Personal Invitation

Well I want to invite you to grab your message notes that look like this as we continue our series Meals with Jesus. In this series we're looking at the ten Meals with Jesus that are mentioned in the Gospel of Luke because looking at the ways Jesus ate and who he ate with and what meals he ate really ends up giving us a lot of insight into what Jesus was all about.

And this weekend's message, let me just start with a statement, see if you agree with this: research shows that one of your deepest needs is the need to feel valuable. That your life is worth something. That you matter to someone. That you have significance and that you have value. And so it follows that a huge question is how do you judge your value? How do you know if you really do matter? Now just think about this for just a second because your answer to this question will absolutely end up driving your whole entire life.

Let me show you what I mean. We typically judge our worth four ways. I just read this this week in a book by Rick Warren and he mentions this in one chapter and it's so convicted me I thought I'd pass this along. This isn't in your notes kind of a late edition so just jot this in in the margins in your notes somewhere. Four bullet points.

First, some of us tend to judge our value by appearance, right? How do I look? There is immense pressure on all of us to gauge whether or not we matter based on our look, our symmetry, our weight, our hair. Our whole society has industries based on this idea. In fact, I saw a magazine cover the other day that had something on the cover "Win at Weight Loss." Look at this cover. Now even that choice of words. If you do not win at weight loss then what have you done? You have lost. You are a loser. But that's not enough. Look at this. You also need glowing skin. I don't even know what that means. It sounds like something from radioactive fallout or something but you need it and that is not enough. You also need incredible hair. Not just fashionable hair. If I get a haircut and I say how do you like this and you do not reply it's incredible then I just don't measure up.

The problem is our appearance inevitably goes downhill. Am I right? No matter how stunning you start out, it does not last. How many of you are living examples of that right now? Can I see a show of hands? How many of you are sitting next to someone right now who is a living example? No, don't raise your hands.

Second, the way we humans typically judge our worth is approval, right? How well am I liked? And here's the problem with this. If you build your worth on what other people think about you then you are going to get devastated every single time you get criticized. You're gonna go through life thinking what do they think? What do they think? What do they think? A slave to the approval of other people and this is so sad to see people live like this. And let me just say this as a pastor because I see this a lot. Some of you have spent your entire life trying to gain the approval of somebody who is never going to give it to you. Ever. And if you're an adult and you do not have the approval of mom or dad by now, you are never going to get it. Ever. So stop looking for it there. You have got to find your adequacy somewhere else.

Where else? Well, there's achievement, right? And this is the one of these four that I am most prone to. True confessions here. If I get a lot of things done in my life then I feel really good about myself. If I reach a lot of goals then I just feel better about myself. I'm not really that oriented toward approval or appearance but man, achievement. If I want to feel good about myself I write about what I have done today and if I come up with a long list of 18 or 20 things then I just feel bad. I can sleep better that day. What's the problem with that? It creates workaholism. An endless treadmill. There's never a stop to it.

And then finally, we can also judge ourselves by our affluence, right? And this is what happens when I make my net worth my self-worth. But the problem is it can all vanish so quickly. In fact, look at every one of these four: appearance, approval, achievement, affluence. These are all so temporary. They're so ephemeral. And so the question is how can I base my self-worth on something more solid? Something that's going to last.

Well, watch this. Psychological studies have shown that you tend to base your self-worth—how you feel about you—on what you think the most important person in your life thinks about you. Does that make sense? You tend to base your self-worth on what you believe the most important person in your life thinks about you. And if they gauge you on your appearance or the approval that you're getting from society or your achievements or your affluence, then you're going to gauge yourself that way too.

However, so many times you and I sabotage our confidence by pinning our self-worth on the opinions of people who never are going to love you unconditionally. Or who really should not be in this position in your life. Or worse, who know this about you and manipulate you. So I highly recommend that you make the most important person in your life the Lord Jesus. Because the part of the Bible we look at today, Jesus shows how much you and I matter to God. And if you really get what we're gonna look at today, it's gonna change your life. Change your life. It will free you of the expectations of others, from the grip of materialism, from the pressure of workaholism, from the need to always look your best at all times.

When you see yourself the way God sees you, it transforms you. And the scripture we want to dig in today is a great example of this. A guy in the Bible named Zacchaeus and his story is in Luke 19 starting in verse 1. And here's the setup. It says Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. Now stop there for just a second just to set up the context. We are actually going back in time a few days from where we were last weekend when we looked at the Last Supper. In this part of scripture, Jesus is actually on his way down to Jerusalem and to get there he has to pass through the city of Jericho.

Now we hear this word a lot, Jericho, and we think of Jericho, the walls falling down. In order to help you picture Jericho in the time of Jesus, I want to show you some pictures. I've been blessed to actually have been in Jericho and taken a lot of pictures there. It is right on the edge of the Judean desert but it's fed by springs. So it's this little patch of green. It actually looks a lot like Palm Springs. Raise your hand if you've ever been to Palm Springs here in California. Got almost everybody here, then you can picture this. Just like Palm Springs, it's fed by natural springs in the desert. It is known for its date palm orchards and it was in the time of Jesus too. Just like Palm Springs, it has a gondola that goes up to a steep mountain behind it. And just like Palm Springs in Jesus' day, Jericho was a resort for the wealthy. Even King Herod had his winter palace there that you can go see the ruins of. So the wealthy people lived in Jericho. The privileged people lived in Jericho.

Now just like Palm Springs, which has wealthy people and wealthy people who are also, shall we say, notorious gangsters and the like, right? Well, the same thing was true in the Jericho of Jesus' day. In fact, we're going to meet one of them. But his story teaches me four things about Jesus related to my self-worth. Jot these down in your notes. Number one, no matter how small I feel, Jesus sees me. No matter how small I feel, Jesus sees me. And this is the part of the story that I loved as a kid when I learned about this in kindergarten Sunday school. Do you remember the song? Zacchaeus was a wee little man. A wee little man was he. Is that true? Was he a wee little man? What else do we know about Zacchaeus actually from the Bible? Well, look at these clues. It says in verse 2, a man was there by the name of Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and he was wealthy.

Some clues here. He was a chief tax collector. This week Mark Spurlock showed me a list of the most despised jobs in ancient Judea in the days that this took place. Check this out. Tied for number five was physicians and butchers because they were basically seen as the same thing back in those days. Number four was dung collector. Yeah, I know. In fact, in those days in Jewish law at the time, a woman could divorce her husband for no other grounds than he is a dung collector. And the rabbis would say say no more. You got your divorce. Alright. Number three, money lender. Financial services seen as a shifty thing to be about in those days in Judea. Number two, any guesses on this one? Turns out it's those guys who wipe up sweat at NBA games. No, that's not true. But that is kind of a gross job. In reality, it was pigeon trainer. I know, and at first I thought pigeon trainer. What's this doing on the list here? Well, it turns out that in those days they would gamble on pigeon races and pigeon trainers were notoriously corrupt. For a small bribe, they would throw the race. Now how do you fix a pigeon race? I have no idea, but apparently they would. And then the number one most despised occupation in those days was what? Tax collector.

Now why is this? We talked about this in week one of the series. They were seen as collaborators with the Romans, traitors, and they were seen as thieves, extorting tax money from people. And so because they were traitors and thieves, they were totally ostracized. They were not even allowed to attend synagogue. They couldn't go to temple. And did you notice it says Zacchaeus was what kind of a tax collector? Chief tax collector. That means tax commissioner. Top of the pyramid. Everybody who collected everything had to pay him a piece of the action. And so he is filthy rich, seen as the chief extortionist, the chief traitor to the Jewish national cause, absolutely despised and ostracized.

Now here's a funny little detail Luke puts in. The name Zacchaeus. Luke doesn't always mention the names of the people that Jesus interacts with but when he does, there is a reason. It's intriguing. Zacchaeus comes from a Hebrew root word that means, are you ready for this? Righteous or pure one. Can you believe that? Now my guess is people would have called him every name of the book besides righteous or pure one, right? And here's what would have made the name calling even worse. It says he was short, right? That's where that song "He was a wee little man" comes from. But watch this. The Greek phrase used here is "Helichia Mikros" and Mikros is the word from which we get the English word what? Micro. Zacchaeus was a micro man. Now this could mean he was just kind of short but it probably means more than that. Just this week I found online a graduate paper written by a woman at Baylor University getting her doctorate and she pointed out all the other times in other ancient Greek literature that this exact phrase is actually used of what we would call a little person, a dwarf or a midget, a genetically small person.

And the author said there was a lot of prejudice in those days and she quoted many ancient writers just little people were seen as cursed of the gods. Even in the Levitical law, they could not serve as priests in the temple. So just imagine Zacchaeus's childhood. Let me ask you, can kids be cruel and ruthless on the playground? Absolutely. So probably starting from the time he's just a little kid and now his entire life Zacchaeus has been given hurtful, cruel nicknames. And this part is just speculation from me but maybe this is why he even becomes a tax collector. Because why else would somebody choose the most despised career in ancient Judea? Why else would you choose that? He has nothing left to lose and he's thinking I'll show them.

I mean think back on those four ways that we seek approval. Zacchaeus is striking out on the first three out of four. Appearance, he's a little man in a society that sees that as a curse from God. I mean approval, you see in a minute everybody calls him a sinner. Achievement, everything he'd done in his life was seen as treason and so he is totally focused on affluence. I'm going to become so wealthy. I'm gonna have a beautiful house in the Palm Springs of my day. I'm gonna be wealthier than all those kids who call me all those names. But it's not working. He is unhappy and there's something about Jesus that just magnetically draws him in. And so he wants to go see him. Jesus coming down, passing through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem for Palm Sunday.

And in just a few chapters we find out by Luke's description, the crowds that had come for the festival were following Jesus. There were hundreds of thousands of people that would come to Jerusalem for the festival. So Jesus is a major celebrity leading a parade of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. It's not the 20 ill-paid extras that you see in a movie. This is a throng, Beatlemania level, and Zacchaeus, being a small man, cannot get to see Jesus. So verse 4, "He ran ahead and climbed a sycamore fig tree to see him," since Jesus was coming that way.

I want you to be able to accurately visualize this. So here's a picture of a sycamore fig tree. You see the people down in the right-hand corner, how big this is? The reason I want you to see this is because in our world here in Santa Cruz we imagine somebody climbing a tall tree. We imagine a redwood. We imagine little Zacchaeus kind of whipping around on the top of a redwood. He's 200 feet above the road. But what happened in this kind of a fig tree is he climbs up and over the road. He's on a branch hanging over the road waiting to see this uber celebrity Jesus when this happens. Rest of verse 4, "When Jesus reached the spot he looked up." Just imagine the electricity here. He sees Zacchaeus and he makes eye contact.

I will never forget when Laurie and I had a celebrity encounter in Europe. We were very young, no kids yet. We backpacked through Europe and in London it was the night before we had to leave and we saw some barricades up and somebody told us, "Princess Diana is in there at that theater seeing a play." So we just kind of waited at the barricades for about an hour. Press started showing up and sure enough out comes Princess Diana and we're right next to her. There's nobody between us and Princess Diana. We're about more like this close and she stops and she looks at me, makes eye contact right at me and just stops and waves and says, "It's the Grand Marshal of the Aptos parade." No, she doesn't say that. We were kind of equal. We were on equal planes because of that. No, she stops and she looks at us and I reached out and I took my camera and I go, "Oh my goodness!" And I was out of film, had just taken my last picture. I kid you not. Kid you not. The good news is there were some newspaper photographers there and we pick up the paper the next morning and open it up and there's a picture of the moment that Princess Diana stopped and looked. She is making eye contact in this moment with me.

Yes, thank you very much. Well now, what would have happened if she not only would have stopped and made eye contact but if what if she would have stopped and said, "René, René Sleptfer and Laurie, I'm coming over to your youth hostel room right now and we're gonna have dinner together." I would have stopped and had a heart attack right then, right? Well that is exactly what happens in this story because what you see is not just no matter how small I am, Jesus sees me. Jesus not only sees me, Jesus also values me. No matter what others say about me, no matter how others mistreat me, Jesus values me.

You say, "How do you see this in this story?" Watch this because look at the next thing that happens. Jesus stops, makes eye contact, and he says, "Zacchaeus!" Again, do you see what is happening here? He calls Zacchaeus by name and remember what his name means? What does it mean? Pure one. Righteous one. He stops and he looks at this despised man in this degrading position and he's probably hoping nobody notices him hanging there on that branch and he stops and says, "Hey, pure one!" Why does Luke include this detail? I'm guessing it had been decades since anyone had called him by his real name. He's been hearing jerk, thief, crook, traitor, and Jesus stops and goes, "Hey, righteous one!" It's like in the Hebrew Scriptures where the angel of God says to Gideon when he's cowering in a hole hoping nobody notices him and the angel of God shows up and says, "Greetings, mighty man of valor!" This is how God is.

God sees the masterpiece that he created you to be even when no one else does, even when you can't see it anymore. And this is so important because some of you have had some pretty mean things said about you. Some of you remember the names you were called, maybe even by your own mom, by your own dad, by authority figures in your life. Stupid. You'll never amount to anything. Why can't you be like your brother? Why can't you be like your sister? And so you have a hard time feeling good about yourself. But what matters is not the names they called you, but the name that God calls you. And no matter what they said about you, no matter what name you call yourself, God says, "I see past the labels and I see what I made you to be. I see that there's a destiny for you. There's a purpose for you that goes far beyond what you've been living up to because that's what everybody else has told you about you."

God says, "You're my son, you're my daughter, you are destined to be righteous and pure and a masterpiece and I don't care about what anybody else says. I have never given up on that. Nobody else may notice you and I don't know where you are right now in your life, but Jesus sees you out on that limb and he looks at you right in the eye and he says, "I value you, I treasure you, you have a destiny." And watch this, Jesus says to Zacchaeus, "Come down immediately, I must stay at your house today." Jesus doesn't even wait for an invitation. And the whole point of this story is this is a template for how Jesus operates all the time.

Before you've cleaned up your act, before you've repented like the religious people maybe want you to repent, when you feel like you're just so far gone God probably finds you disgusting, Jesus goes, "Hey, pure one, I'm inviting myself over into your life right now. Let's spend some time together because you've been hurt and you've had plenty of time to hurt other people too with your own personal brand of selfishness just like Zacchaeus did. You've had things done to you that have shamed you and you have done things that you are ashamed of just like Zacchaeus. I know I have and I know this Zacchaeus never would have even considered inviting Jesus to come to his house and sometimes I feel like honestly I'm not kidding. You don't know the kinds of things I think or the things in my past, not all of them, and sometimes I think God couldn't possibly want me to be a pastor. God couldn't possibly really love me and want to have a relationship with me and Jesus says, "Oh yes I do," and he takes the initiative because I don't dare to take a step toward him. He says, "Come on, let's get together. I want to have a relationship with you."

And then verse 6, "So he, Zacchaeus, came down at once and welcomed him gladly." But check this out. Do the religious people watching this go, "Yeah Jesus, Zacchaeus has repented. Hooray!" No. All the people saw this and began to mutter. He has gone to be the guest of a sinner. I want to show you something. Audience participation time here. The word "mutter" in the Greek is an onomatopoetic word. Do you remember what onomatopoetic words were from English class? They are words that sound like what they define, right? So this word means to mutter and the Greek word here is Diago-guzzo because this is what the people sounded like. Diago-guzzo. Try saying that out loud. Diago-guzzo. Say it again, Diago-guzzo. That sounds really good. Let's try an audience experiment here. Try saying that three times in a row and just listen to what it sounds like. Ready? Doesn't that sound like muttering, right? And Luke is saying, "That's what people sound like." That's what their murmuring sounded like.

Now, check this out. Several times in Luke, people Diago-guzzo about Jesus and they're always complaining about the same thing. What do you think it is? Luke 5:30. "The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining," same word, goguzzo, "to his disciples saying, 'Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?'" Luke 15:1. "Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus and the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling," Diago-guzzo, same word, "saying, 'This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.'" You know what? I've received a lot of complaints as a pastor. I have. That happens in churches and a lot of them I've deserved. They've been true, accurate. But never once to my memory has somebody complained that I am eating with the wrong people. Has anybody ever made that complaint about you? Look at them eating with the wrong people. That's a shame because maybe that means that we're not behaving like Jesus.

I want to have as my goal, if people complain about this church, people complain about me, what they're complaining about is, "He's being too gracious! How dare he go out and eat with those people? Doesn't he know that those people are bad people?" People are gonna complain about you anyway, they're gonna complain about me anyway, so why don't we make our goal to have them complain about exactly what they complain about regarding Jesus Christ? Because Jesus, watch this, skipping to the end of verse 9, here's what Jesus says to his critics, "This man too is a son of Abraham." What's that mean? The Bible says again and again, it's not genetics that makes you a true son or daughter of Abraham. It's whether you live by faith in the Lord and his promises. What's that mean? Abraham had such faith in what God said that he dared to take a step forward into his new life, even though he didn't understand it all. He was drawn by God's promises and said, "You know what? I'm gonna put my faith in that even though I don't understand it all and I'm gonna move forward in that direction." And when we live like that, then we are true sons and true daughters of Abraham, children of God.

And that leads right to point three, no matter what my struggle, Jesus transforms me. See, emphasizing grace does not mean excusing sin. In fact, grace is the only effective means of dealing with sin because it transforms people from the inside out like this, verse 8, "But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, 'Look Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor.'" Now stop right there. Why was that important for Zacchaeus? The Bible doesn't ask everybody to give half their possessions to the poor when they become believers. Remember those four ways we judge our worth. Those things become our gods. Zacchaeus was focused on affluence. That's why for him, this moment was something special because he was saying, "That's no longer my God. I'll keep what makes me comfortable, I'm sure more than comfortable, but I'm gonna give away half of it." Because his self-worth is no longer hinging on affluence. "And if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I'll pay back four times the amount." Now before you skip over that detail, have you ever wondered where in the world he came up with this four times the amount that he just pulled this out of thin air? Was it just a result of kind of over-enthusiasm?

Check this out. There was an ancient Jewish formula for restitution that's in the law of Moses in the Bible. And there were three levels, four simple fraud, and this is in Numbers 5, 6, and 7, you added 20% to whatever you defrauded someone of. It was X plus 20%. For robbery, and this is in Exodus 22, when you snuck into somebody's house and robbed them, you had to pay back twice what you stole, 2X. But for robbery with assault, also Exodus 22, you had to pay back four times what you stole, 4X. So do you see what's happening here? Zacchaeus is saying, "Oh my goodness, what an hour ago I was excusing in my life defensively. You know people have made fun of me, I'm gonna show them, and this is my right. I'm chief tax collector." What he'd been rationalizing away, like an hour later he's going, "I see that as the worst kind of robbery there is. I see that as I assaulted and oppressed these people." And what you're seeing here is something interesting that happens at a true conversion, something...there are two things that happen that almost seem like they're opposites.

When Jesus comes into your life, you...number one, you see your own sin as worse than you ever admitted. At the same time, you see God's mercy as greater than you ever imagined. And you see those two things at the same time. You go, "I've been excusing all of this stuff. Oh my goodness, it's worse than I could ever admit to myself. Yet God loves me and has a destiny for me greater than I could ever dare to dream." And that's the emotion that you just see pouring out of this. And that's what happens when you come to know Jesus Christ. And what's interesting to me about this story is there's not even a record of Jesus telling Zacchaeus to repent. It's not like Zacchaeus...Jesus goes, "Zacchaeus, open your Bible to the Old Testament law and let's look at the penalty for assaulting people with robbery because that's what you've been doing, shaking his finger, bad dog, bad dog." There's no record of that. Jesus is just eating with Zacchaeus and telling him about the kingdom of heaven. And Zacchaeus is so transformed by this relationship that he has this light bulb moment. It's just being with Jesus that transforms him.

And this happens...and it's different whatever your struggle is, you see? You start to see it differently. One time after church, right here after the Saturday night service, a man came up and I could tell he'd been crying and he pulled something out of a paper bag and he hands me his entire stash of pot. The whole thing he just gives it to me. I'm thinking, "Is this a 2020 donation? What's happening here?" And he said, "I just...I need to give this up and I want to give this to you as a symbol before God that it's...this is done in my life." And of course we talked about the tools we have for that, the 12-step recovery groups and so on. But I said, "Can I ask you a question?" I said, "What sermon did I give that inspired you to give up marijuana?" And he said, "You never talked about marijuana. You talked about Jesus." And he said, "The closer I got to Jesus, the more I could just sense him saying, 'You know, you call me your Lord but I'm not Lord of your life. You're enslaved to this addiction and I don't want you to be a slave. And so I want you to give that up so you can be set free.'" Now that's what it was for him and I'm so glad because Mark Spurlock's made great strides since then but I... But for you, it's...whatever your struggle is, it's gonna be something different. Maybe for you it means you'll go, "Oh my goodness, how have I been treating my spouse? It's unbelievable." And you'll have this light bulb moment. Or you'll go, "What kind of media consumption have I been engaging in? Why have I been doing that to my mind?" And you'll be transformed and you'll take a stand like Zacchaeus did and you'll go, "From now on, I'm not doing that anymore." And it's different depending on who you are because Jesus deals with you personally, looks at you in the eye, sees you, values you, and transforms you.

And then look at the first part of verse 9, "Jesus said to him, 'Today salvation has come to this house.'" Now don't get this wrong, he's not saying Zacchaeus was saved because he gave back the money, he's saying he gave back the money because he was saved. Do you see that? This is not the penance of a troubled heart, it's the evidence of a transformed heart. Salvation is not about a ticket to heaven, it's about God forgives me and loves me and that transforms me and it's got ripple effects to everybody around you. It's not the penance of a troubled heart, it's the evidence of a transformed heart. And then don't miss the final point, the whole point of the story, no matter how far I've gone, Jesus seeks me. He seeks me and he seeks you.

Look at Luke 19:10, the end of this story, and I want us all to read this out loud together. Let me hear you. "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost," say it again with me, "for the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost." Do you understand how awesome this is? That the whole point of God coming as Jesus was not to condemn you but to seek you and to save you. This is huge because in my observation as a pastor some people are afraid to come to God because they're afraid he's going to just lecture them and berate them and almost push them away. But he came to seek you, his lost lamb, his lost child, because he loves you so much.

One time when Laurie and I lived near Reno, Nevada, when our oldest son Jonathan was just a toddler, it was Christmas time and we were shopping there and Laurie said to me, "Now René, I want to go by myself and do some shopping for you and for Jonathan. So I'm just gonna go by myself and I want you and Jonathan to stay here in the food court." And then she said, "René, look at me, look at me in the eyes right now, René." René, what? She said, "Do not lose Jonathan. Keep, and he's only a toddler. Keep your eyes on Jonathan." He said, "Of course I will not lose Jonathan. Go enjoy shopping." So she left. Guess what happened instantly? I lost Jonathan. He was gone. I mean I looked away for maybe like 30 seconds and I couldn't see him anymore around me and so I kind of, I thought maybe he's just like right behind, he's little, so he's right behind this clump of people and he wasn't there and then I looked around all the tables around the food court and he wasn't there and I started to feel this panic rise in my throat. Anybody, has anybody ever felt that before with a child? Thank you that I'm not a horrible dad and I started looking for him and honestly my first thought was, "Lori is going to kill me." I was more afraid of that than anything so I look around as I'm racing around the mall now I see a crowd of people pointing and laughing at a display window. It's the display window of a men's store, one of those Patrick James men's stores. Do you remember those? And I'm wondering, "What are they all pointing at?" And I go and I look and it's a display window that has these half-torsoed mannequins cut off here and here because they're displaying Christmas underwear in the window, all these mannequins and making a figure eight around all the mannequin torsos is a train, a little toy train and in the middle of the display window behind glass is my two and a half year old son Jonathan clapping and going choo choo twain, choo choo twain and he had apparently seen the train, gone into the store, found the little half door that led into the display window and climbed in. So now he's there behind glass, everybody's pointing to him and laughing and I think, "Oh my goodness." So I go into the store and I open up the little window and I go, "Jonathan, Jonathan, get over here, get over here." And he looks at me and he climbs further into the display window and I'm reaching in, I can't find him, so I have to climb in there like this as I'm looking up and as if I'm pointing up, I'm knocking over the mannequins and knocking the train off its tracks and I'm pulling him through the window and all of these men who've also been abandoned by their wives are just looking at me because they know exactly what happened and I am making their holiday, best moment ever for them. So I finally get Jonathan out and I tell him as we go back to the food court, "Jonathan, look at Daddy, this will be our little secret. We will never tell mommy ever." And in fact, this morning is the first morning Laurie has ever heard that story. That's not true, that's not true.

Why do I tell that story? You know the panic I felt, the longing I felt, the deep desire I felt to find my lost son and rescue him. That is how God feels about you. He's not sitting up in him. You know sometimes I think we look at these verses and we think that they, that Jesus says, "The Son of Man came to judge and condemn." Or "The Son of Man came to reluctantly save if you perform well and meet my standards." No, he came to seek you and to climb into the display window and endure the mockery of all the people wondering why he's humiliating himself that way because he loves you so much. He means God feels about you exactly like I felt about my lost son. He's been seeking and seeking and seeking you in order to save you.

And so the big question is how should I respond? Well remember how it says Zacchaeus came down at once and welcomed him gladly. And I want to just suggest that you do the same. Maybe you've been away from church your whole life. You've never really been a part of any faith community. Maybe you're coming back to check it out after a long time away. Maybe you've been coming for a number of weeks or even months. Let me just land the plane with this. Did you notice how Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house." It turns out that the word today is an important word in the Gospel of Luke. It's a recurring theme. Watch this, some of the verses, "Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you." Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. I must stay at your house today. Today salvation has come. I tell you the truth. Today you will be with me in paradise. The point, God is at work in your life not in some distant biblical yesterday and not in some far-off future tomorrow. But right now today and he brought you here today because he's been seeking and seeking and seeking you.

And my strong suggestion to you is if you know about him but you've never said yes then today's your day. Today to welcome him gladly. And let's just pray together. Would you bow your heads and just close your eyes with me? And as our eyes are closed, let me just say this, I don't know what you're going through but I do know this. Jesus sees you and he values you no matter what labels, no matter how one-dimensional people have been trying to make you. He values you and he can transform you. And he seeks you. He's seeking you right now. He said wherever two or three are gathered together there I am in the midst of them and I believe that means he is here. And he looks at you and he says, "Hey my child, my pure one, my righteous one. I'm inviting myself into your life right now." And so I just want to invite you to come down out of the tree where you've been watching Jesus and run into the loving arms of the Savior.

Would you just pray this prayer with me just silently in your heart if that's the intent of your heart? Dear Jesus, thank you for the story of Zacchaeus in the Bible. Thank you that no matter how small I feel you see everything in my life. You know my name. Thank you that no matter what I have done you still value me. And you invite yourself into my life still. You want a relationship, not a religion but a relationship. Thank you that no matter what other people say about me you say this is my child. This is a son, a daughter of Abraham. It's hard for even me to see myself that way sometimes God but you see myself that way. And so today I accept your invitation and I receive you into my life. I welcome you gladly. And I don't understand everything that means but I want to have that relationship so I can start listening to your direction. Now please start making the changes in me that you know need to be made. In your name I pray. Amen.