Evangelizing Levi And Us

Evangelizing Levi and Us

Luke 5:27-32

Rabbi Rev. Dr. Michael H. Koplitz

After that He went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth, and He said to him, “Follow Me.” And he left everything behind, and got up and began to follow Him.

And Levi gave a big reception for Him in his house; and there was a great crowd of tax collectors and other people who were reclining at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?” And Jesus answered and said to them, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

The passage in chapter 5 verses 27 to 32 in Luke’s gospel is a brief introduction to a tax collector named Levi, who is called by Jesus to follow him. He gave up his lucrative tax collecting job to join Jesus. He was not concerned that he would no longer have the luxuries afforded to him as a tax collector for Rome. He was not concerned about his own welfare. He realized that the man standing in front of him who asked him to join him was indeed God’s Messiah.

I happen to be an Arminian Wesleyan, so I follow the theological explanation of the Scripture by a man named Arminian who lived about 100 years before the man named John Wesley. Many of you will recognize John Wesley because he was the founder of the Methodist movement back in the early 1700s. John Wesley believed that the people in church were the righteous ones that Jesus spoke about in this passage. He believed that he, like Jesus, needed to go out and find the sinners in the world, who were facing a big problem, and help them become righteous.

Now I can’t say the church is really doing that today, even the Methodist churches, but one should understand that this is pretty important. John Wesley would visit bars with his brother, who was a prolific writer of songs, and they would put these songs to bar tunes. The most famous hymn from Charles Wesley, the brother of John Wesley, is titled “For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”. The tune is an old English bar tune people sang lyrics to in bars.

John did this with his brother because he wanted to bring Jesus Christ to people who may never have heard of Jesus. People who worked in the coal mines in England and other service areas were very upset with what was going on in England at the time and they had lost their hope. John Wesley restored hope in Jesus when he spoke to these people. He got them to see that there was an afterlife and that it was important to be right with God before death. He stressed one must accept Jesus Christ as God’s Messiah, Lord and Savior, so that they would be prepared for heaven.

The Church of England did not appreciate Wesley’s efforts. Many times, he got the lecture that we never leave the church. Rather, people seeking Jesus should come to the church. But how do you get people to think about their relationship with God through Christ if they’ve never entered a church? We have to go out and tell people about Jesus. That’s called evangelism and we need to become superb at it because, if not, the faith in Jesus Christ could continue to diminish on earth and disappear.

I am confident that every person listening to or reading this message can do this. When I started on my journey to ordained ministry, evangelism scared me. I was very concerned that evangelism was not near the top of my list. I had several discussions about it with my mentor and he realized that my fear of evangelism was that I really didn’t know Jesus and the Gospels that well yet. Over the 25 years that I’ve been studying Scripture in Jesus and the doctrine of the church, I am very confident to talk to people about salvation through God’s Messiah, Jesus Christ.

When I received my assignment to a church in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, I successfully convinced several people to join me in going to the local ice cream store and performing Christian music for the crowds. I cannot tell you what all the results were because people may have gone to other churches in the when I was out in Dillsburg, but I felt as an Arminian Wesleyan that I was fulfilling that part of my calling. Every one of us needs to be evangelizing. That’s the way we're going to rebuild the faith.