…and Jesus Feasted While Others Fasted…

Series: …AND… | The Movement of God and His People through Mark
Title: Week 5 …and Jesus Feasted While Others Fasted…
Text: Mark 2:13-22

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

My name is Andrew Haws. I am one of the leaders here. And we have been going through the book of Matthew for the last, or sorry, the book of Mark for the last several weeks. And we've titled this sermon series And because as you walk through Mark, you get this fast-paced account of Jesus, his life, his death, his burial, his resurrection, his teachings. And what you see is Mark continues to see a scene and then another scene and another scene, another scene, and that and just keeps repeating. And what Mark's doing is he's creating this literary wave of the movement of Jesus. And we as readers are meant to be swept up in it, but not just in Jesus' movement. We're actually being invited to be swept up in Jesus himself. Mark is an invitation for you and I to encounter God with us in the person of Jesus. And so we want to continue that today. In Mark chapter one, verse 15, Mark describes the beginning of Jesus' uh ministry and mission by saying that Jesus goes and he starts proclaiming this good news message, the gospel of the kingdom of God. This message that God is coming in and through Jesus to bring his realm to bear on our reality. And that we are being invited to repent. That's just a way of saying that we are being invited to switch our allegiance from the world, from ourselves, from sin, from rebellion, and switch it to Jesus and be part of his kingdom and join him. And as he continues on, we see these different little pockets and pictures of what that kingdom looks like. But as we entered into chapter two last week, Andrew Johnson gave us this great picture of what happens when the kingdom of God crashes into the religion of man. And my hope is as we continue to look through this today, as we see this confrontation continue, that you will see that Jesus is inviting you into a way of life that is so radically different and so filled with joy, it can only be described like a feast or a party. And yet, it will require you to utterly surrender everything you have and everything you are to fully enjoy it. There is no amount of religious work that you can do to enter into that feast. You must fully let go and let Jesus do the work for you. So if you have your Bibles, let's jump into that passage that we read just a moment ago, Mark chapter 2, and I'm gonna just read through that first verse again. Mark chapter 2, verse 13. Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A great, a large crowd came to him and he began to teach them. As he was walking along, he saw Levi's son, Levi, the son of Alpheus, sitting in the tax collector's booth. Follow me, Jesus told him. Now I want to pause this here because if you were with us a couple weeks ago, this sounds like a story that we just read earlier in chapter one. Jesus once again is walking by the lake. Once again, he sees someone at their job. The first story was about fishermen. But what's significantly different about this story is the person of Levi. How many of you like paying taxes? I don't see a single hand. I mean, we intrinsically know that taxes is kind of an icky thing. I mean, probably most of us would admit they're probably good. It's good that we have money that we distribute to pay for hospitals and teachers and roads and all of those things that are necessary. But we kind of have this idea that like taxes are kind of like this necessary evil. Well, in Jesus' day and age, you had that, but then add it to the reality that the person who was taking your taxes was allying themselves with an occupying power, taking your money so that they could continue to subject you to oppression. And that's who Levi was. Levi was a tax collector who was likely collecting taxes at a place in which the nation of Israel had been divided into four different sections. And this was an intersection between two of those. He was working for a puppet king who was set in charge by Rome, who would extract money from the people to fatten his own purse and then pay for Rome to have soldiers to control the populace. So Levi was not just a tax collector. Levi was a traitor. He was someone who betrayed his own people. And he didn't just betray his own people, he did so to fatten his own purse. Because tax collectors didn't simply collect taxes for someone else. The way that they were incentivized to do that is that they could set the tax rates. And so Levi was likely not simply paying or extracting the tax that was needed, but adding extra so that he himself could get rich on the backs of his own people. Levi was considered a sinner, an outcast, a traitor, someone who had turned his back on his God and his nation. The most unlikely person that anyone from the inside looking out would say the kingdom of God should be open to. We haven't betrayed our people, but but we kind of feel like we're on the outside and we're wondering: is there a place for me in here? Is there a place for me in God's kingdom? Maybe it's been a while since you've been to a church gathering and you're like, I don't, is this still something that I can be part of? Maybe you're looking back at your life and there is a list of broken relationships, a list of things that you regret, a list of sorrows and pain that you've left behind you. And you're here this morning, and the question that is ringing through your mind is Is there a place for me in God's kingdom? Should I even be here? I remember talking with a gal one time and she was like, I can't go to church because as soon as I walk through a church building, I'm gonna get struck by fire from heaven. I was like, good thing we meet in the theater. I love this though. Jesus knows all this. He can see it. Literally, Levi is sitting there in the tax booth. He is completely throwing in his allegiance to the puppet king of Rome. And Jesus says, Come follow me, and listen to how Levi responds.

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Levi got up and followed him. I don't want you to miss this. Levi didn't just simply leave a job. Levi changed his allegiance.

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See, Levi had looked to this career path, this job, this calling, if you will, to give him satisfaction, to give him meaning. It made him rich, it made him wealthy. It didn't matter that it did so on the backs of others. This was his God, this was his allegiance, this was the thing that gave him satisfaction and meaning. And along comes Jesus and says, I have a better way. And what does Levi do? He doesn't just simply leave a job behind, he leaves an allegiance behind. He says, I've been serving this king, and I am now joining the kingdom of God. Did he have to make himself clean? No. Did he have to make himself right? No. Did Jesus say, hey, you should shape up and then you can come and follow me? No. Jesus simply saw where he was at and said, it's time to change. And Levi said, yes. So if you're here today and you're sitting on the fence and you're like, I don't know. I don't know if there's room for the kingdom of God, I don't know if there's room for me in the kingdom of God. I want you to see this. There is room. There is a God who is coming alongside you. And he's saying, follow me. And he's not saying you have to get yourself right. He's not saying you have to make yourself perfect.

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He's simply saying, join my team. And you got a choice to make. Are you prepared to switch your allegiance? That's a recruitment of Levi.

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And then we move into the response, and not only is there this immediate surrender, this immediate idea of switching allegiances, of walking away from the things that he was looking to, the idols that he worshipped, but then he does something extraordinary. He leaves behind his allegiance, but he doesn't leave behind the people that he interacted with. So it says in verse 15, while Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house. So again, this is Mark's fast pace, right? There's no like good transition here. It's just like Levi follows him, and then next scene, Jesus sitting there having dinner. While Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. So I love this. Not only does Levi respond and surrender, not only does he walk away from power, from money, from the things that he'd been worshiping, the things that he'd been looking to to give him satisfaction, meaning. But then he invites the people who he's uniquely connected to to encounter the same Jesus that called him.

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Don't miss this church.

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There's a beautiful picture of what Jesus wants us to understand about him, which is this what Jesus does to you, he wants to do through you. See, I think sometimes we look at our past, we look at the things that we've gone through, and we think, how can anything good ever come of this? And we're we're racked with shame or we're racked with guilt. But what I love is that Jesus not only accepts Levi, but he redeems Levi's past for his goodness. Because Levi has been able to uniquely interact with other people who have been believing the same things, who have had the same allegiances, and he has been able to go back to them and say, You have been thinking this, you are acting this way, but guess what? There is something better, and I know because I know how you think, I know how you act. Let me tell you why I made that change, and the people see that and they go to Jesus.

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Some of you have these stories in your history, broken marriages, painful relationships, bad decisions, addictions that you've battled and had to overcome.

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And the beautiful thing is what Jesus is inviting us to understand is that he doesn't just want to heal those, but he actually wants to redeem them, which means you're gonna have an opportunity at some point to walk alongside another person who is going through that same thing and say, listen, there is a God who is bigger than this moment for you. Come meet him. And you're gonna have that ability in a way that is beautifully unique, that someone else who has not gone through those experiences, who's not had that pain, who has not had that moment of suffering, who has not had that failure, could ever do. And it's not just our mistakes that color this. Sometimes it's our history. One of the things I love about our church is that our church is filled with people from all over the world. We have people from almost every continent that are part of our church. God doesn't want to just include you into his kingdom, but he wants to take the experiences that you've had and redeem them to invite others. Maybe you speak a language, a heart language, a birth language that is different than English or French, our national languages. And they're gonna be someone else who comes from your homeland. And you're gonna be able to share the faith and the hope that you have in Jesus simply because you understand the culture, you understand the language in a way that is unique. Because what Levi is showing us here, what Jesus wants us to see as we encounter him in the story, is that what God does to you, he wants to do through you. So who are the people in your life that you have a unique access to, that Jesus is inviting you to invite them into a relationship with him?

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This is the response of Levi.

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But what we see next is there's this other group of people, this religious group of people who were sitting there and watching this from the outside. Listen to the reaction. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and the tax collectors, they asked his disciples, why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? So we don't know where they came from, but somewhere in town, there's this group of really ultra-religious leaders, the Pharisees who are teachers of the law, the people who are the model citizens, the ones who got it all together, the ones who tell you how you ought to live and show you how you ought to live by their actions. And they are sitting on the outside of the scene looking in, and they're like, hey, Jesus, what are you doing? Like, don't you know that person's reputation? Don't you know what they're like? Don't you know how broken and sinful they are? You shouldn't touch that. You're gonna be tarnished. Come and hang with us. We're the people that you should be spending time with. We're the ones that you should care about. We are so much better than them. There's this group of ultra-religious people, and they are looking at the situation and they cannot find any joy in it. Like Jesus literally, he's having a feast, he's having a party at Levi's house. All these people who are on the edges of society, people who are considered the worst of the worst, are coming to him. And the religious leaders are like, why are you hanging out with them? They are so filled with self-righteous condemnation and judgment for those other people that they're missing an opportunity to be with Jesus. There's a parable that Jesus tells in Luke's gospel. I think it's Luke Luke chapter 15. It's commonly called the parable of the prodigal son. It's interesting because it actually is a parable about two sons. And in this scene that we have is really a picture of the first son. If you're familiar with the story, you know that there's a son and he goes to his father and he says, Father, I want you to, essentially, I wish you were dead and I could have your stuff. That's basically what he says. And the father in sorrow says, like, I'm not gonna keep you here if you don't want to be here. So he liquidates his assets and gives his son his share of the inheritance. And the son, I mean, the son goes out and blows it. You know, he blows it. He spends it on all the dumb, stupid, fickle, fruitless things. And he comes to a moment where he realizes, man, my life was so much better when I was just with my father. I need to go back and repent. And he expects that his father is gonna rain down condemnation on him. And so he's like, I'm just gonna ask for the bare minimum that I can because it's still better than where I'm at. And as he's preparing his speech and he's walking towards his father, his father sees him coming. And far from bringing pain and shame and condemnation, his father runs to him, his father embraces him, his father welcomes him, he throws a party because his son was lost and now he's found. This is what Jesus is doing. This is what Jesus is showing right here as he sits and feasts with Levi and the tax collectors and the sinners. But the Pharisees, they're like the older son. The older son out in the fields, slaving away, working hard, doing everything he can to be a good, dutiful son, so that he can come to the day when he receives her and his inheritance and he can go to his father and say, You owe me. I earned it. He finds out his brother's home and they're throwing a party, and he is furious. He will not go into the party. All he can do is sit there and judge the younger brother, and he judges his father for accepting the younger brother back. His father, in great and dignified manner, comes out to him and pleads with him to come and enter into the gladness of the party. And the self-righteous older son looks at his father and says, I have slaved, I have worked for everything I have, and you have given me nothing. And the father says, Son, everything I have has been yours. The father's sitting there and he's saying, It's all yours, because I am yours. The father, in the same way that he wanted the relationship with his younger son, wants the relationship with his older son. The older son, though, just wants what he can get from his father. In the same way, the Pharisees, the religious leaders, they wanted what they could get from God. They wanted to live such righteous lives, and we'll unpack this a little bit more in a second, that they could go to God and say, You owe me. And so they could not enter into the joy, they could not accept this radical grace because it would actually expose their own need. There are multiple ways to avoid God. And religion can be just as much a way of revoiding God as rebellion. So Jesus looks at the situation and he rebukes the religious leaders. On hearing this, Jesus said to them, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. He's acknowledging that for you to get well, you have to first admit you have an issue. Any other like typical dudes out there who like you get sick and you're like just rub some dirt on it, like you know, like I'm just a muscle through it. Like I have a cold, I might be puking up a lung, but I'm like, I'm gonna get to work and I'm just gonna, you know, I'm like that. Well, okay. Shannon will be like, no, you're a big baby when you get a man cold. But uh I am like, I get an injury and I'm like, it's okay, like slap a band-aid on it and we'll call it a day. So I had this medical issue. I will not, uh, I will not disgust you with the details of this medical issue. I had a medical issue a couple months ago. And um, and I'm like, you know what? It's a medical issue, but it'll probably go away. It'll fix itself. I'm married to a nurse. She finds out that I have this medical issue, and she's like, No, you're going to the clinic. So I go into the urgent care clinic. It was a good thing that I went because I actually had a problem and I actually needed some help. And I would not have gotten better. I could have potentially gotten much, much worse if I hadn't gotten in to get healed. But I had to first admit that I had a need, or have a wife who would admit it for me. See, what Jesus is saying here is not that the Pharisees are without need. He's saying, I've come to the people who actually know that they need me, who are saying, Yes, I need you. In fact, in the most famous sermon in all of the world, Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5, it starts off, Jesus says this blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

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Jesus is saying it's a prerequisite that you know that you have need.

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If you're here this morning and you don't think you need Jesus, you're gonna be like a person who thinks you're alright and doesn't get medical help that you desperately need.

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But if you're here this morning, you're like, man, my life's jacked up.

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There's so much that I don't have right. I don't feel like I'm nailed as a parent, as a spouse, as a person. Jesus, hang, there is space for you in my kingdom because I came for you.

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See, Jesus' rebuke here cuts right to the heart of the problem.

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He said it's it's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. In other words, the issue isn't that the Pharisees are too sinful to come to the table, it's that they don't think they need healing at all.

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And when you don't think you're sick, guess what? Grace feels unnecessary.

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The same invitation that invited the tax collectors and sinners to eat what Jesus was open to the Pharisees. But they didn't think they needed grace. And so they couldn't accept it. And because they couldn't accept it, the joy that was being lived out in front of them at the table felt inappropriate. And the feast that Jesus had felt irresponsible. So instead of entering the party, they stayed outside. And as we'll see in a moment, they stayed outside fasting, rehearsing their obedience, waiting for God in a way that kept them in control. Like the older brother we described in the parable of the prodigal son, they believed faithfulness should earn them a seat at the table. And in trying to prove that they were worthy, they missed the very thing that they claimed to be waiting for.

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God to intersect with their reality.

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So that's why the next question that we see posed, it's not really about food. It's all about how we think we are supposed to relate to God. Jesus continues on. So people are looking at these two pictures side by side. Here's Jesus, and he is coming around. He's teaching and preaching. He seems like a religious guy, but then he's doing this thing that doesn't seem very religious. He's having a party. And there's these ultra-religious leaders, and they're teaching and inviting people into a way of religion. And they seem very spiritual because they're going through the emotions. They're doing these things that seem so religious and so good and so important. And people are like, I don't know, which one should I follow? Should I follow this Jesus guy? But he just he seems like maybe he's not right here. Should I follow these Pharisees who seem like they kind of got their stuff together? And Jesus says to them, How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot so long as they have him with them. But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast. Now, before I move forward here, there's something I want to just let you know. In the ancient Jewish mindset, there was this picture that had developed over time as they looked back over their scriptures. And the picture was a metaphor of what eternity with God was to look like. And it was a feast, a banquet. In fact, in the book of Matthew, Jesus uses this metaphor explicitly when he says, many will come from east to west and sit at the table of Abraham on that day. This was a common picture that people had of the afterlife, of a time when God would come and restore all things. It was described as a feast. And what Jesus is actually doing here is he's not just simply having a banquet with sinners and tax collectors. He is actually living out an image in front of the Jewish people that they were very familiar with. A picture to show them that God had come to fulfill what he had promised. Connected to this was another image. The image of a banquet that was a wedding banquet. Throughout the prophets, God recognized that his people were wayward. They strayed, and he often used the metaphor of a husband and a wayward wife. God was a faithful husband who married this woman who did not want to stay faithful, and she would chase after everything that came before her. In fact, she would prostitute herself, sell herself to men, complete disregard for her husband, her love, and herself. And yet the claim of the prophets was that God was a faithful husband who would stop at nothing to win his wife back, to rescue her, who'd bring her back to him, despite how often she strayed. So when Jesus talks about this wedding banquet, again, he's not just simply talking about a wedding, he's bringing this image for the Pharisees to explicitly see and the people around him to explicitly see what's going on here. Yes, Israel was a wayward wife. So who would you expect at the banquet? The wayward people, the tax collectors, the sinners. Jesus was literally fulfilling right in front of them what God had promised, and they were missing it because they were so concentrated on their own religious practices. For the Pharisees, fasting wasn't about connection to God so much as it was about obligating God to them. In that day and age, the way that fasting worked is it was a symbol of group lament. Similar to actually what we do in Canada when some government official looks back at some past tragedy or atrocity and issues some kind of apology. We call that virtue signaling here. This was an ancient way of virtue signaling. The Pharisees would find these days in which they were supposed to remember Israel's sin, remember Israel's rebellion against God, and they would fast openly as a way of saying, look at how sad we are for the way our ancestors failed God. It was a way to have the people around them look and say, Oh, look how holy they are. Oh, look how good they are. And a way for them to look at God and say, look, we're not like them. Look at how sad we are for what they did. Look at us, God. Now you can't punish us because we are not as bad as our ancestors.

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That was what they were doing. And Jesus says, that's not appropriate.

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That's not appropriate for this moment. Because God has come to rescue, renew, and redeem his people. This is a time for celebration. This is a time for a party. This is a time for the great wedding feast that you are invited to. And the sad thing is that they were so concentrated on fasting that they missed the feast. Sometimes I think we can go through all of these religious rituals. We can go through the motions of religion, read our Bibles, come to a church gathering, pray over meals. And we kind of do it ritualistically. And really, what we're trying to do is say, God, look at the good things I've done.

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Now you got to bless me. Now, now you owe me one.

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Now, here's what I don't want us to miss. Jesus isn't saying that fasting in and of itself is bad. In fact, he goes on to say there's going to come a time when he's gone and his followers, us, Christians today, like we're going to be called to fast. And we'll talk about that a little bit more as we enter into the Lenten season because it is actually a really beautiful practice, but that practice flows out of relationship. And Jesus is telling them that I am here and it changes everything. So this act of fasting is completely uncompatible, incompatible with this moment. God is here with you. It is time to celebrate. But they don't want to let go of their control long enough to be able to see the invitation that's right in front of them. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours out new wine into old wineskins, otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins. Some of you are like, what I don't I don't know what that means. Let me just quickly pull up pull this together for you. So in the in the ancient first century, uh, you know, they most people didn't have a lot of clothing, and so they had to keep it going as long as possible because it was expensive and hard to make. And so what would happen is over time, as you had a garment and you you uh washed it, it would shrink and it would finally come to the point where it couldn't shrink anymore. The problem is if you put a new patch on a hole in an old garment, that garment had shrunk, but the patch had not. And so you put this patch over the hole, but as you washed the garment, slowly but surely that patch would start to contract and eventually it would rip away from the hole, and as it did so, it would make the hole worse. In the same way, what happened with wine is that it did a double fermentation or a half fermentation. So they would ferment it in a container, and then when it was about half fermented, they would pour it into a wineskin. The reason they used a wineskin is because the wineskin could expand. So as the fermentation happened, the gases would come out and the wineskin would expand as it needed for the wine to continue to ferment. Reason you would never put new wine in an old wineskin is because the leather wineskin had already expanded as much as it could. So when that fermentation happened and those gases came, it would stretch it and eventually it would pop like a balloon. So this was common wisdom. This everyone knew how this worked in this day and age. Jesus is using a picture though, because he wants us to get at the heart of what's going on in this moment. You see, we have two pictures before us. We have Levi. Life is broken, life is rebellious, life is dedicated to someone else, and he encounters Jesus and he says, This has got to completely and utter chip utterly change me. He walks away from it all. And then you got the Pharisees. The Pharisees were interested in Jesus, they hung around Jesus, they talked to Jesus. They were okay with a little piece of Jesus, but they were not willing to admit that they needed a complete and utter transformation and change. What Jesus is saying with these two pictures is you can't just add me as a little extra piece to your life. It's just not going to work. And I think some of us are kind of like that. You're here this morning, you're like, yeah, I like this Jesus stuff, but my life's pretty good as it is. I don't want it to get messed up too much. You know, I'll just add a little Jesus juice here, a little Sunday morning, a little prayer before. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying any of those things are bad. But what Jesus is actually inviting us into is complete and utter transformation. And he's not doing that because he's egotistical. He's doing that because he understands that this is the only thing that can work. Just imagine, like many of us, you probably have a really busy life. If you try and add just a little bit of Jesus onto your already busy, crazy life, eventually what's going to happen is you're going to break. One more thing to do, one more thing to try and accomplish, one more thing to add to our ready busy schedule. And either that thing is gonna get crowded out, like the piece of cloth that you patched on, it just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it pops off.

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Or it's gonna expand, expand, expand until it blows you up, and you're just like, I can't do it anymore, and you have a breakdown.

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You can't add a little bit of morality here and there that doesn't actually change the way that you live on a global scale. You can't be like, Jesus, I really like the the nice, fluffy, comforting part of you.

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But you can't tell me what to do. It just doesn't work. I think as humans, sometimes we have to admit that we have trouble letting go.

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And so we baptize our old rhythms, our old way of living instead of fully surrendering to a new life. We'll add Jesus to our calendar, we'll add a little bit of morality, we'll try and add a little bit of community, but Jesus doesn't want to come to be added.

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Jesus has come to take over.

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Now, I'm gonna quickly kind of just try and pull this together. Some of you are like, oh gosh, that that does feel like me, but but I don't want to be like rebellious. Like, I don't want to, you know, I'm not trying to do this to like stick it to Jesus. And I think that's that's probably true for many of us. We're not kind of keeping Jesus like a patch or or trying to fill him into our old wineskins because we're we're trying to be rebellious. I think sometimes we're doing it because we're simply afraid, because we've been hurt and we've seen other people who've come into those places of authority and not done it well. And we're cautious. We're afraid of losing control, we're afraid of being exposed, we're afraid of the cost that grace might actually take. And so we're like that older brother. We want the inheritance and the control. We want the joy without the surrender.

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But church, let me tell you this. That's you today.

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The reason that you can jump all in like Levi did is because of who Jesus is.

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Let me just jump us back here.

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Verse 20, Jesus says this but the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them. It's easy to gloss through this to be like, oh, there's gonna be a time when Jesus isn't around, but but though those words in the Greek are actually visceral words. It's like taken away means your life is taken away. What Jesus is saying here to us is that there's gonna come a time when he goes to the cross. The reason that Levi could come to the party is because Jesus paid the admission, and he paid the admission at great expense to himself. He gave up his own life for Levi, and he gives up his own life for us. The reason that we can freely come and enjoy the feast is because there is a God who loved you so much that he would not stop until you could be joined with him, even though it cost him his very own son. So if you're holding on tightly to control, like I often do, if you're afraid to let go, if you're afraid to surrender because you're not sure that Jesus is good, look to the cross. The cross tells you how good Jesus is, to what lengths he would give himself up for you.

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The cross is our guarantee that giving up will be the best thing that you ever do. And Jesus says that when that happens, when you look to him, it changes everything. Behold, the old has gone, the new has come. You are being invited into the feast. I'm gonna invite the band to come up. As I finish off this morning, I want to just give us a couple of reminders. Number one. Like Levi, you and I are being called by Jesus.

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If you are this here this morning and you are sitting on the fence, Jesus saying, I want you to come to my eternal banquet, and you might be thinking, I don't think I'm worthy, I don't think I can make it. Guess what? Jesus paid the admission that you are worthy because he makes you so. So please just come. You are invited, you have a place.

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Number two, remember that as you come, you're being invited to surrender. Admit your need and put your faith in him.

Speaker 1 38:53

You can't hang on to religious efforts, you can't be like, Jesus, I did this, and so I don't really need you here. It requires a complete and utter surrender. And you can't look at other people and say, well, they're pretty bad and I'm pretty good, so I probably have a place at the table. No. Jesus is inviting you to recognize that you are sick and you need a doctor, and he is the best doctor in the world. The doctor who would not even give up, or not even fail to give up his own life to make you well. So as I finish off, if you if you have a phone or a piece of paper or a notebook or something like that, I just want to offer three questions for you to ponder this week. One of the things that Jesus tells us is that we are to not just be hearers of the word, but doers of the word. It's good to come to a moment like this and to hear someone talk, but I want to invite you to take time and allow space for God's Spirit to speak to you. And maybe you need to do this with other people in your family. Maybe you just need to take some time to do this by yourself. But I want to invite you to take time this week and allow the Spirit to just rest on you and wrestle with your heart. Here's the first question: Where am I trying to justify myself instead of trusting Jesus' invitation? So take a thorough look at your life. Where am I still clinging on? Where am I still holding on to the old garment and trying to just put a new patch on? Maybe it's religious effort, maybe it's comparison, maybe it's tightly holding on to control, maybe it's our performance. I don't know what it is for you, but take some time and ask the Spirit to reveal it to you. Second question. What part of my life am I still trying to add Jesus to rather than surrendering fully to him? What's that thing? Like, Jesus, you can have everything except for this. Perhaps it's habits, relationships, ambition, our identity. Number three, Jesus has truly taken over my life. Who might he be calling me toward next? The beautiful part of this story is that as Jesus came and took over Levi's life, he was able to redeem it and invite others in. So who's already at your table? Who's already in your life? Who's already within reach that Jesus is inviting you to invite to his table?