Jesus is in the business of change. No one ever left an encounter with Jesus unchanged. They either loved Him more or loved Him less—and perhaps even hated Him—but they were never indifferent to Him. And the same is true for you and me. We cannot be indifferent to Him either. So, it is my prayer that, through reflecting on our text this morning, you will be changed by Jesus.
What we read here in Luke, chapter 5, is the call of Levi to be a follower of Jesus. We also know Levi as Matthew, the writer of the first gospel, but before he met Jesus he was a tax collector. In first-century Palestine, people hated tax collectors. They loathed them, and for good reason. Tax collectors were traitors. They worked as independent contractors with the occupation Roman government. They were given imperial authority to collect taxes for Rome, and they had a certain amount they had to collect. But they could pocket anything they collected over and above that amount. So they extorted from their neighbors more than they owed, leaving their fellow Jews poor while they themselves became incredibly rich.
It’s remarkable that Jesus would call such a person to be one of His disciples, and it tells us that, if Jesus can change a person like that, He can change anybody. Even me. Even you.
But what is the change Jesus makes? Luke shows us here that the change He makes is a change of heart—and, more specifically, He changes three core functions of the heart. He changes us from the inside out by calling us to faith, to hope, and to love. Let me show you what I mean.
Jesus Calls Us to Faith
First, Jesus changes us by calling us to faith. How do we see faith in Levi? We see it—don’t we?—in what Levi did. Verse 28 tells us that, “leaving everything he rose and followed” Jesus. Everything he was attached to he detached himself from. Do you see that? The name Levi means “attached.” In the Old Testament, when the patriarch Levi was born, his mother named him Levi because she believed his birth would cause her husband to become more emotionally attached to her (Gen. 29:34). And now, here, with the New Testament Levi, we can see how attached he might be to his ill-gotten wealth. But, in following Jesus, he severs that attachment. He is described as “leaving everything.” It takes faith to do that, to leave the familiar to pursue the unfamiliar.
Let me ask you, Why do you think Levi become a tax collector in the first place? Why would Levi choose that life? Don’t you think it was because he thought it would make him happy? Don’t you think that, despite the downside to being a tax collector, it promised more happiness, more satisfaction, than whatever it was he had known before? The choices he made set his course in life. And those choices—like the choices you and I make—are designed, we hope, to bring some measure of happiness.
But was Levi happy? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s a good bet he had plenty of money, a big house, nice clothes, and the best of anything he wanted. Why wouldn’t he be happy? Of course, you and I know that wealth is not really the secret to happiness. Riches do not have to make you unhappy, but there is many a rich person who is not happy. What about Levi?
We can’t know for sure. We can only infer from what the Scriptures tell us. We might ask, Why would he leave everything to follow Jesus? And we might answer that he must have seen in Jesus a source of satisfaction that outpaced his opulent lifestyle. Even money and all that it could provide did not—does not, cannot—compete with Jesus and what He provides.
And you see, that’s faith. Levi left everything to follow Jesus because he believed that what life with Jesus could offer was of greater value than the life he now knew. His beliefs changed! His faith could no longer be in the things—the accessories—of his life, but now he placed his faith in the One who could truly give life. Isn’t that what faith us? Letting go of things that promise happiness but do not deliver to embrace something—or Someone!—who can deliver!
What are you holding on to that you thought would make you happy but doesn’t—not really? What is there in your life that keeps you from following Jesus? It doesn’t have to be something bad. It could even be something that, in itself, is good. But now you see that, as they say, the good is often the enemy of the best! What do you need to let go of so that you can take hold of the best? What are you attached to that you need to detach from so that you can link up with Jesus? Jesus is worthy of your faith. What have you put your faith in that’s not worthy of it? What do you believe in that simply lets you down, over and over? Why not put your faith in Someone who won’t let you down? Levi has led the way here. Do as he did. Leave what’s dragging you down so you can follow the One who will lift you up. Do it for happiness’ sake.
Jesus Calls Us to Hope
So, Jesus changes us by calling us to faith. He also changes us by calling us to hope. What is hope? It’s the anticipation of something good, right? Something better than whatever is happening now.
Look at what’s happening now in Levi’s life. He is part of what we might call a collective—you know, his tax collector buddies and others like them. So, what is a collective? A collective is a counterfeit community. True community fosters life, and therefore brings hope. But a collective is different. A collective destroys life, and thereby brings hopelessness. Levi and his cronies form a collective. They use people. They take from the helpless what they cannot afford to give, and they enrich themselves doing it. They extort money from the poor to make themselves rich. I call them a collective because they are bound together, but the only thing that binds them together is self-interest. They don’t care about one another. They only care about themselves. They compete with each other. They resent each other. They demean each other. They hate each other. They hate themselves.
Human beings are social creatures, which means we form societies. But societies like this—like the one Levi was involved in—are not a healthy ecosystem for anyone. They are more like ‘ego-systems.’ We don’t need collectives; we need community. Why? Because we need hope. We need to know we’re are not alone. We need to know we are safe with others. Others mirror to us who and what we are, and we need to be sure that the others we look to in such an important matter are people that care about us.
Now, look what happens to Levi. Look at how he changes. He comes to know Jesus, and almost instantly he is filled with hope. How do I know? I know because He wants his acquaintances to come know Jesus the same way he does. So, how can that happen? By getting them together. And so, Levi throws a party. He makes “a great feast in his house,” and he invites all the people he knows—who happen to be all the local riffraff: other tax collectors and miscreants. But no matter. There is hope for them because there’s hope for him. And community beings to take shape.
And you see, that’s what happens when Jesus changes us. He creates community. Think about it. He didn’t do His work alone. He could have, but He didn’t. He called others to join Him. He called twelve disciples. Why? Mark tells us. Mark says Jesus called them “that they might be with him”—don’t miss that!—so “that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach” (Mark 3:14). He wants His people to be together, with Him. And so, He creates community. Real community. Not a collective, because collectives engender despair. But communities bring about hope. People connecting with each other, supporting each other, bearing one another’s burdens, praying for each other. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17, NIV).
You and I need that. We need community. Whenever Jesus calls people, He calls them to life together. And that means He calls us into the church. The church isn’t just a convenience. It is a necessity. If your life is not invested here, you need to change that. The church is not a human invention. It’s not ancillary to the Christian life. Cyprian of Carthage, one of the early church fathers, said way back in the third century, Salus extra ecclesiam non est (“There is no salvation outside the church”). He didn’t mean that the church saves us, of course. What he meant was that the church—the Christian community—is an essential element in God’s gracious work in our lives. We respond to God’s grace by living a life of love, and the church will give you an opportunity to exercise and experience love. And you thrive on love. People thrive on love. It brings hope.
Jesus Calls Us to Love
And so now, finally, let’s talk about love. We have seen that Jesus calls us to faith, that He calls to hope, and now we see that He calls us to love. How is this presented to us in our text? Well, in a negative way to be sure. In verses 30 through 32, we see the reaction of the religious leaders to the community that is forming around Jesus. The religious leaders—the Pharisees and their scribes— are scandalized by the fact that Jesus and His disciples would eat with tax collectors and sinners. The word ‘sinner’ was a technical term in Jesus’s day. It did not refer to everyone, even though everyone is a sinner. The term was reserved for those who did not bother even to attempt to keep the law of Moses. Tax collectors were a special kind of sinner, but there were other kinds as well: thieves, robbers, adulterers, liars, you name it. And many people—like these religious leaders—hated them. Had no use for them.
But not Jesus. He loved them. That doesn’t mean that He condoned what they did. He didn’t. But He loved them—loved them enough to seek them out for redemption. And redemption always means change. Jesus said—didn’t He?—“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (vv. 31f.). And repentance certainly always does require change. That’s where we get confused about love. We think that love requires that we approve the wrong people do, but that’s not love. That’s indulgence. Love is wanting and working for God’s best for everyone.
The religious leaders certainly felt no obligation to love these sinners. They looked down on them—and anybody who associated with them—including Jesus. They wished not God’s best for them, but His worst. And what we see in them is an attitude that is so contrary to love that we would be right to regard it as love’s very opposite. What we see in them is self-righteousness, a laughable self-righteousness at that, because self-righteousness is a delusion. Anytime we think we’re better than someone else, we’re wrong. We need to examine our own self-perception. We’re missing the fact that we ourselves, no matter how moral we may think we are, are no more worthy of God’s love than anyone else. These religious leaders were self-deceived. And when Jesus said, “I have not come to call the righteous,” he was using irony. He knew they were not righteous, even if they didn’t. His words were like a pin, pricking their over-inflated self-estimation.
Brothers and sisters, we must not be puffed up with our own self-importance. Paul writes in Romans 12:3, “I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think,” and he writes in Philippians 2:3, “Do nothing from selfish ambition and conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” In other words, love one another! Put others’ needs before your own. Stop thinking of yourself first and give thought to others. God loves them as much as He loves you. And He commands you: Love them as much as you love you! And that’s going to require change. Right?
And Jesus is in the business of change. You can’t miss the fact that no one comes away from an encounter with Jesus unchanged. Either we will harden ourselves even more against Him and choose even more firmly to live for self rather than for the Savior, or our hearts will melt and be recast in the likeness of His heart. Jesus changes us one way or the other.
The question is: Which way will you choose today? Don’t you want it to be a change that will make you ever more like Him? Well, we now know: He changes us by calling us to faith. He changes us by calling us to hope. He changes us by calling us to love. He calls us to faith in what truly satisfies, to hope nurtured in a community that builds us up and strengthens us, and to love that first flows into us and then flows through us. That’s the change Jesus makes. Aren’t you ready for a change?
