Pimp My Ride

Luke 5:27-32

Pimp My Ride

Woodlawn Baptist Church

May 28, 2006

Introduction

Read Luke 5:27-32.

I don’t know how many of you take time to watch MTV, but if you watch TV at all you’ve likely heard of the show that got its launch there in 2004 called Pimp My Ride. The concept for the show was pretty simple. Each episode begins with a young adult and his or her old, unfashionable, falling apart car or truck – called a ride on the show. The host of the show promises the owner of the auto that he will pimp their ride, meaning that it will be restored and customized in some wild and amazing ways. Of course we might wonder how we have come to allow the word pimp to mean cool – but that’s a whole other problem. When they are done pimping those rides on the show, the owners get back a car or truck that is by no means ordinary. They always stick out in a crowd.

Did you ever stop to think that Jesus is all about that? Salvation was the first edition of Pimp My Ride. We are the original. Jesus takes great delight in finding old beat up lives that are falling apart and are in disrepair and making them new. But He goes beyond that. He doesn’t just want to restore us to ordinary. When He pimps a ride, He makes it extraordinary so that His finished work sticks out in crowd for the glory of God.

In today’s text, I want to show you how Jesus pimped one ride: how He walked into Levi’s life and radically changed it and left us an example of what He could do in the life of every man or woman present. You know as well I do that we don’t have it all together, that our lives are held together with bailing wire and duct tape so to speak. Because of sin we are in disrepair, but praise be to God we don’t have to stay that way!

The scribes and Pharisees responded to Jesus’ work in Levi’s life with astonishment and outrage, and more than we can admit it too often we respond in the same way when God works in some lives, maybe even in ours. In these six short verses, I want to show you three things Jesus wants in your life. He wants to “pimp your ride” and radically change your life. As you hear these three things, I want you to call on Him to meet your need, and then when we have the invitation I want you to come tell us how Jesus wants to customize your life. I want you even now to be thinking about sharing with us a commitment you’re going to make today or some thing in your life that you need to publically repent of.

Jesus Wants To Save You

Jesus said in verse 32, “I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” When He said that He hadn’t come to call the righteous, Jesus wasn’t implying that there actually were righteous people; only those who thought themselves to be righteous. The world has always been full of these people. In Matthew 23, Jesus lashed out at the Pharisees and scribes for their hypocrisy.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees! For ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and plate, that the outside may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Phariseees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

Hey, it doesn’t matter how good you look on the outside and how convinced everyone is that you’ve got it all together. Jesus knows what’s under the hood. In Luke 18, there were two men who came before God in prayer.

“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank you, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.”

You can live just as holy and righteous as you want. You can attend church, pray prayers, teach lessons, preach sermons, give offerings and live right, but if you’ve never beat upon your chest in one way or another and confessed to God that you are a sinner and plead with Him for mercy then you’re just as dead as the next lost man.