Thoughts From Luke - Day 81

                                                 Luke 19:1-10

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. ² A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. ³ He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. ⁴ So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
⁵ When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” ⁶ So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
⁷ All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”
⁸ But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
⁹ Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰ For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”


           As I look at this passage, several things jump out at me. First, why Zaccheus? In a throng of spectators and listeners, Jesus called out Zaccheus by name and had a heart encounter with him, not anyone else. I was reading a testimony by a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds- Lorenzen. He was a youth in California hanging out with a few other teens on the beach up to no good when an old guy came up to them and told them about Jesus. Everyone mocked the old guy and made fun of him as they continued on their way. However, the guy's words about Jesus haunted Lorenzen that night as he lay in bed. They resonated truth and they were what he needed and he gave his life to Christ. Why him and not all the other people? You can talk about election etc., but the fact is that his heart at that point in his life was ripe for the harvest. The fallow ground was broken up ready to receive the seed. I have to believe that Jesus recognized a ready heart in Nicodemus so He called him out. We don't usually have that advantage so we share, like the old man, in hopes that some seed will fall on fertile soil. We are mocked, we are rejected, and like the man who shared with him, we probably never find out that some received Christ. One of my favorite accounts was when a patient saw me at Walmart and came up to me and said, "Eight years ago I was at your office and you had a Focus on the Family handout called Living With an Unsaved Spouse. I took it home because I wanted to know what to do about my husband and when I read it, I realized that I was the unsaved spouse! I asked Jesus into my heart and just wanted to tell you." Probably the only person that benefitted from the hundreds of dollars of pamphlets I bought from them but I was sowing seed or throwing out lures and caught a fish! (Which does resonate with my fishing experiences of casting all day long and usually catching one at most)

         The second thing I notice is that Jesus knew Zaccheus was saved. Jesus could see a person's heart and knew that the gospel "took". We don't have that advantage. We don't know, for example when we come home from a mission trip and say 50 people prayed to receive Christ, how many of those were rocky soil, thorny soil, or good soil. We don't know how many of those, if any, will greet us in Heaven and say "I'm here because you shared Christ with me". We can't see inside people's hearts and see if they were truly born again. However there is a sign externally that we can see that would lead us to believe that salvation has truly come to this home and that sign is life change. Zaccheus no longer cheated anyone and returned the money that he had obtained dishonestly, with interest. What is the sign of life change in you? A friend of mine, Dana, from Sunday School, tells of his drunken, promiscuous life before Christ and you can't even picture it now. When he hears guys on the construction sight cursing with coarse jesting, he tells them his testimony how he used to talk like that and where that lifestyle led him - to nearly taking his life. My wife, as a new believer, when we first started dating, was playing Monopoly with me and when I refused to trade her a property, she cussed at me and threw the board at me. It's hard to even imagine her ever cussing now. We would read the Bible in the Library and she would be so embarrassed that her friends would see her that she would constantly get up and go to the bathroom or make phone calls. Now she disciples women in Starbucks.

        Could people say by looking at you, "Wow, you have changed!" "What has happened to you, you are like a different person?" Or when you look at old videos of yourself, do you not like what you see? I don't mean the weight, clothes, hairstyle - I'm talking about the way you behave, talk, countenance. Do you see a difference now? If so, then my guess is that the gospel "took". If not you have to wonder if you never really were born again.