thieves. They were lumped together in the popular Jewish mind with sinners, with prostitutes, with the worst of society.

Matthew would have known exactly what people thought of him. He would have known that the rabbis had ruled that a tax collector could not serve as a witness in a Jewish court. He would have known that a tax collector was considered by many to be beyond the reach of God's grace, beyond the possibility of repentance. He sat at that tax booth fully aware of his social and religious status.

And yet Jesus walked by, looked at Matthew, and said two words: "Follow me."

The Immediacy of Matthew's Response

Now notice what Matthew did. Verse 9 tells us he rose and followed Him. Luke's account fills in an important detail — Matthew left everything. He got up from his tax booth and he followed Jesus. Think about what that means in practical terms. Peter and Andrew and James and John left their nets, but they could go back to fishing. Nets can be picked up again. But when Matthew got up from that tax booth, he was walking away from a Roman government franchise. You did not simply walk back into that position. That tax booth would be given to someone else. Matthew burned his bridge. He walked away from his livelihood, his income, his security, and he followed Jesus.

This is the nature of the call of Christ. Jesus does not say, "Think it over and let me know." He does not say, "Come when it's convenient." He says, "Follow me," and the expectation is an immediate, decisive, total response. And that is exactly what Matthew gave Him.

The Celebration at Matthew's House

Now look at what happens next. Matthew, having left everything, throws a party. Luke tells us it was a great banquet. Matthew invited his friends — and his friends were, of course, tax collectors and sinners, because those were the people Matthew knew. The respectable religious people of Capernaum would not have been socializing with Matthew. His circle of friends was made up of others like him, people on the margins of Jewish religious society.

So here is Jesus, reclining at the table, eating and drinking with a houseful of tax collectors and sinners. And the Pharisees noticed. They said to His disciples, "Why is your teacher eating with the tax gatherers and the sinners?" Now understand what the Pharisees are doing here. In their world, table fellowship was deeply significant. Who you ate with said something about who you were, about your values, about your associations. A rabbi of any standing simply did not sit at a table with this class of people. It was considered defiling. It was considered beneath the dignity of anyone who took the law seriously.

The Pharisees were not asking an innocent question. They were making an accusation. They were saying, in effect, this man cannot be who He claims to be, because no true teacher of God would associate himself with people like this.

The Physician and the Sick

Jesus heard what they were saying, and He answered them directly. He said, "It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick." This is a simple and devastating statement. A doctor does not spend his time among the well. A doctor goes where the sick people are. If you want to find a doctor doing his work, you go to the hospital, not to the health club. Jesus is saying that His presence among sinners is not a compromise of His mission — it is His mission.

And then He says something remarkable. He tells the Pharisees to go and learn what this means: "I desire compassion, and not sacrifice." He is quoting Hosea chapter 6, verse 6. And the way He says it — "go and learn" — is pointed. That was a phrase a rabbi would use with a student who had badly missed the point of a text. Jesus is telling these expert teachers of the law that they have fundamentally misunderstood what God has always been after. God has always desired mercy. God has always desired compassion toward people. The entire sacrificial system was never meant to become a mechanism by which the religious separated themselves from the broken and looked down on them. They had taken the law and turned it into a wall, and Jesus was tearing the wall down.

Then He gives them the bottom line: "For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners." He did not come for people who have it all together. He did not come for people who are satisfied with their own standing before God. He came for people who know they are broken, who know they need help, who know they cannot save themselves. He came for people like Matthew. He came for people like the crowd sitting in Matthew's house that evening.

And He came for people like us.

A New Recruit

"But sinners." Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast, and you but your disciples do not fast?" And Jesus said to them, "The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast." Verse 16: "But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do men put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wineskins burst. The wine pours out, the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved."

That is the passage we are going to look at tonight. As you look at it, you can see how the title "A New Recruit" makes sense.

Matthew the Tax Collector

Verse 9 tells us that as Jesus passed by — He is somewhere back in His home base in the north, Capernaum — He sees a man called Matthew. The other gospel writers tell us that his name was also Levi, which was not at all uncommon. Didymus was Thomas, and Mark was also called John. It may be that it was Jesus Himself who changed this name, just as He said to Simon, "I will call you Peter," and to the sons of Zebedee He gave the name sons of thunder. We use both names interchangeably in our study.

Here is Matthew, and immediately we are taken by his humility. You will see this all through his account. He simply records the words "follow me," and followed Him. We will periodically need to bring in some support from Luke's gospel to fill in details that Matthew, in his humility, leaves out.

Matthew is a tax gatherer. The Jews hated these tax collectors. They were Jews who had formed a loyalty and a relationship with the occupying Roman forces and were considered traitors. In exchange for a franchise fee, they received the right to collect taxes. They did not work on a salary. They had a territory and people they could tax, and within that territory they were free to tax as much as they wanted in certain areas. They were responsible to provide Rome a base payment, and everything beyond that went directly into their own pockets. You can see why the Jews could not stand these men.

Three Areas of Uncleanness

The Jews considered tax gatherers unclean in three areas. First, politically. As already noted, Matthew would have been in collaboration with the occupying forces, and his fellow Jews wanted nothing to do with him.

Consider the taxes themselves. There was a poll tax — every man aged 14 to 65 and every woman aged 12 to 65 paid a tax simply for living. There was a ground tax, which required a tenth of all grain and a fifth of all wine. In some places the Romans also taxed fish and other items, which would have been a significant issue in Capernaum. There was an income tax of 1% of each person's annual income. And there was a duty tax ranging anywhere from 2.5% to 12.5% on all imports and exports. This system provided all sorts of opportunities for corruption and extortion.

Kent Hughes writes: "The system fostered exploitation by the arbitrary power of the tax gatherers. They could stop anyone on the road, make him or her unpack their bundles, and charge just about anything they wanted. If a person could not pay the tax, the tax collector sometimes would offer to loan them the money at an exorbitant rate, thus pulling the people further into their greedy hands. They were trained extortionists. Quite naturally, they attracted a criminal element of thugs and thieves and enforcers, the scum of the society." Hughes adds this final sentence: "So rare was honesty in the profession that a Roman writer said he once saw a statue built for an honest tax collector."

Second, they were religiously unclean. Leviticus 20, verse 5 prohibited tax collectors from entering the synagogues. They were not even allowed to give witness or testimony in court. Third, they were socially unclean. The Jews would not eat with them, associate with them, give to them, or take anything from them. They were total outcasts.

One Jewish historian summarizes the whole picture this way: "A Jewish publican was barred from the synagogue and forbidden to have any religious or social contact with his fellow Jews. He was ranked with the unclean animals, which a devout Jew would not so much as touch. He was in the same class as swine because he was a traitor and a liar, and he ranked with the robbers and the murderers, and he was forbidden to give testimony in any Jewish court."

The Tax Office

That fills in some of the detail surrounding Matthew. Returning to verse 9, Matthew includes one small phrase that helps us grasp the depth of animosity his fellow Jews would have had for him. See it there — Matthew was sitting in the tax office.

We are talking here about publicans, and there were two categories of them. There were the gabais, who collected general taxes on land and other properties. And there were the moheks, who taxed import duties, toll fees, and business licenses, operating with an essentially unlimited latitude for taxation. Among the moheks there were great ones and small ones. The great moheks would hire others to do their work for them, and so they operated in essentially anonymity.

The Tax Collector's World

They might be tax gatherers, but almost no one would know that. They were despised, but they were never seen doing the act. Of the others, of the small moheks, these were the ones who themselves collected the taxes. They would sit face to face. They would confront the people and extort the tax from them. That is Matthew. So when we say tax gatherers, there is this broad category. The Jews did not like the gabais, and they did not like the great moheks. But they despised these men who would sit in this office and face to face extort and exploit fellow Jews.

They saw them as the scum of the earth. They saw them as deep, filthy, vile sinners. That is Matthew. And it provides us with a great base for this story. Jesus is going to confront these sinners, deal with these sinners — and the religious people are not going to like it.

Why Jesus Came

See, that is why Jesus came. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. Jesus came to save His people from their sin. Jesus came to live a perfect life and to take the good news, the gospel, to a lost and dying world. Jesus came to expose us all for who we really are.

John MacArthur writes this: had Jesus come to save the righteous, His incarnation would have been pointless because righteous people need no salvation. But even more relevant to man's situation is the fact that there are no righteous people apart from the saving work of Jesus Christ. Then John quotes Romans chapter 3: "There's none righteous, not one. There's none who understands. There's none who seek for God. All have turned aside. Together they've become useless. There's none who does good, not even one." That is the condition of mankind.

It is so important for us to understand that. And in the world we live in, that is not generally understood. Even in the Christian world, we do not always see churches and Christians who believe this. Virtually every week it seems I have three, four, or five discussions with people talking about the condition of man and what happened to man. When Adam sinned, what was the condition of man? Can man do some good things? Does man have the ability to make good decisions? The answer is no. The Bible says a natural man cannot understand spiritual things, and that no one does good, no not one.

Why You?

So what is going to happen is everyone will gather around and say that Matthew is an awful man. But we want you to hold up the mirror and look at yourself. We will hear that every once in a while when we start talking about God choosing who He is going to save. And we will get questions like, I do not understand — if God is choosing, why would He not choose them? But that is not the question. The question is, why did He choose you?

Can you get it into your mind that before God, as a sinful person, it does not take any more grace to save you than it does to save Osama Bin Laden, or some mass murderer, or some pedophile? They do not deserve salvation, and neither do you.

The Call of Matthew

Verse 9: Jesus passed by and He saw a man named Matthew, a tax gatherer. And here is what He says: "Follow Me." And he rose and followed Him. Matthew is a little humble here, and that is demonstrated in his writing. Luke, in Luke chapter 5 verse 28, adds just a little insight into this. He says Matthew left everything behind and rose and began to follow Him. And with this, again, there is the idea of immediacy. It is what we saw back in chapter 4 with Peter and Andrew and James and John. He walks away from everything.

I want you to understand what has happened to Matthew here. There has been a radical transformation in his life. Once he turns his back on this occupation, there is no going back. One author writes this: because of his position as an agent of Rome, he knew that once he forsook his post, he would never be able to return to it. He knew the cost and willingly paid it.

Of all the disciples, Matthew doubtlessly had the greatest sacrifice of material possessions, yet he himself made no mention of it. He felt with Paul that whatever things he counted as gain, those things he now counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Paul records that in Philippians chapter 3 verse 7. The same author continues: far from being depressed about what he left behind, his heart overflows with joy. He lost a career but gained a destiny. He lost his material possessions but gained a spiritual fortune. He lost temporal security but he gained eternal life.

I do not think for a second that Matthew sat and said, what a sacrifice has been made, what a price has been paid. He saw all the price paid by Christ and Christ alone. We see the picture of a converted heart. He gets up, he follows, he leaves everything.

Matthew's First Act of Discipleship

Now Matthew does something. Look at verse 10: "It happened that as he was reclining at the table in the house, many of the tax gatherers and the sinners were dining with him and with Jesus." Again, we go to Luke's gospel. Luke chapter 5 verse 29: "And Levi" — that is Matthew — "gave a big reception for him in his house." I want you to understand what is happening. This is a gathering at Matthew's house that Matthew orchestrated, that Matthew put together. Matthew is going to connect all of his friends with Jesus.

Hit the pause button for a second. How does this play out in your life and mine? What this is saying is, if I really know who Christ is, there is a revolutionary thought process that takes place in my life. He is not necessarily calling us to walk away from everything, but he is saying he was certainly willing to walk away, he was certainly seeing a destination and a change, and he was understanding that his relationship with his possessions had been transformed.

Matthew's Farewell Dinner

These things — these attitudes, these hobbies — are not the most important thing anymore. And there should be, almost naturally, this desire to share what has happened, to talk to people. The most logical place to start is with your friends and with your family. If you become a Mary Kay distributor, all of a sudden the most natural thing in the world is to call all your friends and family and get them together for a party. The same goes for Tupperware, or insurance — you go into the insurance business, and all of a sudden you discover all of your family has unlisted their phone, because they know you're coming.

So here is what Matthew is going to do. His life has changed, and he decides he is going to have a dinner, a reception, a banquet. A couple of things are going to take place. Number one, he is going to say goodbye — goodbye to his friends, goodbye to his occupation, goodbye to family. In a sense, he is saying goodbye to an old life. And he is also going to say, "I want to tell you what has happened to me. I want to tell you what has taken place in my life." He begins to share.

So what does he do? He calls together his buddies. There is the response: he follows Jesus, he leaves everything, and he begins this process of evangelizing. Back to verse 10, there in the house are the tax gatherers and the sinners. Those are the guys Matthew hung out with. Matthew does not know who else to talk to, so he gathers all the other tax gatherers and then this broad category he calls sinners.

Who Were the Sinners?

The Jews of Jesus' day had a formal term here, and what they were talking about were people who wanted nothing to do with the rabbinical or Mosaic law or rabbinical tradition. In their mind, these were the vilest, most wicked of the people. John MacArthur, in his commentary, writes this: "The sinners doubtlessly included robbers, murderers, drunkards, prostitutes, other irreligious and ungodly people."

They were the riffraff of the area, and they must have been intrigued and touched by the prospect of dining with Jesus. They would have all heard about Jesus. They were in Capernaum, and everybody in Capernaum knew about Jesus — knew who He was, knew what He had done. They had heard about all the miracles, all the signs, and His marvelous teaching. Matthew brings them together to eat. It must have been a great night. I would love to have had a tape recorder running that evening — to listen to that conversation and to know what Jesus said to them — but we have no record of it here.

Applying This to Our Lives

Let me stop for a moment and apply this to our lives. My experience is that close to half of the people at East Valley Bible Church were converted as adults — and by adults, I mean 18 years of age and older. If you are one who came to faith after age 18, you have a story to tell. You can all meet at Starbucks, get a coffee, and swap stories about your old life.

Typically, if you came out of a sinful background, there is some tension with the old life, with the old buddies and old friends. You have heard things like, "What is with you? Are you a Bible thumper? You used to be so much fun, but something has really changed." Perhaps they have even started to pull away from you. Maybe it is more serious than that — maybe it involves family members. We have adults in their thirties with two or three kids whom God saves, and they relate to me conversations with their parents, who are afraid they have joined a cult. In some cases, you experience separation, or even what I would lightly call persecution, and you feel afraid and sorry that they have rejected you.

I try to make this point every time we touch on this topic: they are not rejecting you. They like you. They like to hang out with you, go to ball games and movies and dinner with you, go to the beach and skiing with you. They like you. What they cannot stand is the Jesus they see in you. And that is actually a powerful picture of how God is working in your life.

The Pharisees Object

We have no real record of what took place at this dinner, but Jesus is there and He is eating with these people. The Pharisees, however — the religious leaders of the day — cannot leave that alone. Look at verse 11. When the Pharisees saw this, they would have nothing to do with these tax gatherers and sinners. No contact. They would not dirty themselves with them. They are observing the scene, perhaps from outside Matthew's house. They see it, they hear it, perhaps they even smell it — whatever is going on in there. But notice they do not go to Jesus directly. They are probably intimidated by His presence. Instead, they go to His disciples and say, "Why is your teacher eating with tax gatherers and sinners?"

Verse 12 tells us that Jesus heard this, and Jesus answers. These religious men are going to keep appearing from here through the end of our study in the life of Christ, and virtually every time it is extraordinary — you can see Jesus hanging with the prostitutes and the drunkards and the outcasts, and it is the religious people who have the problem with it.

Jesus and the Outcasts

Jesus gets along fine with the bottom of society and hurting people. But bring in the religious, and immediately everything explodes. This is a great example of it. They hear this, they watch, and they go to the disciples and say, "What is with Him? Why is He hanging out with these guys?"

Jesus hears it, and He says, "Let me explain something to you." He doesn't dispute the Pharisees' assessment of these people at all. He doesn't say they're not bad people, or that the Pharisees don't understand. Instead, He says this: "It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick."

The Physician Illustration

Jesus hits them right in the face with pure logic. Who goes to a doctor? Haley, our youngest daughter, has been sick, really, for almost two and a half weeks now. She spent about eleven days in bed, listless and with no strength, though it's starting to come back. We've been to urgent care, an emergency room, a doctor, and back into urgent care again Friday night, completing the whole cycle.

That first doctor, after two weeks and a day, looks at her and says, "I have not got the foggiest idea of what's wrong with you. Not a clue." She has all this stuff in her throat and it's not pretty, but she's feeling better, she's moving around, she was in church this morning, and she'll go to work tomorrow. They told her she was fine, even though they don't have a clue.

What's interesting is that Tyler didn't go to the doctor. Susan didn't go to the doctor. I didn't go to the doctor. Sarah didn't go to the doctor. Timmy didn't go to the doctor. The only people who go to doctors are people who are sick.

Jesus Came for Sinners

Jesus says, "Stop and think about this. If you're sick, you go to a physician. It's not those who are healthy who go to a physician." He's talking physically here, but He's speaking a spiritual truth to them. He says, "Here's the point: I didn't come to call the righteous, but to call the sinners."

In other words, He is saying: I don't need to hang out with you, because you're the righteous ones. You have it all figured out. You have your religion, and that's all you care about. I'm here for the sinners. I'm here for those who are hurting and troubled and sick.

So the question He's really asking is: is that you? Jesus is the answer. Jesus is the great spiritual physician, and Jesus alone can take a heart of stone and turn it into a heart of flesh, and take a heart that is bitter and angry and free it from guilt.

"Go and Learn"

In verse 13, Jesus says, "But go and learn." That phrase, "go and learn," is a phrase used in the rabbinic writings to rebuke those who should already know something. It means: you ought to know this, go look it up. Then He quotes from Hosea 6: "I desire compassion, not sacrifice."

The moment He goes to Hosea, it is again right in their faces, because that is a story of the unfaithfulness of the nation of Israel to the one true God. He makes the point clearly: I'm here to seek and save the lost, the sinners. I'm not interested in the religious people. Take your religion, go, and think you're going to be okay — but you aren't.

God hates religion, if by religion we mean meaningless rituals that we simply attend. I was raised in that environment. From the time I was a little kid, it was: do this, don't do this, say this, go over here, do these first Fridays, confess this, don't do this, say these prayers — that's all we ever heard. I never once heard anything about my heart. Nobody was ever concerned about whether I wanted to be there or what the condition of my heart was. It was just: be there, check it off, and then you're free. Jesus says, "No, that is not how we work here."

A Question About Fasting

Some time passes — we have no idea if it's a minute, thirty minutes, or an hour — but verse 14 tells us that the disciples of John came to Jesus. John is now in prison. He has already said to his followers, "I'm not the Christ. I've been sent before Him. He must increase, I must decrease." Some of John's disciples have begun to follow Jesus, but these are some of the others.

They come to Him and say, "We have a question. Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" Jesus gives them an answer in verse 15: "The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away, and then they will fast."

Who is the bridegroom? He's talking about Himself. That word "taken away" carries the idea of sudden removal, of being snatched away violently — clearly a reference to His own crucifixion. Once the bridegroom is taken away, then they will fast.

Fasting, Prayer, and True Righteousness

It is important to note that Jesus did not come along and tell these men that fasting is not important, or that prayer is not important. Turn back to chapter 6, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is teaching and giving a warning about those very things.

He says in Matthew chapter 6, verse 1: "Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them." He's saying, "Watch out. Don't be involved in religious activity in order to draw attention to yourself, so that others will look at you and think, 'Wow, aren't you a godly person?'"

He then gives three concrete examples. Verse 2: "When therefore you give alms" — in other words, when you give, and the implication is that you are to give, it's not "don't give," it's "when you give" — "do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men." Don't call attention to yourself.

Giving, Praying, and Fasting in Secret

Don't announce it in front of everyone — "Here's Mort, and he's going to voluntarily give a bunch of money." You don't need to do that. He says, but how do you give? Verse 3: when you give, don't let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. There's this idea of almost spontaneity, this idea of discreteness, this idea of giving not to draw attention to yourself, but to fulfill your desire to give.

Verse 5: when you pray, don't pray as the hypocrites. They love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners in order to be seen by men. They would have certain times in the day when they would pray, and they would coordinate the prayer time with their walking across the street at 24th and Camelback. They just happened to be at 24th and Camelback at the prayer time. They'd have to stop and pray right there, and everybody would say, "Wow, look at him praying. He's incredible. He's a godly guy." Don't be praying that way.

But pray, verse 6, in your inner room, shut the door, pray in secret. Now He's not saying you and I shouldn't pray publicly here. He's saying when you pray, the purpose is not to be seen by men but to speak to God.

Verse 16: when you fast, don't put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance in order to be seen fasting by men. They don't take care of their hair, they don't wash their face, their clothes — they let it all go. So they're walking down the street and people are saying, "Look at him, he's fasting. That's the guy we saw at 24th and Camelback, and we've seen him give — wow, this is a godly guy." And Jesus says, no. Verse 17: when you fast, anoint your head, wash your face.

What's the whole point here? The whole point is that our giving and our praying and our fasting and all that we do is not to influence each other, but to go before the Lord. The point He's making to these people is there's a time and a place for this, and it is fine to go ahead and pray and go ahead and fast. The Jewish calendar had one prescribed day for fasting — Yom Kippur — but Jewish tradition had added two days each week for fasting. Jesus is just kicking the slats out of all of this. He said you've got this empty religion with hearts that aren't right, you're going through the motions, and you're missing the whole point.

The Heart Behind the Law

You're there in Matthew chapter 6, and it's the same thing we saw in chapter 5. In the Sermon on the Mount, beginning in verse 21, He's talking about all of these commandments. Let me just give you one example. Right there in verse 21, He says, "You've heard that the ancients were told" — you've heard this from the rabbis, you've heard it from the teachers — "that you should not commit murder." Verse 22: "But I say to you..."

If you spend time in this passage, you see the same process repeating. Verse 27: "You've heard... but I say to you." Verse 31: "It is said... but I say to you." Verse 33: "You've heard... but I say to you." Verse 38: "You've heard... but I say to you." Verse 43: "You've heard... but I say to you." Jesus is taking those commandments one step deeper. He's taking them to the heart.

He didn't come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill it, and indeed He did. But He's bringing something new — the understanding that the heart needs to be changed, that the heart is hard, that no one is good.

New Cloth and New Wine

Then He gives two practical illustrations, back now in Matthew chapter 9, in verses 16 and 17. No one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch pulls away from the garment and a worse tear results. Nor do men put new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the wineskins burst and the wine pours out.

The garment He'd be talking about would be a cloth of either wool or linen, and the minute you washed it, it would shrink. So what He's saying is you don't take a shirt that needs a patch and attach a brand new piece of linen that's never been washed, because the minute you wash the garment, it's just going to shrink up and tear. Likewise, if you take a wineskin — an animal hide that's been prepared specifically to contain wine — and it's fulfilled that purpose but has now become dry and brittle, and you take that old wineskin and put new wine in it, the wine ferments, it expands, and the wineskin will just burst. You can't do that.

He's saying it's the same thing here. We see it a little later, as the word begins to spread and they're moving into the book of Acts and going out to take the gospel to the world. Even some of these converted Jews want Gentiles to become Jews first before becoming Christians. Jesus said no — this is something new, something different.

The So What: Lessons from Matthew's Call

We've got about eight minutes. What's the so what of all of this? What can we learn from it? As it applies to Matthew, there's much application, but I want to focus on what J.C. Ryle mentions here. We should learn from Matthew's case that with Christ, nothing is impossible. He can take a tax gatherer and make him an apostle. He can change any heart and make all things new.

Let us never despair of anyone's salvation. Let us pray on and speak on and work on in order to do good to souls — even the souls of the worst. When Jesus says, by the power of the Spirit, "Follow Me," He can make the hardest and most sinful obey.

We should also observe in Matthew's decision that he waited for nothing. He didn't tarry. He didn't wait for a convenient time. He didn't say maybe later. I offer that by way of encouragement, because I meet people all the time who are praying for spouses or kids or family members or friends and wondering...

You Don't Know Who God Will Save

You're not very good at being the Holy Spirit. You don't know who God is going to save. That's certainly been my experience. I had many people who never even thought to invite me to a Bible study. It never occurred to them that God would save somebody like me, but He did — and He saved you. We learn from Matthew that He can save the worst of sinners.

We can also learn from Matthew's response, because it should mirror our own. Once we understand who Jesus is, we follow Him, and there is a sense in which we leave everything. All things are new. All the old things pass away, and there is in us a desire to begin sharing this truth. There should be in our life a steady flow of men and women, students, friends, and family with whom we are constantly sharing the gospel. That should be normative. What we see in Matthew's life should be present in the life of every believer.

The Pattern of Every Believer: Isaiah 6

There is a pattern here that I want to drive home — a pattern that, at least in my mind, reflects the thought process of every believer. It is Isaiah chapter 6. If you are part of the music team here at the church, Gary is continually taking you back to Isaiah 6. Even here in the services, Gary is continually returning to this very process.

Isaiah sees the Lord. That is what Isaiah said: "I saw the Lord." This is very important. We live in a time where people are seeing their own version of God — how they perceive Him to be. They have created God in their own image. They have made God to be exactly what they want Him to be, so they will say things like, "My God would never do this," and "My God would never do that."

When you present biblical truth to such a person, they respond almost violently — certainly angrily. They resist it. I have sat with people long enough to walk through this, and eventually they will say, "I never saw this before." That is because they created a God in their own image. When you see God as He really is, that changes everything.

Woe to Me, for I Am Undone

In Isaiah chapter 6, verse 1, Isaiah says he sees the Lord on His throne, high and exalted and lifted up. He sees the seraphim and the cherubim, all the beings around Him, the singing going back and forth. When you see God for who He really is, there is only one response. It is the response Isaiah has in verse 5: "Woe to me, for I am undone."

Think of it in the context of the Pharisees. A person might say, "I thought I was religious. I thought I had my church life taken care of. I had my school, my family, my work all in order. I am at the gym, working on my golf game, I have my friends, and I am involved in church — check, check, check, check. I am a together person." But when you see God for who He really is, it allows you to see yourself for who you really are. And the only response is, "Woe to me, for I am undone."

Consider how the great saints of the faith expressed this same response. Augustine wrote, "Lord, save me from that wicked man, myself." John Knox said, "In youth, in middle age, now after many battles, I find nothing in me but corruption." John Wesley confessed, "I have fallen short of the glory of God. My whole life is altogether corrupt and abominable, and consequently my whole life being an evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit." Augustus Toplady wrote, "Oh, that such a wretch as I should ever be tempted to think highly of himself. I am myself nothing but sin and weakness, in whose flesh naturally dwells no good thing."

Low Self-Esteem or True Self-Knowledge?

Now imagine your child goes to school tomorrow. A sixth grader is in the middle of class, and the teacher asks, "Johnny, tell me a little about yourself." And Johnny says, "Oh, that such a wretch as I should ever be tempted…" The teacher is going to stop him and say, "Johnny, you shouldn't think of yourself that way." All of a sudden, Johnny is being diagnosed with the worst condition our culture can imagine — low self-esteem. He feels bad about himself.

It was Tozer who said that whether you are feeling good about yourself or bad about yourself, both are no good, because you should not be thinking about yourself at all. When Isaiah sees the Lord, there is one conclusion: "I am undone. I am a sinful person. I deserve nothing but judgment and punishment and hell." That is the honest conclusion.

Isaiah then continues and describes the process by which God cleanses him. That is exactly what happens to you and me. A Christian is someone who understands that Jesus died on the cross for His people. If I will acknowledge my sin, repent, and come to Him in repentance and faith, I am forgiven — not based on who I am, what I have done, or what I might do, but based on His grace and His mercy. That is what Christianity really is.

Send Me

Then God says He has a job to do and asks, "Who should I send?" Now Isaiah, cleansed and converted, says, "Send me. I am ready to go."

I have two thoughts when I read this. The first is that we seem to be surrounded by people who hear God asking, "Who should I send?" and respond, "Send them — don't send me. I am not interested in that." The second thought is that —

The Danger of Serving Without Seeing

People who are busy and tired and simply serving the Lord in whatever capacity often find that serving is an addendum to them — or they are serving and they are exhausted. Almost always it is because they have heard a call and responded to the call, but they have never seen the Lord and they have never repented. That is what it means. I watch this all the time with guys in ministry who I presume are converted — I do not know that for certain, they say they are — but they are worn out and tired. They are in the battle.

Sometimes they are in the battle and it is just a battle so big and so powerful that they simply need to step back from it, and there is nothing wrong with that. But most of the time, it is people trying to do God's work through their own strength. There is a sequence here, and you cannot change that sequence.

The Sequence of Salvation

That sequence is the sequence of salvation. I see the Lord for who He is. Woe to me, for I am undone. Now there are good works. I am saved by grace through faith, that not of myself. It is a gift of God that no one should boast. Why? For the workmanship. I am God's workmanship, for the task that He has prepared for me, and now I go under the power of the Holy Spirit, redeemed by God's grace. It is a great picture of what the church should be. It is a great picture for us.

So my "so what" is to look at this and ask: have you been through that process? For some of you, you simply say yes, I understand it — and you have. For others of you, this is all new. You need to figure this out, because this is what it means to be a Christian. This is the process.

If you do not have this conversion — identical in nature to that of the Apostle Paul — you have not been converted at all. Circumstances are going to be different, but if your heart is not swept away by God and who He is, and by your sin and your brokenness, and if there is not now a life change, then the work has not happened.

What Conversion Looks Like in a Life

What happens in Matthew's life? The minute he begins to follow Him, the first thing he does is say to the people around him, "You have got to see this man. You have got to hear this truth. I need to connect you with this Jesus. This is extraordinary." Is that your life? We will pick up right there next week.

Closing Prayer

Father, help us see this truth. It is a great story, and it is a story we are going to see over and over again. I confess to you that some weeks I feel like I am saying the same thing, because it is the same story. It is the story of how great You are, how sinful we are, how You sent Your Son to redeem Your people, how the religious want to fight for their religion, and how all of that is empty apart from You. God, thank You for that. Let us experience the joy that comes with this.

I get a sense that Matthew's life is filled with joy. It is a new beginning, a new start. You saved him for a purpose, and the same is true of us. You have us here for a reason. We are not here by accident. You are going to do a work in our lives. You want one thing from us, and that is availability and obedience.

So, God, we obediently present these lives to You. We pray that You take these lives, which are nothing in and of themselves, and make them something because of who You are — not because we are worthy, not because we deserve it, but because You are a great God who loves Your people. As Your people, we rest in Your arms and in the reality of that truth. God, brand this in our hearts. We pray it to You in Jesus' name. Amen.