Luke 19:1-10
Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short, he could not see over the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”
8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
After the Romans conquered a region or people group, they wanted to tax the people so they could get rich off of them and so they devised a system. Otherwise, it would cost them a lot of resources to operate there. They discovered that if they transplanted a Roman official there to collect the tax, he wouldn’t understand the city well enough to know where all the money was hidden; he didn’t understand the protocol. The Romans wanted an insider who knew where the real money was. And so, they paid local Jews to do their dirty work for them, they told them, “This is how much tax we want; anything you get beyond that you can keep for yourself. And here’s a garrison of soldiers to help you enforce it.”
So Jewish tax collectors extracted these huge amounts of money from their own people and got rich in the process, and anyone who resisted them would get dealt with by the Roman soldiers. Tax collectors did this to their neighbors, friends, and their abuela. When you chose to become a tax collector you chose to get rich off of the suffering of your people.
Tax collectors were so despised that the Jewish Mishnah—which is an ancient commentary on Jewish laws—said that lying to one was OK.
He hears Jesus is coming into town and climbs a tree. Why does he climb the tree? Is it just because he is a little man? Yes and no!
When I’m at the zoo with my kids, I don’t make them climb a tree so they can see the Elephants that they wouldn’t otherwise see because they’re behind me. I simply put them in front of me because they won’t obscure my view.
When somebody is short, you don’t mind if they stand in front of you; they don’t affect your vision. So why is Zacchaeus not in front of them? And why is he in a tree? Because they hate him.
He knows he’s not welcome in the crowd, so he climbs a tree.
I don’t ever want to be like the crowd - the kind of people who keeps a Zacchaeus from getting a glimpse of Jesus.
There are people in our world who want to get a glimpse of Jesus, but they don’t feel welcome by the crowd.
Don’t let the crowd stop you from getting to the cross!
Jesus goes straight to the person the crowd had rejected and at the end of the story He says, “The son of man has come to seek and save the lost.”
I don’t know what they spoke about over food, but the grace of Jesus brought transformation to the life of Zacchaeus. In response to the grace of God through Jesus, he says, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (v. 8).
This vow is not made as a precondition of Jesus’ acceptance, but because of it.
He’s not saying, “I’m going to change my life to be accepted by Jesus.”
He’s saying, “I’m going to change my life because I have been accepted by Jesus.”
We don’t go to church to get acceptance from God; we go to church because we’ve already been accepted by God.
We don’t do things to get acceptance from God; we do things because we’ve already been accepted by God.
He accepts us to change us. He doesn’t change us to accept us.
It’s God that changes and its God that saves.
Our issues come when we try and be God in people’s situations by trying to fix them and trying to change them.
It’s Our Job to FIND, It’s His Job to Save
It’s our job to seek, it’s His job to save.
It is not our job to FIX lost people, it is our job to FIND lost people.
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