#38 Luke 5:29-32 A GREAT COMPASSION FOR LOST SINNERS Introduction: In our previous text Jesus called Levi or Matthew to the ministry. In our text today both Matthew and Jesus show a great compassion on lost sinners. I. Levi making a great feast V. 29, "And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them." After Matthew answered the call to preach, as soon as he could make the arrangements he invited a great number of his old friends and associates in the tax collecting business to a banquet at his home. Matthew must have felt extremely honored to be among the small group of men whom the Lord Jesus had called to preach. Therefore he wanted to do what he could to bestow honor on the one whom he felt rightly deserved to be honored. He wanted to honor the Lord Jesus Christ. So he made the arrangements for a great banquet to be prepared at his home and he sent out invitations to his friends and acquaintances. There must have also been another motive in Matthew's mind in giving this great feast. He had a deep concern for the spiritual welfare of his friends. He had a great many friends who were also publicans or tax collectors for the Roman government. Outside of his profession as a tax collector, he had no friends --or at least he had very few friends. All who were not publicans despised the publicans. Other publicans faced the same kind of unfriendliness from the general public. So since none of them had any friends outside of their ranks, they had become all the more close in their friendship with one another. Matthew must have come to care about his friends a great deal. This care and concern about them must have grown to even greater heights after he had gotten saved. He had come to be deeply concerned about where his friends would spend eternity if they should die. No! I should not say, "If they should die." Matthew became concerned about where his friends would spend eternity when they would die. They most certainly would die. They would die and they would spend eternity somewhere. Matthew had good reason to believe that the most of his friends would spend eternity in the fires of torment rather than in heaven. There just must be some way that he could witness to them and at least attempt to win them to Christ and salvation. The desire to win His friends to trust in the Christ and to salvation must have been very strong ever since he had gotten saved, but now that Jesus had called him to preach, the desire to win them to salvation was greater than ever. There must be something that he could do to try to win them to the Christ. So Matthew came upon the idea that he could give a great banquet and invite all his friends to the banquet. There he would introduce his friends to Jesus. Matthew believed that if they just ever met Jesus and got a chance to hear Him speak that at least some of them would believe in Jesus as the Christ and be saved. It would cost him something. It would cost a great deal of money to feed the great number he planned to invite. But the cost in money was no barrier. For one thing, he could well afford it. For another, whatever it cost him personally, it would be money well spent if just one of his friends would just get saved. II. What went on at the feast Luke does not tell anything about what happened at the banquet. None of the gospel writers do. They just tell us that Matthew did give a banquet and that many of his publican friends and a few others came to the banquet. We can be sure of one thing. Matthew would want his friends to know why he was leaving his office as a tax collector and become a follower of Jesus. I can imagine that at the banquet he first of all allowed them to feast themselves upon the great banquet that he had prepared. During this time they would have an opportunity to get personally acquainted with Jesus. There was not a one of them who had not heard of Jesus by this time and so Jesus was most certainly the center of attraction. Then after the feast Matthew would make a speech to all present in which he would inform them all that he was leaving the business. He was resigning his office and from henceforth he would be traveling with Jesus and would devote himself full time to the ministry of preaching the word of Jesus. One cannot be certain, but I think that in his explanation Matthew must have referred back to the time that he went down to Judea and heard John the Baptist preach. John was a man whom they all knew about and respected very much. He would remind them that John had preached about the soon coming of the Christ and had urged all men to repent of their sin and to trust in the coming Christ. He would inform those who did not already know, that he had repented of his own sin and that he had trusted in the coming Christ that John preached about. He probably also mentioned that he had been baptized by John. He must have explained that as the weeks and months went by that he had become more and more convinced that Jesus is the Christ. Then Matthew related to them how Jesus had come by his tax office and asked him to travel with Him and to preach His word. I am most confident that Matthew then, as tactfully as he could and yet with as much persuasion as he could, called upon his friends to repent of their own sins and place their faith in Jesus as the Christ. In other words, I think that Matthew preached his first sermon right there at this banquet. There is another thing. For the life of me, I cannot imagine Matthew passing up the opportunity to let the Lord, Himself, speak to his guests. You very well know that when the Lord spoke, He gave those people some very good reasons why they should repent of their sins as John the Baptist had been telling them to do and why they should believe in Him as the Christ. I am not at all certain that He told them directly that He is the Christ, but He gave them good reason to reach the conclusion in their own minds that He is the Christ. Mark tells us that many of Matthew's guests became followers of Jesus from that occasion. In other words, many of them got saved. III. Criticism by the scribes and Pharisees after the feast V. 30, "But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" Now we are not to understand from this that the scribes and Pharisees were also guests at the banquet. In the first place, I doubt that Matthew invited them. In the second place, they would not have come if they had been invited. The very thing that they were criticizing was that Jesus and His disciples ate and drank with the publicans and sinners. They would not have dared to do such a thing themselves. No, they were not present at the banquet. But you can be sure they kept up with every move that Jesus made, including the banquet, hoping to find something that they could criticize and when they did they were quick to criticize. The scribes and Pharisees looked upon the publicans as the scum of the earth. They were not only sinners; they were the very worst kind of sinners. The scribes and Pharisees had nothing to do with such sinners. In fact they thought that anybody who would have any kind of social fellowship with the publicans were just as guilty as the publicans. This is what irked them about Jesus. Jesus did not hesitate to come in and sit down with the publicans and eat dinner with them. Jesus did not hesitate to bring His disciples to this banquet and to encourage His disciples also to sit down and eat dinner with the publican sinners. I repeat: In the eyes of the scribes and Pharisees, anybody who would sit down and eat a meal with a sinner was just as bad as the sinner. By associating with the sinner, he, too, became guilty of the same sins. Therefore the scribes and Pharisees were very outspoken to the disciples of Jesus in their criticism of Jesus. As of yet, they still did not dare to criticize Jesus to His face. They went around to His back and criticized Him. But they criticized Him in such a way that they knew He would hear about it. They wanted Him to hear about it. So they criticized Him to His disciples. IV. The answer that Jesus gave the scribes and Pharisees V. 31, "And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick." They criticized Jesus to His back. Jesus answered them to their face. He answered them, not because He thought that they might be persuaded to the truth. He answered them for the benefit of His disciples who were put on the spot by the accusations against Him. Jesus knew that His disciples were no match at this time for those sly foxes. But He did not want His disciples to catch the brunt of criticism that was in reality aimed at Himself without coming to their defense. So Jesus answered the scribes and Pharisees and showed the fallacy of their thinking. Furthermore, Jesus wanted to answer the scribes and Pharisees even though He knew that they would not be converted to the truth for the benefit of people in the general public. Jesus did not want the common people in the streets to be swayed by the false teachings of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus wanted the people in the public to see the fallacy of their thinking. He wanted to publicly show that the scribes and Pharisees were wrong in this matter. V. 32, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Jesus explained that He did not come to this world to call righteous people. He did not come to find out who is righteous and who is not. That is what a lot of people think about God. They think that God is watching to find out who is righteous and who is not. The fact of the matter is that except through repentance of sin and faith in Jesus Christ, there are no righteous people upon the earth. Romans 3:10 reads, "As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one." Romans 3:23 reads, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Ecclesiastes 7:20 reads, "For there is not a just man upon the earth that doeth good and sinneth not." Only after one has repented of his sin and trusted Jesus Christ as his Savior can he rightly be called "Just." So Jesus had not come to call the righteous because outside of those who have trusted the Christ there are no righteous. There are no righteous people. There is no righteous person. There is another sense in which Jesus did not call the righteous. He did not call those who are self-righteous. Those who look upon themselves as being alright just like they are will not repent of their sin. They are not aware that they have done anything for which they should repent. They think that they have never done anything bad. They think at least that they have not done anything bad enough to put them in danger of hell fire. The scribes and Pharisees are a prime example of such self righteous people. They looked upon themselves as having done no sin. They thought that surely God would be proud to have such fine upright people as themselves in heaven. They could not imagine themselves being in danger of hell fire. Yet that is just exactly where they were headed. They thought that if anybody made it to heaven they surely would. Now the Lord knows that they need to repent and in Acts 17:20 He has called upon all men every where to repent. That verse says that He commands all men everywhere to repent. So the Lord wants even the self righteous to repent. But He knows that they will not repent and that is why He said that He has not come to call the righteous to repent. Rather the Lord has come to call sinners to repentance. If anyone is aware that he or she has sinned in the sight of God then the Lord Jesus Christ calls upon that individual to repent of his sin and get saved. This call to repentance is a call to salvation. The Lord would not call upon a man to repent and then forsake that man after he has repented. The Lord would not call upon a man to repent and then fail to do anything for him after he has repented. The Lord would not call upon a lost sinner to repent and then fail to save his soul after he has repented. If a man repents the Lord will save him. If the neglects to repent he will perish, but if he repents the Lord will save his soul. Now you may say, "But I thought that even if a man repented he still has to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ to get saved." Well, yes, that is true. But the fact of the matter is that if a man will repent toward God, he will trust in Jesus. Just as you can say, "What goes up must come down," even so you can say, "He who truly repents of his sin will also trust in Jesus Christ. So if any person repents of his sin, he will get saved. He will trust in Jesus Christ and get saved. V. An assumption about this congregation Now I am going to make an assumption right here. I am going to make the assumption that I am talking to someone who is unsaved. That may or may not be true, but I just think that in a congregation this size that someone within this congregation is unsaved. Lost sinner friend, will you let me show you something about your sin? You do not have to be one of the worst outlaws in the country to go to hell. You do not have to be one of the worst outlaws in the country to deserve to go to hell. You do not have to murder anybody to go to hell. You do not have to rob a bank to go to hell. You do not have to curse and use the name of the Lord in vain to go to hell. You do not have to commit adultery to go to hell. You do not have to be the biggest liar in Texas to go to hell. You do not have to break all 613 commandments of the law to go to hell. You do not even have to break all of ten the Ten Commandments to go to hell. All you have to do is to break any single one of the commandments and you are guilty before God. You are just as guilty of sin in the sight of God as if you had broken every single commandment in the Book. Adam did not have to eat every piece of fruit on the tree to be guilty and stand condemned before God. All he had to do was to commit one sin and he was condemned before God. The wages of sin is death. The wages of any single one sin is death. The wages of your sin is death. The wages of any single one sin committed by you is your death. The second death is to be cast in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone. VI. If Matthew or Jesus were here in person If Matthew were here, he would call upon you to repent of your sins and trust in Jesus as the Christ as he did with his friends at the banquet. If Jesus were here, He would call upon you to repent of your sins and to trust in him for salvation.