What Jesus Said About How God Feels About You Series

Have you ever wondered about how God feels about you?

If you’re here this morning, I’ll bet you have.

And it’s a terribly important subject. Once you understand God exists, and who He is—that He’s your Creator and the sustainer of your life and will, therefore, likely have some considerable say about your future, well, the whole matter of what He’s like and how He feels about you becomes of paramount importance.

Because your life, ultimately, is in his hands.

And on top of that, our view of God and what he thinks of us will determine how we live our lives.

If we believe He is an angry God with His heart set on our destruction, we will run as far away as we can to hide from His wrath. Our we might determine to win God’s approval by trying hard to make right choices in order to please him.

If we believe God is indifferent and apathetic toward us, we might deem Him irrelevant to our lives and so decide we must find our own way apart from Him.

But if we believe God cares, and cares deeply about our lives, and is even a merciful and compassionate God who wants the best for us, well, then, we might seek His mercy and His plan for our lives.

So how can we know what God’s like, and how He feels about us.

Well, as the title of our series suggests this morning, there is no better authority than Jesus of Nazareth, by common consensus the greatest man who ever lived, who was attested by God to be the Son of God by the signs, wonder and miracles He did, and by His own resurrection from the dead.

And Jesus has good news for us this morning. In Luke 15, he assures us that the God of Creation cares deeply for us. In fact, He’s crazy about you and joyfully and compassionately forgives us when we turn to Him through Jesus. Now let that thought sink in for a moment—because it can be a life-changing thought: The true God who is in charge of everything, who created you, is crazy about you and will joyfully and compassionately forgive you when you turn to Him through Jesus.

That’s the message that Jesus has provided for us as we’ve read from His famous Parable of the Prodigal Son, which might more aptly be named, the Parable of God’s loving heart for you and for me.

Jesus had just finished sharing his exacting demands for anyone who wanted to be His disciple in Luke 14, and he finished his comments there with this exhortation: “He who has hears to hear, let him hear.

And as we’ve read in verses one and two, his invitation evokes a very surprising response. Guess who responds to his invitation. The tax collectors and the sinners! The religious and social outcasts of the Jewish community. The last people whom you would think would be interested in following such a spiritual and religious leader.

Verse one tells us that “All the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near to listen to Him.”

Who were these people. Well, the tax collectors were Jews who had betrayed their own people and their own religion by becoming agents of the Roman or Gentile occupation of Israel. From the viewpoint of other Jewish people, they were guilty of collaborating with the Roman and Gentile forces who were occupying their land and ruling over them. And they were greedily extorting taxes from their fellow Jews to support the Roman occupation of Jewish territory. In so doing, they were associating with Gentiles. Gentiles were considered unclean by the Jews, and so to associate and even work for Gentiles was dirty business. They rendered themselves unclean, or guilty by association. And so they were despised by their fellow Jews and considered to be the worst kind of sinners.

And of course the second group of people who were eager to hear Jesus were the “sinners.” The term is almost self-explanatory. But these were Jews who were not observant or religious Jews. They likely made no effort to attend synagogue on the Sabbath, to offer sacrifices or prayers at the temple or to follow the Old Testament Law. They were expressly known for their unrighteous life-styles. Some of them had unsavory occupations—some were likely even prostitutes.

And guess who wasn’t impressed. The religious people of all people. Especially the most religious people, the spiritual leaders among the Jews. The Pharisees were the strictest sect of Judaism. They weren’t happy just to follow the Old Testament Law to a T, but they added a bunch of human teachings, call tradition, and made them mandatory. And the scribes were those who made a living by being experts in the law—they were the lawyers of that day, but the Law which they practiced was the Old Testament Law of God. And so these two most highly respected groups of spiritual leaders had a problem with Jesus. They see Jesus gladly welcoming these tax-gatherers and sinners. And they begin to murmur among themselves—there is this critical undercurrent going on and the heart of it was the statement found in verse two; “This man receives (welcomes really) sinners and eats with them.” Oh, the shame of this. As it is expressed elsewhere, if Jesus were really a prophet and a holy man, he would know these men and women are sinners and he would have nothing to do with them. Because he could be defiled—he could get the “Jewish cooties” by doing so. These Jewish religious leaders in their haughty self-righteousness, could not accept that Jesus was welcoming and associating with such great sinners.