Acts 5:31 “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior, so that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel.”

Political candidates campaign on promises they make to the voters. Once elected, many of them seem to lose interest in keeping their promises to the people who voted them in. Jesus is installed at God’s right hand in heaven as rightful ruler of the universe. Does our Prince and Savior have anything to offer us today?

Peter’s words answer that question. Today Jesus is at God’s right hand so that he can give us his gifts. The first of those gifts is “repentance.” Jesus doesn’t spread the Christian faith by adhering to the old marketing principle, “The customer is always right.” I have been a part of paid market research focus groups in the past. Companies interviewed me and others to learn our opinions. Then they tried to tailor their products to our tastes. They assumed the customer must be right, and they changed to suit us.

No, Jesus does something that seems counter-intuitive if you want to develop a following. He starts by telling you your ideas are all wrong. You and I have developed tastes and preferences that need to change. Our behavior and treatment of others is inappropriate. Our ideas about right, and wrong, and often God himself are backwards. He calls us to repent. He calls me to recognize that I am selfish, prideful, bossy, manipulative, dishonest, two-faced, ungrateful, lazy, lustful, greedy, impatient, and discontented. He calls me to stop defending it and rationalizing it, to feel genuine sorrow and regret for it.

But he does more than call us to repent. He gives repentance as a gift from God’s right hand in heaven. He exposes our sinfully wrong-minded notions in his word. He accompanies his word with his Spirit to convict us. He directs the events of our lives so that we are forced to come face to face with our true nature, to know ourselves in ways we never, ever wanted to know ourselves. He gives repentance to his people as a gift.

“Some gift,” we might think. But it is a gift, a gift of inestimable value. We will pay a doctor a great deal of money to uncover the physical deficiencies that are causing us pain and threatening our lives. Only then can we get the medicine right that puts us on the path to health again. How much more valuable is the diagnosis that uncovers the spiritual deficiencies that have condemned our souls!

Then we are ready to receive the other gift he gives from God’s right hand, “the forgiveness of sins.” However we have offended God, however we have hurt each other, however we have twisted God’s good gifts like sex or money and made them sick and grotesque, he does not hold against us. He does not say that it was okay. It wasn’t. But he does not hold them against us. He does not let our past determine how he will treat us in the future. Every day, every moment, we start off with a clean slate–as though we were as pure and as holy as an angel in heaven.

This, too, is more than an offer. It is a gift he gives–the gift he thought so valuable that he suffered death by crucifixion to make it happen. It’s more than a neat idea, a happy concept. Jesus’ sacrifice forms the real historical basis for God to forgive our sins.

Now from his Father’s right hand he distributes it to us. He sends it around the world as he spreads his word through preachers and laymen alike. He washes us in it at our baptisms. He feeds it to us in his supper. His Spirit fans the flames of this good news so that it grows in our hearts and catches on in the hearts of more and more people. All this he does with the power and authority he enjoys from God’s right hand in heaven. Truly it is a gift to us that Jesus occupies such a place!

Matthew 9:10-13“While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and ‘sinners’ came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’? “On hearing this Jesus said, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’”

            Matthew doesn’t give us the details on the people at his party, just that they were publicly known as “sinners.” Maybe there were prostitutes, or at least home-wreckers, at the table. Thieves, dishonest merchants, people who drank too much–all kinds of people could possibly have attended. Missing were the people you saw at the synagogue every Saturday, anyone who valued their reputation.

The Pharisees can’t figure out why Jesus would spend time with people like this, and his answer teaches us a couple of lessons about those he invites to follow him.

Sometimes people have said to me, “Pastor, I have a friend who is a great guy. He’s a great family man. He works hard. He does some great volunteer work. I should try to get him to come to church with me.” Or “Pastor, I work with a woman who is one of the most caring and faithful people I have ever met. She is always doing something for other people. I’m going to invite her some Sunday.” By all means, invite your well-behaved friend. But don’t introduce them to Jesus as though Jesus were running a club for people with better-than average morals.

Invite them because underneath the pious and upright exterior they suffer from spiritual terminal illness, and Jesus is the only one who can heal their sin-sick souls. Invite them to find forgiveness for their sins and life that never ends. While you are at it, don’t forget the people you know whose behavior is a questionable, whose morals are a suspect, the obnoxious ones who rub you the wrong way and are frankly hard to like. They need Doctor Jesus, too. He wants to show them mercy. He came to call them to follow him.

Then let’s not miss the lesson Jesus is teaching us about ourselves. If we have been invited to follow him (and we have), then we are the sinners, the sick, the unrighteous Jesus has come to save and heal. Do you suppose that Peter, John, or one of the other disciples at Matthew’s house that day might have heard Jesus say these words and thought to himself, “Hey! Wait a minute! Jesus called me. What’s he saying…that I’m not righteous?”

Exactly! Not in and of ourselves! Near the beginning of our church’s Sunday services the whole congregation says together, “I confess that I am by nature sinful, and that I have disobeyed you in my thoughts, words, and actions. I have done what is evil and failed to do what is good.” What does a first-time visitor think at that point? “What kind of people are these? What have I gotten myself into?” These aren’t theoretical sins we confess that need a theoretical Savior. They are real sins that need a real Savior. That is exactly what we have: a real Savior who takes our sins away. That is exactly the reason Jesus has given us the invitation: Follow me.

So here we go, with Jesus just ahead. Have a nice trip.

Matthew 9:9 “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.”

We can learn many things following Jesus. His teachings can make your family a happy place–if your spouse, and your parents, and your children, and your in-laws are on board with the program as well. Jesus teaches things that could move your career forward–if your boss, your employees, your coworkers, and your customers are willing to live by more-or-less the same principles. But none of their reactions are guaranteed.

More than anything, following Jesus can teach us about God’s grace. Matthew saw him tell prostitutes the parable of the lost sheep and the lost son, stories of God’s great joy and forgiveness when a sinner comes home to him. He heard Jesus defending the woman caught in adultery from stoning, and promising grace to the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears. “Her many sins are forgiven, for she loved much.”

All of this culminates at his cross. Matthew actually took a pass on watching that, but this was the crowning moment of Jesus’ love. We see it through what the gospels record. Have you ever watched the movie The Passion of the Christ? It is hard to watch because of the graphic way in which we see Jesus brutalized by his enemies. It is one of only two movies I have ever seen in the theaters after which no one in the audience said a word when the end credits rolled. On the way to the parking lot the only sound was the sound of some people softly weeping. It is hard to watch what he suffered, but this is how much he wanted your forgiveness.

The love we see is not just love in a story, or watching love between two other people, like you might read in a book or see in a movie. This is how much he loves you and me. If all the world of people had remained perfect, and you were the only sinner there ever was, Jesus would still have died just so that you could be saved, and just so that you could be forgiven.

This is the key that fits the human heart like nothing else in the world does. One thousand six hundred years ago St. Augustine prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are never at rest until they rest in you.” Money and sex and drugs and power and prestige and things and mindless entertainment, and even other people, will never fully satisfy. But Jesus will. And those other things will never last. But a billion years after this world has passed away we will still be feasting with Jesus at his heavenly table, worshiping him before his throne, and exploring our new and glorious home. It will all be as fresh and fulfilling as the day we first arrived. Jesus’ invitation has some serious implications to consider. But today he is still calling to you and me, “Follow me for my grace.”

Matthew 9:9 “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.”

Take a few minutes and put yourself in Matthew’s place. You are sitting at your desk, attending to customers, or working on some project. A man approaches. You recognize him because you have heard him speak before. You liked what he had to say, but you know that he is a controversial figure. The “establishment” is generally critical of him. He comes up to you and pauses. He looks you straight in the eye and says two words: “Follow me.” He means right now. He doesn’t ask you to put in your two-week notice. Put down your pen, or your tools. Leave the computer behind. Right here, right now, get up and follow Jesus.

Sound hard? This is the invitation Matthew faced. Here, in the middle of the business day, Jesus tells him to leave it all and follow him. So Matthew goes.

Jesus still invites us: “Follow me.” It doesn’t necessarily mean leaving your work behind. He looks us in the heart, not in the eye, when he calls. But the invitation is still right here, right now, in this moment, every moment, of our lives.

There are big implications to Jesus’ invitation. One is a call for trust. Look at what Matthew was leaving. He had carved out a lucrative career and luxurious lifestyle for himself. There were negative things about being a tax collector. Not only did they take your money, but they also cooperated with a foreign enemy who was trespassing on your land. Matthew was collecting taxes for Rome, not Jerusalem. His neighbors probably thought of him as a traitor.

People like Matthew traded popularity and acceptance for wealth. He had money. Now Jesus was calling him to leave the big money behind. And there was no promise of public popularity and acceptance to show for it. The respectable people like the Pharisees didn’t like Matthew even a little bit more for following Jesus. Matthew had to trust that there were good reasons to follow Jesus that didn’t have to do with a higher standard of living or more enjoyable life in the short run.

It’s still that way. The invitation to follow Jesus is always a call to repent. He wants us to leave certain things about our former lifestyle behind. It could involve money, if there was something less than godly about the way we were getting it before. If we have it, following Jesus will mean a willingness to give more of it away and spend less of it on ourselves. It could involve the kinds of words we use and the way we talk to and about people we don’t particularly like. “Love your enemies” is a big part of where Jesus leads.

This all calls for trust, because there is no promise our lives will be filled with fantastic new wholesome versions of the things we enjoy in place of our old vices in the short term. Keep in mind Jesus’ warning, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” (John 15:18). The invitation “Follow Me” implies a heaping helping of repentance and trust when we consider that we are leaving behind some things that we really liked.

So what do we get instead? Why is the trade worth it? Jesus is offering front row seats to the greatest love there has ever been. I once heard a pastor at a mission festival tell a congregation that there is a little two-or-three-feet-square patch of ground that is the most blessed little patch of earth in the world. It is the little patch of ground right behind Jesus when you are following him. From that patch Matthew stood and watched him give blind people their sight back, deaf people their hearing back, lame people the ability to walk again, dead people the ability to live and breathe again. He saw Jesus reach out to social outcasts. He heard him telling prostitutes the parable of the lost sheep and the lost son. When Jesus got up in the morning, his life was all love. When he went to bed at night his life was all love.            

Not only does Jesus loves others that way. He loved Matthew like that. He loves us like that. He makes his love a substitute for our own, providing the love God demands of us but we have always lacked. That is because we, too, are the objects of his love. It is the love in which we live when we follow him.

Jeremiah 20:11-13 “But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonor will never be forgotten. O Lord Almighty, you who examine the righteous and probe the heart and mind, let me see your vengeance upon them, for to you I have committed my cause. Sing to the Lord! Give praise to the Lord! He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.”

Jeremiah gives us three descriptions of the Lord that give us courage for what we have to say. First of all, the Lord is with us like a mighty warrior: someone like Goliath, whose size and strength kept the entire Israelite army hiding until David came along.

Perhaps a more up to date picture for us would be an action-adventure hero. In one hand he carries a 20 millimeter machine gun, in the other a grenade launcher. He single-handedly wipes out the enemy. Our mighty warrior may not be very loud or very visible to us today, but he is with us nonetheless. Remembering that Christ stands behind us, and is going to vindicate us in the end, may make us feel a little less lonely when we need to take a stand.

Second, Jeremiah reveals that God has a purpose in letting us take some heat for speaking out against evil. He is the Lord “who examine(s) the righteous and probe(s) the heart and mind…” God is testing us and refining us when the world is taking us on. Our faith becomes purer and more certain when believing or doing what is right has been particularly challenging, and we have had to put our trust more firmly in the Lord and his word. We may not like it when our stands make us unpopular, but, like so many things that taste bad or feel bad, it’s good for us.

Finally, God be praised, for “…he rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.” If there is one thing we should never forget about our God, it is that he is the God who rescues. Bible history is one long litany of events in which he rescues his people. He rescues Noah from the flood. He rescues Jacob from Esau. He rescues Israel from famine. He rescues Israel from Egypt. He rescues David from Goliath, and Saul, and Absalom. He rescues Jerusalem from Assyria. He rescues Judah from Babylon. Finally, he rescues the world from sin and hell by letting his Son be crucified to death and rise again to life. God is going to return to rescue us from this world on the last day.

If our Lord has gone through all of that to rescue us as a people for himself, we don’t have to be afraid or ashamed to stand with him against the sin and deceit of the world in which we live. He will come to our rescue. In fact, he already has.

Jeremiah 20:10 “I hear many whispering, ‘Terror on every side! Report him! Let’s report him!’ All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, ‘Perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him.”

Rock star Frank Zappa once said, “When you see the little fish sign on the car ahead of you, you know you are looking at the enemy.” Perhaps it doesn’t surprise us when the non-Christian world around us rejects our faith, values, and warnings about sin. If anything, we might be surprised that they tolerate us as well as they do.

The world that rejected Jeremiah included some less likely figures, or so we might think. Jeremiah was not only a prophet, he was also a priest. In the first part of chapter 20, a fellow priest by the name of Pashhur had ordered Jeremiah beaten and put in stocks for preaching against the city of Jerusalem and its people. Here Jeremiah confesses that even his friends were plotting against him because of the things he said.

There is a great temptation for us here. Religion and relationships are deeply important to us. We would like to think that “men of God” are all deeply moral, deeply trustworthy people. But they are still fallible human beings. Sometimes they can be grossly on the wrong side of a moral or doctrinal issue. Don’t be overawed by how spiritual or well-educated they seem to be. Don’t be pressured to give up what God’s word clearly says.

And we may treasure our deepest relationships with family or friends. We may put a high priority on family and friends, but God’s word must be higher still. Jeremiah didn’t back off on God’s message even though it turned friends against him. Jesus still says to us, “He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he that loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Don’t let the world’s rejection, whether it’s the world out there, or the world in here, or the world in your own home, stop us from speaking against the things that need to be confronted.

At the same time, we have Jesus’ promises to those who hold to his word faithfully. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31). We are always on the right side when we believe and profess Jesus’ words. He himself continues to claim us as his own. He continues to provide the freedom of his grace and forgiveness. Human opposition cannot change his own approval and acceptance of those who remain faithful to him. “Whoever acknowledges me before, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Matthew 10:32).

They crucified him for his teaching. It is no surprise that his teaching continues to attract hostility today. That may be a clear sign we are believing and speaking the right things.

Jeremiah 20:7-9 “O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”

Jeremiah’s complaint can be broken down into three parts. First he seems to say, “I didn’t know I was getting into all of this.” “Lord, why didn’t you tell me how hard serving you was going to be?” He suggests that the Lord didn’t prepare him for the opposition he would face. Perhaps at first the title “prophet” appealed to him. He knew that he would serve an important purpose in doing the Lord’s work. He was a little naive about the trouble it would cause him.

Have you ever felt that way about your Christian witness or service? Not everyone accepts your Scriptural views. Your service to the church hasn’t been free from opposition, roadblocks, and setbacks. Like Jeremiah, we want to whine, “Lord, you deceived me. I’m not having fun anymore. I didn’t know the trouble this could be.”

The second part of Jeremiah’s complaint dealt specifically with the message he had to deliver. “Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long.” In essence, Jeremiah was saying, “I don’t like the negativity. I don’t like speaking against things all the time.”

And there was much for Jeremiah to be “against.” Idolatry, greed, child sacrifice, social injustice, Sabbath breaking, and false prophecies are only a partial list of the sins God sent him to confront. He had the unenviable task of preaching to a people who were about to feel God’s hand of judgment. Jeremiah was tired of it.

The list of sins that need to be confronted in our culture, our church, and ourselves is no shorter than the list before Jeremiah. The temptation is to tone down the talk about sin, emphasize the positive, and try to avoid offending anyone. It is for this reason that Church today seems to be losing its fighting spirit and is more and more willing to be swept along with the spirit of the times.

But who is served if we are ashamed to speak against the things that God’s word speaks against? Abortion kills children. Sexual license kills families and societies. Non-Christian religions and non-biblical teachings kill souls. Don’t be ashamed to be against such things.

In the last part of his complaint Jeremiah complains, “I can’t even stop speaking against evil when I want to.” “But if I say, ‘I will not mention his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” It’s not that he didn’t try, but it was painful to try to hold his convictions in.

Do you find the same difficulty? If you do, it’s not just because you are naturally grumpy or suffer from a pathological need to be critical. The Christian recognizes that there is something vital at stake here. Unrepented sin condemns. We speak against the things God speaks against not to win arguments but to save souls. It is the necessary prelude to sharing the good news that God will completely forgive all sins for the sake of Jesus’ innocent sufferings and death on the cross.

Are you skeptical that being “against” things can work, that it can actually produce any good? Sometimes, like Jeremiah, we might think that all it gets us is ridicule. But God does get his work done this way. A retired pastor once told a convention I attended about a card he received with a picture of a family he didn’t recognize. The accompanying letter was from a lady whom he had confronted for cohabiting with her unbelieving boyfriend nearly two decades earlier. Though she had walked out of his office angry that day, she was thanking him for telling her the truth and not accepting her excuses. Everything he had predicted about where such an unholy relationship would end up came true. Now she had been led to repentance, received forgiveness, and had a new life with a godly husband and children.

Don’t be ashamed to be “against” things you know are wrong. God may turn our present day complaints into future reasons to rejoice.

1 Corinthians 12:7 “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”

I have to confess that when I get gifts from others for Christmas or my birthday, for Father’s Day or an anniversary, I usually think, “Thank you! This is for me to use or enjoy for myself.” That doesn’t mean I won’t share it, too. But I am thinking mostly of how I can use the gift to serve me. Sometimes even the giver will say, “Now this is for you. Don’t let everyone else enjoy it and not you.”

When God gives us his Spirit, and the Spirit gives us gifts, it works the other way around. Yes, we enjoy using the talents he gives us. There is a beautiful sense of satisfaction that comes from putting God’s gifts to work.

But the object, Paul says, is “the common good.” Any ability God has given to me isn’t so much so that I can glorify myself. It is so that I can serve my neighbor. I can use my gift to take care of others. It is an opportunity to love. You may lack what I have, so I can love you in this way. And I lack some things that you have, and you can love me in return. This way, the common good is served, and love grows, and God is glorified, all because he has given us his Spirit.

Isn’t that how Jesus used the gifts he possessed? How many times in the gospels do we read about him using his power to feed himself or heal himself? His whole purpose was to serve the common good. “Even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). This resulted in forgiveness and salvation for all who believe.

When we use the Spirit’s gifts for the common good, we don’t get less. We get more. God himself is active in our lives. Our family of faith grows around us. These are greater blessings than the gifts themselves. Let’s not miss God’s purpose in the spiritual abilities he has given to us all.