“Lessons from a little man”
Luke 19:1-10
“Jesus came to seek and save the lost.”
Sunday Morning Sermon
Intro: (Start with Title and Text)
Have you ever lost something? Not just misplaced something – have you ever really lost something? I know most of the time when I lose something – I can’t find my wallet, can’t find my keys – I usually yell for my wife. She’s the best at looking and finding stuff. I lose things she finds them – it was apart of our wedding vows. I remember working at Wal-Mart back when we were in school and they have “CODE ADAM” – when a parent realizes that their child is lost they simply tell the closest associate and everything stops – until the lost child is found – when they first started this – even the registers stopped. Wal-Mart cared so much about the kids that their cash flow stopped.
Discussion:
The Bible if filled with stories of people looking for something – especially the New Testament – Luke 15 comes to mind – Lost Coins, Lost Sheep, Lost Son
-- All three the reaction is the same when you find it – you call everyone and celebrate over the found coin, the found sheep – over the son who comes back.
I wonder what would happen if when I was looking for a certain tie, or I lost the remote it would know it’s lost and it would find me. Work with me for just a second – you lose something and the something lost knows it’s lost and comes looking for you – wouldn’t that be great? You accidentally lose the remote in the couch, you start looking and it finds its way out of the couch, back into your hands.
Some of you know this we have a small mix breed dog – we’ve had her almost as long as we’ve been married. We’ve never lost her – she’s been arrested twice, but we were always willing to bail her out. One time she was gone over night – we were just horrified. We looked everywhere, called out her name – we were empty. We got into the car and I looked in the mirror to back out of the drive way – I saw something I didn’t see before – a sign – DOG: FOUND, Small sandy blonde hair, for more information call: I jumped out of the car and called the number to find that it was our dog SANDY. What a relief it was to have her back. We went to the pet store and bought her the best canned food, a nice collar and several toys – When you have back something you’ve lost – you are truly grateful
Jesus is about a week from the cross – about a week from the separation from the heavenly father, about a week away from being mocked, questioned, stripped, and the crown of thorns pushed down on his skull. He meets – he sees someone who is seeking him out. A little man.
Turn with me, if you have your Bibles to(Advance) Luke 19:1-10 (Read)
I see a couple of lessons we can learn from the little man --- the wee little man.
(Advance)
Lesson # 1:
I. When you seek out the savior – you will find him
a. Zacchaeus
i. He was a wee little man
ii. And a wee little man was he
The truth of God’s word in a kids song. He was not only a short man – he was like the kid who picks his nose – the one who gets caught picking his nose – yeah, no one wants to be friends with him. Zach wasn’t any different.
iii. He was socially an outcast
iv. He was a cheater – a liar – he was selfish
Tax collecting was done through percentages – the person collecting a tax would add a certain percent to the amount owed and keep it. So if I owed 1000 dollars in taxes – the person collecting the tax would knock on my door and tell me that I owed 1100 dollars – I pay all of it, and they pocket the extra 100 dollars.
b. When you cheat people: Two things happen
i. You get rich – collecting something that costs you nothing it will make you rich.
ii. You will be hated – people won’t like you. The quickest way to get people to hate you – abuse their money and their time.
It didn’t start out this way – Zacchaeus – the Hebrew name means clean/innocent – But over time – it was just easier to cheat, it was just easier to lie, it was just easier to hide the truth, smudge the paper work, cheat the time clock. The wee little man, found himself full of this world, and empty inside. He had the cars, the large house, the white picket fence – living the American dream before it existed, but he was empty inside. (Advance)
Jeremiah 29:13 (NIV) – You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
c. God wants to be found!
i. He wants a loving, fulfilling, passionate relationship with you!
ii. He wants to make you whole, and bring healing to your life.
God wants to be found. Church, when we seek him with everything we have – we find him. When we pray to him like he can do his will in our lives – he will. It is promised in the word of GOD. Jesus says: (Advance)
Luke 11:9-10 (NIV) So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
d. Seeking God – For Zacchaeus
i. Meant running ahead of the crowd
ii. Meant climbing a tree
He did what he had to do to seek out the Son of Man.
e. Seeking God – For Us
i. Will mean that we shed our desires our personal will our personalities – our hurts, our history, our baggage, our stress, our weariness.
1. Giving those things completely over to the one who can handle them.
2. Giving those things to the one who loves us.
Church, if you truly want to seek God with everything you have, shed and take off all of who you are. Replace that space with the things of God, his word, his people, music that is good, books that build you up. Get out of the cycle of going to God, with a desire to get things straight without actually having a desire to remove the sin, the junk from your life.
Lesson # 2 (Advance)
II. When you move yourself towards God – Not everyone will go with you.
Jesus tells Zach to come down – Jesus invites himself over to His house, probably an overnight visit. Here’s what Verse 7 says: (Advance)
Luke 19:7 (NIV) 7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, "He has gone to be the guest of a ’sinner.’
a. Can you blame them?
i. Tax collector…
ii. Chief Tax Collector…
Surely, there were more qualified people to be around the king of kings and the Lord of Lords, surely there were better people, for the promised messiah to spend his time with. After all, if we are going to conquer and gain freedom from Rome – it probably wouldn’t take place through fishermen, sinners and tax collectors. Because after all – if they don’t look like a duck, quack like a duck – they probably aren’t ducks. Certainly, we need everyone who comes in here to look like us, smile like us, and be the same as us. We don’t have room for hurting people and people with problems – do we? Church, if we are going to grow up and be the church God wants us to be – it won’t matter who they are, or what they bring – the possibility of bringing someone to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ should be the intended victory.
b. God has no grandkids – your faith is personal
How many people in here have grandkids? Someone told me the reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is because they have a common enemy. When Jesus comes back you will not see the bumper sticker: “Ask me about my grandkids” on the chariot.
i. Your faith is your faith – not based on mom or dad’s faith
ii. Not based on the church they attended or the preacher they liked or the one they dislike.
We do a huge injustice to our kids – we grow them up dependent on our faith – when they get to college, the professors look for the church kids – they get them to question everything they’ve ever been taught in church. You send Jonnie to college – they plan on finding a church and continuing on – they get to first semester philosophy and it blows their mind – all this time they’ve been carrying around your faith instead of theirs. We need to teach them why they believe the way they do (and it needs to go deeper than just “the bible tells me so” – through youth ministry – our Sunday morning – children’s church every chance we get should be filled with not only the what, but the why.
So if I change my life, and come to Jesus and those around me don’t understand, think that I am qualified, or even follow with me – the lesson
c. It’s ok
One of the toughest sayings of Jesus: (Advance)
Luke 14:26 – "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.
Jesus doesn’t mean “Hate” as in anger – Jesus doesn’t mean “Hate” as in disobedience – (Advance) Jesus says you must love him above everything else. It’s too easy in our world to create doctrines or move yourself to teachings that allow momma into heaven, if she didn’t know Christ. When we do that it shows a lack of trust and a lack of love for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. I didn’t say it was easy – I’ve dealt with it in my own personal life. You aren’t God and neither am I – He’s in heaven and we are down here for a reason. He’s the one who decides the who has a heart after him and who doesn’t. I struggled with this in my own life – I went to a Christian man I respected – and his response was trust God. Trust God more than anything else – that’s the answer to your struggle. He knows what he’s doing!
So you follow Christ – people come with you – that’s excellent – people don’t that’s ok too. Because it’s your faith – independent of those around you, that brings you to a saving knowledge of Jesus. Zach, didn’t have much choice, for him he was independent of those around him. I think he was excited about Jesus coming over, I think he wanted that innocent name back and knew only Jesus could provide it. I think he didn’t care what those around him thought, because he was about to answer the whys in his mind.
Lesson # 3 (Advance)
III. When you seek Jesus out – Change will happen
You should not be the same Christian you were when you first gave your life to Christ. You should not have the same bad habits, the same desires, the same understanding of his word.
There’s a scripture that speaks to this change – it describes the past but speaks clearly of the present. (Advance)
Ephesians 2:1-10 Message
1-6It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. (Advance)
7-10Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
People don’t like change. We get comfortable where we are. Truth has very little effect on the changing of our minds – we can just flip the channel and adjust the truth. We also have to count the cost too – What do I have to give up? Get your pencils ready, here it is, the preacher’s talking about change…I’ve got a huge list….for some of you it’s longer than others, but it will cost us all the same – maybe I can shrink it down into one word.
a. Everything
For him it meant honesty, integrity, not cooking the books.
He promised to pay back 4 times the amount if he cheated anyone – he gave ½ of what he had to the poor. Listen, I am not a mathematician – he cut his wealth by 50% -- giving away the other 50% -- from the half that he still has – he has enough money to give back what he’s stolen, plus 4 times that amount. I got one word for you – WOW! He basically admitted to everything people knew he was doing – nowadays they would just go to some country club prison for 20 years.
b. Notice this:
i. His moment of salvation was not void of proof. (Advance)
James 2:24 (NIV) You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.
ii. He made things right –
Church, when we, if we have come to a knowledge of who Jesus is – we need to make things right – regardless if we were the one who was right or the one who was wrong. And it doesn’t matter the situation – but I know it’s more comfortable to hang on to those hurts, it’s easier to use it as an excuse for growth. Make things right. He didn’t have to give back 4 times the amount; the law only required the loss plus a 5th. Maybe you don’t have to apologize, but you should.
Jesus says that salvation has come to this house – because he is a son of Abraham – and with that everyone rejoiced, and starting singing now I belong to Jesus, they all go inside and share tea and watch Dr. Phil. Um, NO – most people who were standing there probably were shocked, and uncomfortable with what Jesus had just declared. Being a son of Abraham meant being a Jew and if you just go around giving that title to SINNERS, and tax collectors that would mean the gospel message is for everyone.
Conclusion:
Well, Christian, that is why he came – to seek and save the lost – to go after at any cost – to swim the deepest ocean, and climb the highest mountain – for us. The lost. You and me – we were the lost. He paid the price of our sin – the Bible says that he who had no sin became sin. Here’s the thing that’s hard for me to understand – he did this while we were still in rebellion, while we were still going our own way, while we didn’t care – that’s when he died for us. Not after we shined up, and put on the happy smile for church. He died for us while we were still in our sins. Giving us a way out, giving us a release from the sin and shame and guilt. He gives us a way to embrace him – the bible says that we can approach the throne of grace with confidence and we can only do so as we have accepted Jesus as Lord – and salvation has come into our house.
Church, there will be a day of declaration – we have four-hundred shades of gray, and a justification for each one, God doesn’t have any. He declared that salvation had come for Zach. One day, he will declare the same about you and me, if we are faithful to his call on our lives.
Pray
2 things this morning – if you don’t know Jesus as Lord this is an opportunity, maybe you need more information, maybe you just want us to pray with you as a family – perhaps you can feel Zach’s desire to move yourself to the will of God – maybe you’ve felt that way in the past and the crowd came back, the friends came back, the habits came back – Zach found a fresh start and so can you.
Maybe you are here this morning and you are going strong in your Christian faith – doing what you believe is God’s will – Let me encourage you to share and take ownership of the mission of Jesus – to seek and save the lost – You can’t save them, and neither can I, but we know the one who can – we should bring them. Think about the people who aren’t here who should be – go after them.
If you have a decision to make this morning come as we stand and sing.
