Sinners Are The Enemy Right?

If you were organizing a church you would not go to Jensen and Quitman to look for members would you

(an area frequented by prostitutes)

Mat 5:46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

I overheard a believer make this ridiculous statement Sinners are the enemy

I. God calls the unlikely

A. Common folk

B. Ceremonially unclean

A happy fate to be known to the entire world for all time, only by this one thing, that he unconditionally, immediately and joyfully obeyed Christ’s call

Perhaps it’s the plain folk who have been searching for something genuine and recognizes when it appears

It was the thief that extended an Invitation to Jesus to come home with Him

The thief prepared a feast for Jesus

We can’t get angry with Matthew because more crooks came over

He invites those like him, those who need forgiveness too.

II. Fellowships with the Undesirable

The castaways

The outcasts

He is comfortable with the undesirable

They do not change who he is, He changes who they are

The religiously unclean and socially disreputable are the very ones Jesus came to save (v. 13).

The Pharisees insist that sinners become righteous to gain acceptance; Jesus insists that they be accepted as sinners.

III. He serves the unfortunate less fortunate

Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’a For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Expecting a Messiah who would crush the sinful and support the righteous, they had little place for one who accepted and transformed the sinner and dismissed the "righteous" as hypocrites. Jesus explained his mission in terms reminiscent

He was so unlike them.

He came among these sinners as a physician; and who wonders at his being beside the sick?

He does not spend his days by their bedsides because he likes the

atmosphere, but because it is his business to make them well.

They preserve the shell and lose the heart of the matter

God’s desire that his people should show mercy rather than only perform external sacrifices, and this meaning is probably intended by our Lord here also. The connection will then be either (1) “I wish you to show mercy rather than perform external actions, for only thus will you resemble me in my coming to call sinners;”

Learn the true principle by which God acts, free grace, for it is on this that I have acted in coming to call sinners.”