Luke 14:1-24

Discussion Questions

• What excuses do we make to avoid helping others? Are our priorities out of order? What keeps us so fixated on ourselves that we don’t show up for others? Are we ready to roll up our sleeves and get busy working for the kingdom? Do we realize that our efforts on earth can echo into eternity?
• How can we cultivate a heart of humility? Are we exhausted by constantly trying to prop up our image and pretend that we have it all together all the time? What happens to our hearts when we finally lay down this human–fueled hypocrisy and prideful posing to start walking in the full freedom of gospel grace and honest humility?
• How can we unpack the paradox of the depth of our sin and the heights of the love of Jesus? How do we lean into, and live out, these two truths? Do we understand that the more seriously we see our sin, the more amazing God’s grace looks in comparison?

Transcript

We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. We have extra copies, just raise your hand real high. You’ll have something to follow along. It’s really good to look in the text as we go verse by verse, chapter by chapter through these books today in Luke, Chapter 14; you’ll see it up on the screen. The QR code is there if you would like the quotes and notes to the sermon, all that’s available to you online as we prepare to dive into this text. I also want to thank the folks who joined us from all over the world last week. We have heard from people from Agartala, Tripura, India; and from Oiso in Naka District, Kanagawa, Japan. I know I can say this one right: from Greensboro, North Carolina. Did that one pretty good, didn’t I? We had folks here last hour who join us online every week from the Hebrides Islands in Scotland. And we’ve had folks here, as well, from Singapore. So, so grateful to the Lord for the technology and the ability to reach beyond our own four walls. I’m hoping you’re turning to Luke, Chapter 14, in a moment I’ll read that text for us.

A couple questions, what if true freedom begins with you being honest, with me being honest? What if real joy grows out in the soil of humility? What if grace doesn’t ask you to earn your seat at the table? What if grace simply invites you to come to the table? There is a table where you don’t have to be a somebody to get a seat. Where the humble become the joyful, where outcasts outsiders and the ostracized are all invited in. And today we’re going to go to dinner with Jesus in the home of a religious leader of his time, a Pharisee, and Jesus is going to open our eyes to the beautiful banquet and the scandalous welcome of the Gospel. And He’s going to rewrite the guest list from that day, and it’s going to include you and it’s going to include me when He gets done with that. He was on His way to Jerusalem. Some of you will remember where we left off last time. He’s going to lay down His life on the cross. We just read about that in our confession of faith. And if you add the four gospel accounts together, you find that Jesus, along the way in His earthly ministry, he performs lots of miracles. As a matter of fact, so many that the apostle John tells us if we were to try to fit them all into one book, it wouldn’t work.

But we do have within Matthew, Luke and John, seven different occasions where Jesus performs a miracle on a day they call the Sabbath day back then. This upset and ruffled the feathers of some of the self-righteous religious leaders of the time. They had traditions, but they also had fallen prey to traditionalism. And the problem is in the “ism,” as we’ve said so often around here before. Tradition’s good. Tradition is kind of the living faith of dead people, and we just continue to do some of the things they did as well. But traditionalism is the dead faith of living people, and that’s not a good thing. And so, we want to watch out for that ourselves.

And before we read the text, I’d like to pray for the Holy Spirit to illuminate us as we read and walk through this text: So, Father and Holy Spirit, I pray to You and ask You to come, open our hearts, soften our hearts, open them, open our minds as well as we hear the Word. Lord, if we’re weary and need rest, I pray that we would find that in Jesus today. If we mourn, we’re longing for comfort, that we would find that Holy Spirit in You. Lord, for those who are here today that struggle, perhaps they’re numb from the struggle. Maybe they desire some kind of victory. I pray for them and ask they would turn to You and release everything, lay it all at Your feet. Lord, for those who have sinned this week in ways that are quite obvious to them, and they’re aware of it, they know they need a savior, I pray for them, and I pray for us.

And I pray, Lord, that we would lean into seeing Jesus as we study this text. For those who may feel like outsiders or strangers and just need community, I pray that they would find that here. Lord, for those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, that the world would be set right, I pray for them as well, that they might see in You all that they, all that we need. May this church open wide her doors and her arms and may we offer the warmest of welcomes in the name of our Lord Jesus. As we come to Your Word today, we pray that through this passage of Scripture, You’ll give us a clearer vision of Your truth, a greater faith in Your power, and a more confident assurance of Your love for us. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen and amen.

So, Luke, Chapter 14, it goes just like this: “It came about that when He [that’s Jesus] went into the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on the Sabbath to eat bread, that they were watching him closely.” There’s a lot there, in verse one, that you might just miss. And so, I’ll stop occasionally and point some things out. Why would He do this? This is the first question I thought to myself because I’ve been reading these gospels for a long time and the tension between Jesus and the religious leaders is so obvious. It’s right up front throughout the gospel records, all four gospels. There’s a mounting tension. Why would He want to go eat dinner with somebody like that? Why would He go to their house and do that? And the only thing I can come up with is that, looking at Him and His life and His heart, He loved even them, those who hated Him, who were already plotting His demise. They wanted to completely derail His ministry. They totally wanted to destroy Him. They even have murder on their minds, and He goes to dinner with them in their house. And that’s a bold move in my book.

And it makes me curious, more and more curious about Jesus and His kindness toward His enemies. It’s also true that this guy was not just a Pharisee, but he was a leader of the Pharisees. Probably, not 100% certain, but probably one of the 70 on the Sanhedrin. This is the ruling religious council or leadership of the Jewish people in that day, made up of both Pharisees and Sadducees, sort of the Pharisees being kind of the legalists that they believe the entire Old Testament, but they added to it. They had some 613 applications of God’s laws that went way past. I mean, just amazingly far past what God originally intended for some of His law that He set down in the Old Testament. They had just piled it high with rules and regulations. And so, they get real prickly when Jesus begins doing things on Sabbath that they would consider to be work, for instance. And it’s just their interpretation of work. That’s what they’re essentially doing. We’ll see that in a second.

But it’s also on the Sabbath, and that’s fascinating that they would invite Him into their house on a Sabbath. I think they’re doing it on purpose, and I think you’ll probably agree with me, because we’re given their motive. Luke kind of knows the story. And so, at the very end there of verse one, he says they were quote, “watching him closely.” Paratereo is the Greek word. It means not just to watch to observe, but to watch to scrutinize, to watch to catch Him in something; that’s in concert with what their motives have been. And so, we know this is a setup. And Jesus goes in and has dinner with them, “And there in front of Him [verse two] was a certain man [I like the way Luke says that] suffering from dropsy.” Dropsy today, I think they would call it edema, that is your legs, especially, might fill up with water, liquids, that kind of thing, swell up quite a bit. It’s quite uncomfortable. And this guy is suffering a lot from this edema, and he’s been invited into this dinner. But why would they invite him? They’re self-righteous religious people who think that people who are sick got that way because they sinned, and they drew direct connect. You must have done something really wrong for that to have happened to you.

They’re wrong, and we keep seeing that over and over again in the gospels. Sometimes there’s a connection between my foolishness and the consequences that I suffer, that’s true. But we can’t say that was certainly all the time, like these Pharisees seemed to do. But why would they have invited somebody like him into their house for dinner? A leader of the Pharisees on that particular day: “It’s a Sabbath, oh yeah, Jesus come in. Let’s see if we can catch Him in something.” Verse three, “Jesus answered and spoke.” What did He answer? Did anybody ask a question yet? No. But somehow or another, and you read throughout the four gospels, Jesus seems to know what people are thinking. Jesus seems to know what the motive of their hearts would be in any given moment. And so, He answers, even though they haven’t verbally asked a question. It’s in their minds. He answers and he says to these lawyers and these Pharisees saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” So, this is a masterful bit of sort of debate in the way that He’s pushed the burden back on them, knowing what their thoughts were.

Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not? If they say no, it’s not, then they’re in as much as saying it’s not right to do a good on the Sabbath at all. If they say, “Yes, you can do it,” well that kind of goes against all of their petty little rules that they had made about the Sabbath. You couldn’t even spit in the dirt on the Sabbath, according to some of their ancient traditions, because when you did the spittle, would roll in the dirt and form a dirt ball and that would be considered work. That’s pretty amazing how difficult they made it for people to just make it through a Sabbath day in their time, because everything to them was considered work. But how did they respond? Verse four, “They kept silence,” the first of two times, they will be silenced. I mean, they had just Jesus’ ability to ask these questions, to try to get them to think a little bit about what they’re doing, what might be going on in their hearts, that’s what He’s doing. “They kept silent,” verse four tells us. They didn’t have an answer. He took hold of him, the dropsy man, healed him and sent him away, because Jesus saw a person. Jesus didn’t see bait for the debate, trying to catch Him in something. Now he saw a man and He healed the man who had the dropsy, and He even sent him away.

And He said then to the rest of them that are there, verse five, “Which one of you shall have a son or an ox?” And by the way, I know some of the English Bibles say, “Which one of you shall have a donkey?” Doesn’t say a son in some of your English translations. And I want you to know that that is actually sort of an argument about manuscripts. It’s not somebody arguing about whether or not a child can act like a donkey from time to time. The parents are going, “Yes, my children can sometimes act like donkeys.” But it’s just an argument about how to interpret that particular kind of word. But He says, “Which one of you shall have a son or an ox fall into a well, and will not immediately pull him out on a Sabbath day?” So, he’s making the illustration very personal for them. If you had a child or if you had a donkey or you had an ox, whatever, whichever the translation is, and it fell into a well, you certainly would do that, wouldn’t you? He knows what’s on their minds. “And they could make no reply to this,” verse six tells us. So twice, Jesus with just asking a couple questions, he bests them in this particular moment.

But again, I don’t think it’s merely about winning the argument. I don’t think it’s about a Mike Drucker moment. I think He loves them. And I think He wants to lead them out of their Pharisaism, their legalism, their being bound up by religious rule-following, thinking that they can save themselves by doing enough good things or observing enough loss, or even punishing themselves and others by not allowing good things to happen that day. This shift now is to a parable. Verse seven, he’s talking to the same people in the house. “He began speaking a parable to the invited guests. When he noticed how they had been picking out the places of honor at the table; saying to them…” So, verse 1 tells us they are watching Him intently to scrutinize Him. Verse seven tells us He’s watching them. See, He’s got his eye on them and what they’re doing as well. And he has noticed that they had been picking out the places of honor, the couches that they would set out for dinner called triclinium. They were sort of three people on three different sides of a couch. And there would be one side that would be sort of closer to the hosts. And so, people would come in and choose to sit there because they want to be close to the power center, close to the host, that’s the place of honor. He sees these people kind of vying, sort of trying to get the best seat in the place, right? And He says to them, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor lest someone more distinguished than you may have been invited by him [the host] and he who invited you both shall come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man.’ And then in disgrace, you proceed to occupy the last place.”

In other words, don’t come in and just take the best seat. Somebody more important than you is going to come in, and the host is going to move you, and isn’t that going to be embarrassing for you to get moved to a lower place because you took the high place or the most honorable place to begin with? “But when you are invited, go and recline at the last place, so that when the one who has invited you comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; [verse 10] then you will have honor in the sight of all who are at the table with you. [verse 11] For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” I love that. That’s such a succinct statement. It’s pithy, it’s straight to the point. It shows you the value system of Jesus, His axiology, if you will, in philosophical terms. This is what is good and valuable to Him: humility.

Verse 12: “And He also went on to say to the one who had invited him, ‘When you give a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and relatives or your rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and repayment come to you. But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be, [I love this word] blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’ And when one of those who were reclining at table with Him heard this, he said to Him, [One of the guys in the room says to Jesus] blessed is everyone who shall eat in the kingdom of God.’” It’s like somebody just blurting something out, because I think there was probably a pregnant pause there. You know, really just this massive pause where He’s talking to the host of the table, the dinner that we’re at right now. He’s kind of putting this guy in his place and telling him to think straight and there had to be quiet. And then this guy has to fill the silence with something. So he goes, “Blessed are you. Eat in the kingdom of God.” You know, that kind of thing.

Some commentators think this guy was just trying to interrupt and break the ice. Others think maybe he’s getting it. Maybe he’s understanding some of what Jesus is saying. Let’s be gracious. Let’s consider maybe there is somebody in the room who’s starting to get what Jesus is saying. Okay, that’s fine. But He said to him, Jesus does, verse 16: “A certain man was giving a big dinner, and he invited many; and at the dinner hour He sent his slave [his servant] to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is ready now.’” And that’s the way it was back in those days. You prepare a meal. It wasn’t just, you know, heat and eat. They had no microwave ovens. It’s an all-day deal to cook a meal. And so now the meal’s ready. You’ve invited them early in the morning. By the time dinner’s ready, you send somebody out again, going through the town to bring the invited guests. It’s ready now. Come on, it’s hot now. Let’s go. Come for everything is ready now.

Verse 18: “But they all alike began to make excuses. The first one said to him, ‘I’ve bought a piece of land and I need to go out and look at it; please consider me excused.’” Now, this is just interesting because excuses, I heard one preacher say, there’s nothing more than the skin of reasons stuffed with lies. Oh, that was interesting. Excuses, no real reason there. Another one I heard said that excuses are when the heart is absent from the reason. There’s no will, there’s no desire to actually do what’s being asked or how you’re being invited to respond to, right? And so, we have this person who goes, I bought some land, I need to go look at it. By the way, has anybody in the room ever made a real estate purchase and not gone to look at it? See how foolish this is, right? I mean, I know we can go online and look at things and look over a house and do all that sort, and you can walk through it virtually and all that sort of thing. But I’m not ever, I can’t imagine anybody buying something like that and not having seen it first.

The next excuse is interesting as well. “Another one said, [verse 19] ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m going to try them out; please consider me excused.’” Well, raise your hand if you ever bought a car without first at least trying it out. I mean, you might have done the Carvana thing, or something like that, you know, where you go online and they deliver and all that, but you still drive it, and you still have some time to return it. And this is oxen, this would be used for agricultural purposes. So, this is both, you know, in the case of the land it’s about possessions, in the case of the oxen it’s about productivity and work and making some kind of living. But the excuse is “I bought some oxen without even looking at them. I haven’t even tried them out.” That doesn’t make any sense either. And then thirdly, the last one said this, “I have married a wife, for that reason I cannot come.” Now raise your hand if you think that’s a good excuse. There was a guy, actually, there was a guy who left this morning in the first service. He walked by and he goes, actually, I think that was the best of the excuses. If you gotta have an excuse, that’s the best one, you know? But again, it’s the thing that these three excuses say to me, they just remind me to think about all of the categories of excuses that I make for not showing up.

And I do that; you do that as well. This is more important right this minute. So, I’m going to set aside this other thing that might actually be better for me on the spiritual side of things. I’m going to prioritize my life in such a way that my possessions or my productivity or perhaps even some relationship, and maybe it’s a broken relationship, but it’s so first in my life, I just can’t get past it. It’s blocking me from the invitation to come to the feast that the Lord has prepared for us. This slave/servant comes back and reports all this to the master verse 21 says, “Then the head of the household became angry and said to this slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Master, what you’ve commanded has been done, and still there is room.’” It’s interesting. The emphasis is now on the room not being full. The emphasis is not just on who gets invited, but it’s actually that the room isn’t full. You know why? Because that’s what’s important to this master. And I think in this parable, I think this master does in a way, represent the Lord Himself, that God would have us come, that He would like His room to be full, you’ll see this in a second. The master said to the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and to the hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.’” That’s his purpose, that’s his will, that’s his desire for a full table in a full house.

And he invites people from every background, every kind. I love the way Matt said that, “The gospel invitation is a universal offer.” That doesn’t mean everybody accepts the offer, but the offer is there. The offer is there, repent and believe; it’s yours. Would you like the salvation of God, the redemption of God to be at work in your life, and to also save you ultimately for eternity? If you would like that, that’s all that’s needed: response, repentance and faith. “I tell you,” verse 24, sobering in this particular illustration in this parable, “none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner.” In other words, he’s moving the argument from, “Will the saved be few?” to “Will the saved be you?” He’s trying to say, “Are you going to respond or not?” And I think that’s fair, really fair for Him to do that. And I think this is a fascinating passage, for me anyway. We’re going to call this “A Table Set by Grace.” And I’m hoping that these three points that I’ll be able to offer up to you will invite each and every one of us to lean into a little bit more of the grace that’s on offer for us as those who have trusted Christ as our Savior.

So first, I think there’s a freedom of gospel humility on display here, versus, if I had room for it on the slide, I would say, versus the frozen-up bondage of religious hypocrisy in verses one through six. We have all of these people who are sort of on a sort of stage that’s been set to entrap Jesus, that’s hypocrisy. In a sort of a fake invitation to the dropsy guy that they would never have invited because he’s sick, that makes him an unclean sinner, and yet they’ve invited him into their house, another bit of hypocrisy. The idea that they would want to converse with Jesus, that they would want to dialogue with him, another bit of hypocrisy. Jesus’ heart is, he loves them. He wants to set them free from their hypocrisy so that they could walk in some gospel honesty. And that’s what I do love about the gospel. It does set us free to do that. Posing, pretending is problematic because it is exhausting. Somebody say “Amen.” Yeah, it is really hard to keep up an image and to keep keeping it up, and to keep posing and pretending over and over and over again. So, Jesus asked these two questions: Is it lawful on the Sabbath or not? They kept silent. Which one of you has a son or an ox (or whatever) and wouldn’t help it?

They could make no reply. See, Jesus really wants, as He heals this man, He really wants to show them that He can set them free from their hypocrisy so they could live and walk in gospel grace. See, this miracle is not really just about the man with dropsy, is it? And all the miracles of Jesus, we’ve been saying this all along as we’ve studied Luke’s gospel, they have purposes that go way beyond the person healed. Jesus is seeking, yes, to arouse spiritual curiosity. I like to call it numinous curiosity. People who understand there’s something more than this world itself. There’s something calling me or drawing me that’s not material, that somehow or another is speaking to my soul, my heart, and even to my mind sometimes, and it’s bigger than just what I can understand and control. And so numinous curiosity, this gift that God has given us, where He sort of puts within us a longing to know Him and to become curious about Him. And the miracles do that, don’t they? They display the power of Jesus. He has power over disease, over demons, over disasters like storms, and even over death itself. He raises three people other than himself from the dead. We know about that.

There may have been more. And then He gets up from the grave Himself. So, displaying His power in these miracles, revealing His compassion — He actually loved this man. He loved this man because he was a man, a human being, not bait in a debate. And then it affirms the identity of Jesus. If He really is the Son of God, you would think He could do some of these kinds of things. And it certainly inspires worship of God. All of His miracles do that. There are, as I said earlier, seven of these very bold miracles that Jesus performs on the Sabbath. He wants to put these seven miracles in the context of something that they have begun to worship, their traditionalism about Sabbath. And so, He wants to do good for the glory of God and to draw people to the Gospel. And He does it on a Sabbath showing them that they could be set free from their hypocrisy and they could begin to walk in some gospel honesty.

Finally, we, in our own day and time, can be honest about our sin, honest about the fact that we are sinners. If you’ve come in here and you’ve had any kind of church hurt over the years, or if you’re a person who has thought to himself somewhere along the line, “I don’t go to church because it’s full of hypocrites,” I say to you right now, “Yes, it is. It is full of hypocrites.” That’s exactly right. But I also say to you, the entire world is full of hypocrites. We cannot get away from hypocrisy. It is the problem of every human being. You’d have to leave the planet, but then the problem is you’d be with another hypocrite, you. And so, you can’t get away from hypocrisy. What we need is redemption from hypocrisy. We need salvation from our hypocrisy. We need to be set free to be able to be honest before a God who already knows the worst about me and the worst about you. My darkest thoughts and longings, your darkest thoughts and the things that make you so angry, the things, the darkness that has encroached, but He knows that all of that, all of that. And yet He still walks into your house for dinner, just like He did with these guys. See, He loved these Pharisees. He’s not merely trying to mic drop on them. He loved them and He wanted them to be set free from their hypocrisy. We put this quote on the screen 50 times. We’ll keep coming back to it. The Gospel is this: We’re more sinful and flawed ourselves than we dared believe. Yet at the very same time, we’re more loved and accepted in Jesus than we ever dared hope. You’re here today, you’re aware of your hypocrisy or you’re struggling with pretense and posing. Man, the invitation of the Gospel is be set free.

Be honest with Jesus. He already knows everything about you, but He loves you completely. It’s really beautiful. Also, the table set by grace, not only does it offer us the freedom of gospel honesty, but we get the joy of gospel humility, which I think we see here in verses 7 through 11. Now the place of honor at a table like that belongs to an honorable person. I think everybody would think that makes sense. The person, though, who jostles and manipulates to sit in the place of honor, who elbows somebody out of the way, to be able to sit in that place of honor. That’s not really an honorable person, is it? And it’s certainly not a humble person. Jesus exposes the errors though of both in that parable, both the guests and the hosts. I think the hosts in that parable made some mistakes too. Jesus exposes the errors of the guests for their self-exaltation, taking the place of honor and sitting there. But also, the host’s for his hypocrisy of moving one person up and another person down. And it’s just as if the host is saying, “I want to make sure everybody sees that I have so and so in my house.” Man, that’s a problem for a lot of us. Because a lot of us in just the everyday sort of illustration of that same problem is that we can’t be in a room with 300 people without our eyes wandering around the room looking to see who’s more important, who just walked in, who we might want to be talking to instead of the person we’re with right now. Does that make you uncomfortable? It makes me uncomfortable to think about.

But that kind of humility that leads to joy is the kind of humility that stops with the self-exaltation and also stops with the idolatry of others and elevating them in some way. We are indiscriminate suckers for notoriety and celebrity and fame. We don’t just want to be good. We want to be better than the next guy. And we all want to be the G.O.A.T., you know, the greatest of all time, right? This week I saw a great little tweet sent around it’s got to be fictional, I’m pretty sure it is, but I loved it anyway, it was worth sharing. This news reporter asked, supposedly Michael Jordan, speaking of G.O.A.T.s, right, if he thought the 90s Bulls could beat LeBron’s Lakers. MJ says yes, the reporter says by how much? MJ says two or three points. The reporter says “Why so close?” MJ says “Because most of us are over 60 now.”

I love that man, I just thought that was great. Oh man, we need to be freed up, I think it’s true. We need to be freed up from this sort of rush effort, you know, obsession to be the coolest in the room or to be with the coolest in the room. It’s really important and Jesus is wanting us to get that, I think, as we look at these. Tozer: “The rest He offers [the kind of rest Jesus offers] is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief [get this, bore into this] the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend.” Man, yeah, there’s freedom there. There really is, I love his book, The Pursuit of God and recommended it to you. What if you wanted to become more humble? Could you? Could you do that, could we do that? What, you know, I do love the way Lewis talks about it, he says if anyone would like to become more humble, I think I can tell them the first step, and the first step is to realize that one is proud. If you think you’re not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed. So, it’s that irony, isn’t it? I want to be humble and yet the minute I think I’m humble, I’m probably not. I don’t want to be proud, but the minute I don’t think I’m proud, I probably am. That’s the human condition, that’s why I need redemption, that’s why I need salvation, I need a rescuer, somebody who isn’t me that’s outside of me, that’s greater than me, that can save me from myself. Nobody lies to me more than me – in both directions. You really did a good sermon there, Jim. Your sermon was really horrible, Jim. Nobody lies to you more than you in all directions.

And we need to know that we’re loved. We need to know that our savior, our redeemer, knows the worst about us and still loves us completely. That’s why this is such good news, this Gospel. It’s a freedom of gospel honesty; it’s a freedom of gospel humility. Gavin Ortlund is a theologian and a pastor here locally in town. He has a book called Humility, which we recommend here at The Village Chapel. He says, “Humility is a whole new way of approaching life: An acceptance of our status as sinful and yet loved in the gospel, and consequently a self-forgetful, unpretentious bounce in our step that lives life to the full, embracing it as a wonderful gift from God.” It’s a whole new way of approaching life, humility is. And it really is something that will set you free and fill you with joy. Finally, the scandal of gospel hospitality is on full display here, verses 12 through 24. You remember the story, don’t you? He sent three different people. Three different groups of people out to invite people to come in. There are all these excuses, all that sort of thing. And this final invitation is to the blind, the lame, the cripple, the people that just have nothing. They bring nothing to the table or to the party. And I don’t know about you, but I find that really refreshing.

And as a matter of fact, there’s a great freedom in coming to the place where you understand you actually don’t bring anything to the party. There’s a great freedom in going, falling on my knees, lifting up the empty hands of faith, as Francis Schaefer used to say. And just holding Him up to receive what I cannot achieve. To receive simply because I believe and trust in Him. Because He is that good. “God’s gospel invitation,” Michael Wilcox said, “goes not to the well-connected, but to the well-aware – those aware of their need.” Is that you? Do you understand what you need? Because understanding what you need is setting you on the road to freedom right here. This is a great thing. If the Holy Spirit moves on us, or when the Holy Spirit moves on us, to convict us of our sin, to convince us of what is true about Jesus, and then to draw us to Him, this is not when the host says to his servants, “Go out and compel them to come in.” He doesn’t say go out and coerce them with a sword to come in. This is not conversion by coercion here. This is an invitation, you know? So, it’s compelling in and of itself if we can simply tell you how beautiful it is, how beautiful He is. And if you could just open your eyes and see all that He’s offering to you and to me, you would see that it meets your every need.

There’s a guy named Steve Brown that Kim and I used to listen to his tapes back in the day when it was cassette tapes anyway. We would listen to his teaching tapes all the time when we were on the road for about 20 years. And he was kind of our road pastor. And then we got to meet him one day, and we actually played some music at a conference he was at. I think I’ve told this story once or twice, but we played some music at a conference. He was out and he was the speaker. And at the end of the whole thing, we’re tearing up, sending down our instruments and our cases and stuff like that, and he walks up. He had this voice that sounds like he smokes six packs a day. You know, like, (makes loud noise) like that kind of a voice. He’s also amazing radio voice, but he goes, “Jim, Kim, I don’t like your music, but I’m gonna pray for you ’cause I think we need you.” And I looked up and I said, “Thank you?” (audience laughing) I think that’s it. I think we should say thank you on that. Well, I love what he says here.

Check this: “I used to think that God liked only certain people — those who lived up to His standards. But I’m increasingly surprised by His choice of friends. And even more surprised that His choice includes me.” Probably said this 50 times here too. Today’s a good day of reminders, I guess. I’m pretty sure, I speculate, but I’m pretty sure most often heard thing on the first day in Heaven is going to be, “What are you doing here?” It’s going to be asked of me, and it’ll probably be asked of you, and it’ll be asked over and over and over again. Surprised by His grace. So, folks, from this passage, we conclude God’s desire is to do what? Fill His table, His feast, the table set by grace. How will you respond? You have some excuse categories, like the three excuse categories we read about that really just are the tip of the iceberg, illustrating the beginnings of all of our reasons, no they’re excuses really, for why we won’t come. Or are you ready now when you see what this really is? What great news this really is, that yes, you’re right, you don’t deserve it, but it’s still on offer. Yes, you’re right, you can’t earn it by being good enough, but it’s still on offer. The only question left is will you come to Him? Will you come to His table of grace? “The Gospel is not good advice to men,” Stott said, “but good news about Christ; not an invitation to us to do anything; but a declaration of what God has done; not a demand, but an offer.”

I know a lot of you here have grown up in church, I know a lot of us have, and I’m one, I’ll say this, I’m one who had some church hurt. I grew up in a context where a whole lot of people that thought a whole lot of what I did was a whole lot of wrong. And looked down their nose at me and judged me, the whole thing and all that. But yet God held on to me somehow. And I think it’s because, partly the church secretary prayed for me and the pastor kept loving me. And some of the other people in the church kept loving me. They sat in other pews to the ones that were all grumpy and all about religious rule following. But I started to see the gospel in motion. And I started to understand grace a little bit better; that it is indeed an invitation and an offer. It’s not something you purchase or achieve on your own. So, if that’s news to you, I hope it’s good news to you, and I hope you will respond to it. Because I know what God’s heart is in all of this, and this will be the final quote from Spurgeon, “The Master of the house is more willing to welcome than we are to come. His heart is set on filling his table.” His table set by grace.

Would you pray with me? So, this invitation is real. Just if you don’t mind me, just talking for a second while you close your eyes. In this text we saw the meal is ready. We saw the feast is waiting. We saw the people who didn’t want to come. We saw some of his servants at that last parable were in his house and went out and found everybody that didn’t deserve to be there and brought them in. That is beautiful. That is wonderful. The Gospel is a summons for not for you to start acting religious. It’s not a demand for you to live up to a certain set of standards or balance out some set of scales because the symbol of the Christian faith is not scales. It’s a cross and an empty tomb. Your enjoyment of gospel assurance is on offer, the freedom, the joy of it all. But it only comes when you put your hope, your confidence, and your boast in Jesus. His love for you. Will you come? Sadly, I think some here in the room and maybe listening on the internet, perhaps there’s some that would say, “No, I’m too busy” or “I got too much stuff” or “I don’t want to bow. I’m not into bowing to anybody.” I hope that’s not you. I pray it’s not you. I pray that you, like me, will delight to receive what you can’t achieve as a gift from Him. He’s so generous. And He’s called my name. I hope you hear Him calling your name and you’ll respond. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen, amen.

Songs, Readings & Prayer

Songs

“King Forevermore (God The Uncreated One)“ by Aaron Keyes and Pete James
“He Is Making All Things Right“ by Ben Shive, Bryan Fowler, Skye Peterson
“Before The Throne Of God Above“ by Charitie Lees Bancroft and Vikki Cook
“All My Boast Is in Jesus“ by Bryan Fowler, Matt Papa, Matthew Boswell, Keith Getty
“Doxology” by Thomas Ken and Louis Bourgeois
All songs are used by Permission. CCLI License #2003690

Call To Worship: Let us go to the House of the Lord

Leader: I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord!
People: Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God!

Leader: Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; His understanding is beyond measure.
People: Blessed is he whose hope is in the Lord, Who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them.

Leader: The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations.
All: Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

The beginning lines of this Call to Worship are taken from Psalm 122, one of the Psalms of Ascent, which Israelites would sing and recite as they traveled up to Jerusalem to worship the Lord.

Classic Prayer: Bonaventure, 1221-1274

Let us bow the knees of our heart in devotion before the throne of the eternal majesty. With tears and groans before the royal throne of the Trinity, let us pray without ceasing that God the Father, by his blessed Son, would grant us the grace of mental acuity in the Holy Spirit, that we may know what is the breadth and length and depth and height of His love.

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