JAN 5 2020 | Invite: Discovering the Power of Invitation S1E1 | The Calling of Matthew

Sea Change Church · Invite: Discovering the Power of Invitation · "The Calling of Matthew" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · January 5, 2020
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning. My name is Bonnie O'Keefe, and I have the pleasure of playing piano with this awesome lady every Sunday at this beautiful piano, and it's such a joy. Today's scripture is from Matthew 9, 9 to 13. So it says, 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. 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's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners. That is the word of the Lord. Dun, dun, dun. Solid, Bonnie. Great. I should have you do it to a song with some piano next time.

That'd be awesome. We're going to make that happen. So good to be here. Who are you inviting? That's a great quote. Oh, great. You're actually pointing. A bit rhetorical, but nonetheless, I appreciate it. There's about six to eight people this Sunday from people that either my family is personally invited or I invited or in the service as well. I have never invited someone to this church who has not continued to come back or reached out to me afterwards and said that their lives were dramatically impacted by it.

It says a lot about you. It says a lot about what God's doing. What I think it says more is about how rad Jesus is. He's an incredible God. And the question is, in this new series called Invite, the power of invitation, who are you inviting? Eden invited a friend this morning. Eden and Devin invited a friend. And afterwards, it was interesting that Eden came up and said the testimony as the friend was leaving was, I'm coming back.

I've never felt like this before. It was an incredible thought. I want one of our core values to be invitation. Continuing to invite people into life. Continuing to invite people into a place of hope where other people, where there's a momentum of hope going on. There are a lot of stories here. There's a lot of stories in these pews that are like Matthew. Matthew's a tax collector. Matthew is rejected from his society, his Jewish society, because he had become cronies with the Romans.

Had given himself over to money. He had all these things going wrong. And there's a lot of stories in these pews that are like that. But there are so many that are desperately looking for an invitation. We've been told in society that no one wants to hear about Jesus. They're all a bunch of bigots. That is so not true. I am actually finding that it is the easiest time in my entire Christian life, 50 years, to ever invite people to church, ever.

I have never found more fertile soil or more people that have, you know, jumped into everything the world had to offer and found it lacking and found it wanting. Who are you inviting? And, you know, the types of people. Matthew was the type of person that religious people wouldn't invite to church. I have a few people that I invited that were here in the first service. They all seem to come in the first service today.

I never call them out by name or you wouldn't know who they are. But they've come on my radar through spiritual perception, I guess, where God has said this person or that person invite them. I invite some of the, I don't want to use the word crazy because they're not crazy. I make some of the craziest invitations. That's what I want to say. I invite people you would never invite to church. I invite people that are so, if you thought that's the person not to invite to church, that's the person I tend to invite.

And you know what's so weird and funny? They tend to say yes. And then they tend to show up and then they text me. I got three texts since Christmas. Thank you so much for inviting us. Actually, I've gotten four that I'm just inviting people. I have to tell you, it's a buzz. I did a lot of drugs in the 80s. A lot. Nothing is as good. I have to tell you, nothing is as good as having people come and seeing their lives changed.

Most of the drugs I did was bad anyways. I never really enjoyed it, you know. But inviting people and having their lives changed, having marriages stay together, having people get sober, having people have dramatic life change. Try it. I just got to say, you know, the first one's always free. I'm going to tell you, try it and see what happens with invitation. Let me read through this passage here in Matthew. Jesus invites Matthew.

I have all three scriptures here where you find this in the Bible. These are in the synoptic gospels. That means that there are three of the four gospels that are very similar. That three of the four gospels have this story. One is written by the author himself, the person who it happened to, Matthew. And then you have two others. I put those there because I really want to get better at helping you use the notes and the sermon to study further on.

I want this to be a primer for what you do the rest of the week. Hopefully, church isn't the, you know, the ultimate experience of your week. Hopefully, church will solidify what you've done all week with God. That you come and you get some worship. You hear sermons where God is just reminding you of something he told you on Wednesday already. So I'm trying to have our notes and I'm changing our note format to make them more interactive.

And to make us a church that you really know this is a Bible-based church. It's not about personalities. It's about being biblically based and I love the scripture and so we're going to dig into it. As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew. If you would circle saw, I put it in bold there. Going on from there means he was by the lakeside. He'd been doing ministry and he was walking and maybe going into the town.

He saw a man named Matthew sitting at a tax collector's booth. Interesting. Matthew was sitting at a place that had become his identity. Matthew was sitting at a place that was a hated place. It was the same as if someone, a Jewish person, had become friends with the Nazis. That would be more of a modern understanding. He had become friends, if not friends, at least co-workers with the Romans. People that were oppressing the Jewish nation and taking money and collecting taxes and taking money off the top.

He was a hated person in society. You can see that he was equated later on with sinners. The Pharisees call, they say there are sinners and then there's tax collectors. We're not saying that tax collectors are all sinners, but they're kind of in the same ilk, if you can understand where we're coming from. And so they were put there. This is who Matthew was. Now, what we didn't know, but what Jesus saw, and we'll look at it to in a moment, is Matthew was desperate for an invitation.

Jesus was able to see this. He was desperate for an invitation. There are people that are out there that are desperate for an invitation, that are looking. They say right now, two out of ten people suffer with the debilitating loneliness. Two out of ten. Twenty percent of the population, just that twenty percent, not even looking at the others, two, and that might even be you, are looking for community. Two out of ten, Jesus found and saw him sitting there at the tax booth.

And then he says, follow me. No deliberation, no pre-conversation, no warm up the crowd a little bit. Jesus walks up and gives a direct call, follow me. Why? Because he saw something beyond what the others saw. Others saw sinners and a tax collector sitting at a booth. Others saw someone who was in bondage to money or perhaps title or prestige or whatever reason it is. He saw someone, and he went up and he said, follow me.

And he called him from a tax collector booth. What that says to me is, are there places in my life that I'm just sitting at a booth? I've been sitting at that booth, and now it has become my identity. That booth has become bigger than who I was created actually to be. And sometimes these things in our life that we get involved in, these, you know, personas we take on, these titles, these whatever they are, they become a bondage.

They call them the golden handcuffs sometimes. They become a bondage. And we actually lose our identity in the midst of trying to prove who we are or stay stuck in a place that we have found that makes us comfortable. Matthew was stuck here, and Jesus saw beyond it, and he called him away from the tax booth. And so the question to you, looking at the scripture, is where's your tax booth? Do you have a tax collector's booth where you're sitting there, but you no longer want to be there?

I wonder how long Matthew didn't want to be there. I wonder how many times when the Pharisees went by, he thought to himself, I wonder if anybody would have a seat for me at the synagogue. Because he obviously didn't go to synagogue anymore. Because sinners and tax collectors weren't allowed in synagogue, and it was a religious society. And so everything revolved around the center, which was the synagogue, and all the houses were built around it.

He no longer went. But I can imagine him just wondering, isn't there a rabbi, isn't there anybody, who might say, hey, come with me? Jesus was becoming a very popular rabbi. He's perplexing. He's mesmerizing. He's captivating, I guess is the word. He's becoming very popular. And all of a sudden, in the midst of his poverty, filled with riches, this really popular rabbi at the time, this was in the year of Jesus' popularity, comes up and says, I want you to be one of my followers.

That's a big deal. Matter of fact, the rabbi you followed said a lot about you. And people would jockey for a position to be around the wisest, smartest rabbis because it said a lot about you. It gave you some cash in society, so to speak. Interestingly, the people that followed Jesus were more like a group of rabble-rousing pirates than spiritual people. And it kind of reminds me of our church a little bit sometimes.

Not you guys, just us on staff raising that pirate ship. Because none of us really feel like we belong here. I don't feel like I deserve to be preaching the word in a place like this. But I want to follow Jesus because he's captivating. It says in one of these other two passages here, when you read through all three of them, that it said that many tax collectors and sinners were the type of people that followed Jesus.

He was attractive to those type of people. Matthew got up and followed him. 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 the disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? Look at the scorn. Look at how he just, oh, that type of people. You know, it's kind of reminiscent of today.

That looking, that categorizing, oh, those fill in the blank. Oh, that group of, and you don't even see beyond their title. You don't see beyond their political badge. You don't see beyond their religious affiliation. You don't see beyond their sexuality. Jesus had eyes to see beyond all of that. To see broken people and to say, hey, come follow me. And if there's things we need to work out, we can work it out later.

You see, Jesus calls the broken. Jesus is not afraid of your wounds. Jesus is not afraid of your darkness. Let's say, you'll see in a moment here that Matthew invites Jesus into his home, which is intimate. But he also invites him into his darkness. He invites him into his life, a life that was scorned. If you have darkness in your life, I want to encourage you to begin to invite Jesus into your addiction. Into that dark corner of sexuality that no one else knows about, that you know about.

But you have that, invite Jesus into that. Say, Jesus, would you come be a part of this? I invite you into my deepest darkness. That's why he came anyways. Jesus is not waiting for the perfect, cleaned up, you know, version of you. The Instagram filtered version of you. Jesus isn't waiting for that. Jesus wants you the way you are now. He doesn't want to have this, you know, this perfect version that we share with the world.

He wants your darkness. And he says in a moment, I came not to call the righteous. Matter of fact, you Pharisees need to go learn this. I came to call those that are sick, those that are sinners. On hearing this, Jesus said, it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. And then he rebukes them. Now, this isn't in the other two ones, but he rebukes the Pharisees with this. Because you don't tell a Pharisee to go learn anything.

You just don't. That's how their system works. You don't question the religious leaders. Jesus not only questions them, he rebukes them. And he says, by the way, why don't you guys go and learn something? And when you're done, you can come back. And let me tell you what you need to learn. For I desire mercy and not sacrifice. The religious leaders were so good at becoming religious. Lots of good prayers. They'd memorize prayers.

They would stand at the steps of the temple. And they would, you know, recite these long prayers. When they fasted, they would put ash all over their face and let everyone know that they'd fasted for so long. They had this laws that they followed. They had so much sacrifice. They were doing so much for a God who doesn't need you to do anything. Because he's completely self-sufficient and all-knowing and all-being. And they're trying to do things to prove their worth to God.

And a God whose worth you cannot prove. I mean, you can't prove your worth to him because he needs nothing. You see, you can't follow God by just sacrifice. Does he require sacrifice? Absolutely. Matthew gets up. But it's not about the sacrifice. They were trying to build a bridge to God through sacrificial acts. That's not the way you do it. You do it through contrition. You do it through giving your life away. And this is what Matthew was willing to do.

And they weren't. You see, when Jesus saw these people, he didn't just see sinners. He knew they had sin. He didn't just see people that were tax collectors. He saw those that were broken. And he cared about the broken and the lost. You know, about a year ago, I began to ask God, give me a heart for those that are broken and those that are lost. If you have a pen, try to maybe write that down on your notes, that prayer.

It's a good prayer. Maybe not. But I began, God, give me a heart for those that are broken. And I've gotten so much more excited. It's just that prayer will change your life. God, give me your heart for the broken. Give me your heart for the lost. Where you quit seeing people as their label, as their sexual identity, as their whatever. And you begin to see those that are the beloved of God, that are created of God, that you can share life with.

This is powerful. This is what Jesus saw. As you look in your notes, the invitation of Jesus to Matthew was one of spiritual perception. He didn't just see Matthew. If you don't actually look into the meaning of the words, and this is why it's important sometimes to do some deeper study, and there's so much, if you can write down, blue letter Bible. Just Google blue letter Bible. It'll show you a whole bunch of different meanings.

It's a great way to go deeper. Reading the Bible is one thing. Studying the Bible is another thing. If you're reading it for the first time, yay. Listen, read the Bible. It's amazing. It'll change your life. Study the Bible as well. There should be some area where maybe you're going a little bit deeper. Blue letter Bible. Write it down. The blue letter Bible, if you can say it 10 times fast, will tell you when you look at this word saw, that it does not mean what we see as saw when we use the word in English.

Jesus didn't just see Matthew. He did see Matthew, but he saw beyond Matthew. The word there is Edo. I think that's how you pronounce it. I was trying to find the right word, Ido or Edo. But nonetheless, the meaning is the same. Matthew 9 says that when he went on there, he saw a man named Matthew. Now, if you go above that a little bit further, the writer Matthew uses the same word in a different tense, but he uses the exact same word earlier in the chapter, which goes to show us when he said that Jesus saw me, because he's writing this about himself, he is trying to communicate to you that Jesus didn't just see me.

Jesus saw into me is what he's saying. And let me tell you why we know that, because he had already used it just a few paragraphs up. And you can look at that in your scriptures later on when you get home. In Matthew 9, 4, when speaking to the Pharisees, Jesus said, knowing their thoughts, Edo. Jesus said, why do you entertain evil thoughts within your heart? That word knowing is the exact word with a different tense that it was used when he saw Peter.

It's a perceiving. It's living not by sight, but by faith. One can even argue that the spiritual life, actually the life that you live, actually should be lived more from the cues you take from what you see, from a deeper place than just what you see. We don't want to live from a surface level. The enemy would always have you live from a surface level. Oh, you see that? That's what that means. Oh, you heard that? Well, that's what they're saying.

Has anyone ever spoke to you? They say something to you, and deep down you're like, I don't think that's true. I think they're telling me they're awesome, but they don't seem awesome to me. There's something a little bit deeper there. Most of us have this sixth sense. We have this intuition. Once you have the Holy Spirit, that goes nuclear. That goes spiritually nuclear. And God begins to share where you're not living from such a heavenly place that you're no earthly good, but everything that you're doing is now perceived through the filter of the Holy Spirit.

In Romans, it says we don't walk by faith. We don't walk by sight. We walk by faith. It says, you know, we don't walk by just by what we see, by sight alone, but by faith, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And this is what Jesus was doing. Turn your notes over if you would. And we're going to look at the meaning of this word. Because this is a muscle I want you to begin to develop. I try to use this in marriage a lot.

I need to use it. Things will be said. My wife will tell me something. And I'll listen. And I thought, well, I'm going to react this way. I usually find that Adam's initial reaction to something wife has said is just not great. I don't know why. I'm just not great at the first thing that I think of. What I've kind of learned is the first thing I think of is probably, you know, a road mark to go look at something else.

If I can step back, and let's say we have a conversation about something, and ask myself, God, what are you trying to say to me through this? Can you give me some insight to what she's actually trying to say? And is what she's trying to say actually the issue? I don't want to get into too deep territory here. I get into murky waters. But what I have learned is oftentimes, I'll just say with all people, that what people are telling me, there's a deeper issue that needs to be discerned and drawn out.

We'll just say that. And I find that when I'm living at a spiritual level, I will come back with a response, and the person, especially in marriage, my wife will be like, oh, you get it. When I take that time, when I take that pause, not always, but more often when I'm living from that perception level, our life seems to go a lot better. What I will say again is this is a muscle that we need to develop. Are you just living base?

Are you just living off of the base reactions, off the first thought that comes to your head, the first instinct, or are we slowing down to live with spiritual eyes and perception and to actually take some pause to do that? It says saw means this. It says, Edo, seeing that becomes knowing, then is a gateway to grasp spiritual truth, reality from a physical plane. It also means that it is seeing. It is a physical seeing, which should be the constant bridge to mental and spiritual seeing.

Whatever we hear, whatever we see, we want to filter it. And that's what Jesus did. Jesus walked around constantly with a second set of eyes. It was probably his primary set of eyes. His primary set of eyes was probably the eyes of his heart. The Bible talks about this. Actually, he actually, I believe, if you were to, you know, I think Scripture would make a solid argument for this. Jesus lived more from what most people would consider a secondary set of eyes, the eyes of his heart, more than what he saw with his physical eyes.

See, there's two set of eyes, and what the Scripture is giving us the ability to do is to live from that second set of eyes, to use both and to go into that deeper place. So what did Jesus see in Matthew? Well, like I said, he didn't see a tax collector. He didn't see someone who was a Roman ally. He didn't see an enemy of the people. He didn't see any of that. He saw someone who needed a new path. He saw someone that was desperate for a friend.

He saw someone who was hurting. He saw someone who had some spiritual darkness. He saw someone who was lonely. He saw so much more than you just see if you just look at whatever the world presents to us. Very few of us, I have found, very few people have the ability to present who they truly are. Most of us, myself included, live behind walls. We live behind false pretenses. We live behind things, safety mechanisms. When you meet a person who is truly comfortable in their own skin, that is truly themselves, you'll know it.

Jesus was this kind of person. Jesus was the kind of person who could show up and just be comfortable in his own skin, so to speak. Matthew was living behind all these illusions. And then Jesus comes up and says, follow me. Jesus wants to make you more real. That's what Jesus wants to do. He wants to introduce you to the Father to make you more of who you truly are. I believe we're living in a society that is more fake and plastic than I've ever seen before.

You know, you can only put so many filters on your life or on your pictures, but eventually the truth comes out. The truth of who we truly are actually comes out. And what we want the truth to do is to set us free. Jesus calls them away, and maybe Jesus is calling you away. So he sees this in Matthew. And so you'll see in your notes, there's a blank there where it says, invitation brings us to a crossroads. And it does.

The entire faith, as we'll see in a moment, is a circular faith of invitation. Jesus is inviting you, and then you're inviting him, and then he's inviting you, and you're inviting others, and then you're inviting him. It is this circular, you know, relationship of, reciprocal relationship of invitation, we'll see in just a moment. But the first thing is that invitation brings you to a crossroads of choice. Jesus took action when his spiritual eyes told him that there was a person who needed to be invited.

Who do you know that for one reason or another you've talked yourself out of sharing the love of God with them? For one reason or another. You don't think they want to hear it. You don't, you know, maybe if they've told you they don't want to hear it, then I want to respect that boundary. I'm not going to keep pushing you. But how many people have you not invited when you thought to yourself, hey, now is a perfect chance to share with someone the love of God?

One of the things my mom always does is every day she asks for someone to share with. Every day. She prays. And for those that have asked, her dog's sick is why she's not here and hasn't been here. So a lot of people, I thank you so much. So many of you ask me, hey, how's your mom? So she's doing great, free of cancer and all that. So that's cool. But one of the things that she does every day is, God, let me meet somebody who needs you today.

And she is like on the radar. My mom is just looking around all the time for someone to love on, to care for. That's her deal. In fact, I've told this story before. It's awesome. And so I go to 7-Eleven by her house and she goes and gets money at the cash machine and I'm getting like a donut or something and I'm paying for it. The guy's behind the counter. And I say, hey, mom. And the guy looks, he goes, Virginia, she's your mom?

And I'm like, yeah. He goes, no, I love Virginia. Let me give you a hug. And I'm like, dude, I don't want to hug you, dude. And he comes around the corner. The guy's like hugging me, dude. Why is he hugging me? Because I'm related to her. And she cares about people. She really, really cares about people and tries to care about people every single day. There are people that are waiting to be seen. They're sitting at the side of the road like tax collectors.

They got a big pot of money. They got a nice jacket on, a big house because Matthew invites Jesus to his house. They're sitting there and they're just waiting to be invited. They're waiting to be cared for. Put that. Ask Jesus to give you someone that you can care about. You know, sometimes the world has to, you know, be more about just us. The more you think about yourself, I think the more difficult life is. I'm serious.

Self-pity is running rampant. I was thinking something about my life the other day and I thought, dude, stop pitying yourself, dude. Start caring about other people. Who can I care for? An outward focus will do nothing but fill your life. I've seen that over and over again. Jesus lived that way. If anybody could have pitied himself, it could have been Jesus. What did I do wrong? I got to go to the cross. I didn't do anything.

You know what I mean? Perfect life. I'm completely perfect. I got nothing wrong. You're going to crucify me. I mean, that guy could have had so much pity if he wasn't so busy caring for other people and talking to his father. This is Jesus. So he actually followed up. The first invitation was an invitation to ask somebody who was broken. Jesus followed the invitation. The second, Matthew accepted the invitation. It says Levi got up and left everything.

Now we know he didn't leave everything because he has a house he goes to later on in the story, right? But he left his tax collector booth. He left all the money there, I'm sure. He left whatever was there to be taken. Now we're going to meet his boss next week. I think it's Zacchaeus. Next week we're going to talk about Zacchaeus. He was the chief of the tax collectors and he was probably Matthew's boss. A very good chance that he was.

He also follows Jesus. But what Matthew did and what the story means to say, and Matthew's the one that wrote he left everything. What Matthew was trying to say through that is he left everything that was, the identity, the position, the title, the money, the fake friends, whatever he had, he left it. The future, the promise. He left it all. We don't even know if he's going to be able to afford that house that he throws the banquet at later on.

But he leaves it all. And what he's willing to say is, I'm willing to leave. I ask myself this question all the time. Am I willing to leave everything? Not my family, not my wife, not my kids. House, retirement savings, all of it. Position, title, right. I mean, all of it. All the stuff you like. Are you willing to leave it on a moment's notice just for Jesus? Would I be willing to pack it up, you know, in a Volkswagen with the kids, leave it all behind, give it away with the wife, and we just go where God calls us?

That's a great question in a society that is constantly trying to build up more stuff for a potential future we might never get to. Now, I'm not saying go throw all your stuff away and don't have savings and don't make a plan because a lot of people in the name of faith have done a lot of things that God never called them to do. They've given everything away and God's like, I never called you to give you that away. I want you to use it later on.

But whatever it is, I'm not saying just do that, but how tightly are you bound to your tax collector booth, to that identity, to that addiction, to that whatever it is? And are you just begging for someone to come up and call you away? The call of Jesus is strong. And if he's calling you, you are at a crossroads to either stay. Sometimes Jesus wants you to stay in something. I mean, Jesus doesn't always call you to things.

There's many times in scripture where he said, go back to your house and stay there. Go back and tell the people where you live. Don't all follow me. No, you go do this. You go stay in the thing. Longevity is a great calling of God. Stay in relationships. Fight for things like that. Over and over again, we see this. But Matthew left everything. Then, I love this. This was the most powerful thing to me from the whole message.

Matthew reciprocates the invitation. Now, I like following Jesus and I especially like following him from afar. Meaning, he's over there. I'm here. He's doing miracles. Yeah, I'm handing out the bread if he needs me handed out. You know, the fish and the loaves. I'll be a part of it. It's easy to follow Jesus around the lake. But how many of us invite Jesus into your house? You see, there's a big difference between following Jesus and then going, I'm gonna go home.

I'll see you back in the morning. You go pray on the mountain, that thing you go do. And I'll see you in the morning at the lakeside again and we'll go do some more miracles together. Or saying, hey Jesus, you're so amazing. I don't just want, I don't want to leave you. Would you come to my house tonight? And I'm gonna throw a party for you. I'm gonna throw not only a party, I'm not just having you for dinner. He threw a banquet on a moment's notice.

This guy had some hospitality credibility. I don't know if you watch the Hallmark channel or whatever those things are. One of those channels. That he was able to just whip out a banquet like that quick. He probably had servants like, get that banquet for Jesus, you know? And then he invited all of his like scullywag pirate friends, like all of his, you know, like loser friends that no one liked. He just had this rip-roaring party.

But this time Jesus was there and was a part of it. He invited Jesus to his house. He was so excited to know Jesus. We have a friend who's coming to the church now who was invited through a family friend who has told me last week, I'm so excited that Sunday morning has become my favorite morning now. Sunday morning has become, this is what I hear over and over again from people that are being invited. Why? Because Jesus is changing lives and then now they want to make a banquet into their own house.

I love when like a husband or a wife gets saved sometimes and they go back home. Like the, you ever seen like where the wife's like, you need to go to church. You need to go. And then they go to church and they get Jesus and they come back home. Like, I didn't want you to have that much Jesus. Not a lot of Jesus. It's pretty funny. He invites into his house. Have you, like, are you following, look, if you're following Jesus up by the lake, there's a lot of good stuff.

Obviously, Jesus never called anybody to follow him from a lounge chair. You got to follow him. You got to do stuff. But inviting into your house is another level of intimacy. Now, he's already living in your heart. So he's already there. But we're so afraid of our dirty houses and we're so afraid of our bad selfies and all these other things that we don't want anybody to see. That we don't bring Jesus into the darkest place of our lives.

Just invite Jesus into your darkness, into your pain, into your brokenness, into your loneliness, into your sin. He does his best work there. That literally is where Jesus does his best work. And he tells the Pharisees this. He goes, I'm not looking for righteous people. He is completely righteous. You can't add to his righteousness nor be righteous enough to even get close to him. You would incinerate if you even got close to his righteousness.

He's not looking for righteous people. He's looking for people that want to be righteous through him. Who want to give their hearts. Who want to be in community. Because he doesn't want your actions or your spiritual activity and a big cloud of dust of spiritual stuff and all of your money. He wants you. He wants your heart, your broken little sad heart. The one that you feel like you're not good enough with those dark thoughts coming.

That's where he wants to be. He wants to be there at three in the morning when you wake up. He wants to be there in the afternoons when you're alone. He wants to be there. He wants to be in all of it and invite him into all of it. It's a reciprocal invitation. He's invited you. You've invited him. You're inviting others. He's inviting others. It is a reciprocal life of invitation into a deeper place. Coming in for a landing.

It says, What did the Pharisees see? They saw sinners and tax collectors. Who had Jesus invited to follow him? Sick sinners. That's the word. Who had Jesus invited to follow him? Sick sinners. Look at who Jesus asked to follow him. Look at the people that followed him. They were sick sinners. People that were broke. As we come in for a landing, there's three things that I want you to work on this week as we learn how to put this eyes of invitation is what they are.

It's spiritual eyes of invitation. The first is, where are you being invited to follow Jesus? Where in your life is Jesus saying, Hey, I want you to follow me over here. Some of you, that's a missions call. Some of you, it's, I don't know. But Jesus is saying, I want you to get up and move or change this location. It's a location of the heart. It's a location of the emotions. It's a location. It's actually a location, places you go.

I remember when I got sober, there's just places I couldn't go anymore. Just couldn't go. And I had to change. One of the best ways to stay sober is change your geography and your calendar. Just book your life full of really positive events. I remember I just booked my life with everything. I had no free time because I was not good with free time. Free time, with time on my hands, was not a healthy place for Adam. I was not my own best friend.

Now I find that I can get alone and things go pretty well these days. But back then, I just booked it out. Where is Jesus inviting you into? To follow him. Hey, follow me here. I want to go to this place. A more benevolence. I want you to give away more of your time. I want whatever. He's calling you. You know it. The other one is, where are you inviting Jesus into in your life? You know, this was a big insight for me this week.

I've done a lot of Jesus following for years. And I haven't actually thought about, well, I haven't really created a banquet for him. I want to invite, hey, I got this cool thing that I'm doing. And would you come be a part of this? This is a really cool thing that I want to do. And I want to invite you into my house. Or I want to invite you into my relationship with my daughter. And as your kids go from five-year-olds to 17-year-olds, they tend to have minds of their own, which is weird.

It's totally weird. And they end up having these conversations with you. And I just got to talk, I just got to figure out how to have that, to have different conversations, you know, when your child becomes an adult and when they get married. Jesus, I need you to come into that with me. I want to invite you into my relationship with my daughter because I want to continue to have the strong relationships I've had when they're 35, when they're 40, when they're 50, if I'm still around or whatever it is.

Jesus, I want to invite you into that. Would you come into my marriage? Would you come into my prayer life? Would you come into, I'm going to invite you into this stuff because I'm so excited. I want to have you near me as opposed to just getting up and following Jesus. It's the first time. I mean, I'm sure I've seen it, but it's the first time in such a powerful way that I realize that Jesus wants to be invited into your house.

He's not asking, I'm not asking Jesus to follow me, but he wants to be invited as much as he loves to invite you. I think it's really powerful to think where can you invite Jesus? And the final thing is this, who are you inviting to your banquet? You know, when you get to know Jesus, you start following Jesus, you end up to have this ability to have, to be able to call friends. You know who the best inviters are in the entire church?

Usually people that just got saved. People that are just fired up. They just start telling everybody about it. I know that I did. When I got saved, I've told this story a bunch of times. I grew my hair out, grew a beard, and I got like this white gi because I'd been taking karate classes, and I walked around like Jesus. You know, I didn't think I was Jesus. I didn't have any like mental thing going on, but I just like, I was just, it was actually, I was just more comfortable in those clothes, but I kind of did end up looking like Jesus a little bit.

And I would just go down to PB and share the gospel with people. I'd go to AIDS hospices, and I'd paint, and ask if they needed any help, and I'd go to the homeless center, and I would just, I would tell all my friends, I had this one guy, he was a homosexual, Elvis impersonator, his name was Eldon, was going, I met him, and I forgot where I met him, but I invited him to church, came to church, started coming to the youth group, the college group, he was in college, and we're driving back, and he had had this big weekend in Vegas, and he'd come, and he wanted to go to church, and so we went to church, and on the way back, he's in the back of the car, and we're in Bonita, and I was there, and we were listening to music, and I had another friend in the front, and I'm like, dude, have you not accepted Jesus yet?

He's all, no, I never asked you, I said, dude, you need to accept Jesus now, and he's all, okay, I'll do it, and he didn't want to do the Elvis impersonation, because he used to do it for me all the time, so I pulled the car over in the parking lot at Bonita Mall, whatever that Bonita Mall is called down there, and I jump in the back seat with him, I'm like, dude, come here, and I pull my Bible out, I read him some bits of the Bible, and I grab Eldon's hand, and we prayed, and he accepted Christ in the back of the car in Bonita, like, this is how I used to roll, it was like, full on, come to the banquet, crazy thing is, like, two years later, he died of AIDS in Las Vegas, Eldon isn't with us anymore, but there was a moment in my life there, and I'm actually starting to rediscover it again, discovering the power of invite, I'm starting to discover how much I love inviting people to know Jesus, not just because it grows the church, just saying, like, just because I love people to know Jesus, Jesus is awesome, and I want more and more people to know, and I want more moments like Eldon, and back, you know, jumping in the back of the car with a homosexual dude who does Elvis impersonating every weekend in Vegas, I think he was 19 or 21 years old, and led him to Jesus, and he continued to try to follow Jesus until he died, I remember when he died, you know, and it was sad, but he knew Jesus, and I don't know what the rest of the story was because we lost contact after that, but with that, there's an invitation, there's an invitation to you, to leave your tax booth, there's an invitation for you to follow Jesus, there's an invitation to you to decide to invite Jesus to a banquet at your house, and there's an invitation you can make to others to let people know that Jesus is real and that he's alive, amen?

Let's stand if you would. You're invited, you're invited into a new experience, a new reality, follow Jesus as much as you want to prepare a place for him as he prepares a place for you. If you'd extend your hands, I want to bless you in this new year and this new decade. Lord Jesus, I bless these people with the word of God, of invitation, God, that invites them to a deeper place, to a deeper well, to be filled with your love, to be filled with your grace, to be filled with your goodness, Lord Jesus.

That you would send them out now, God, enriched in your power, enriched in your love, and blessed, Lord God, moving forward in a new position in a new state of grace. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.