Luke 19:1-10 Zacchaeus: The fruit of true repentance Introduction: What is repentance? 1. Salvation is received through repentance and faith. a. Jesus message was Repent and believe the good news Mark 1:15 b. Just doing good can never cancel out sin. c. True repentance will show itself in the way you live. 2. Zacchaeus: An example of true repentance.(1-8) a. Before seeing Jesus, his God was Money.(1-3) b. He risked everything to see Jesus (4-6) c. He gave away his wealth as a sign of repentance (7-8) 3. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. a. Zacchaeus puts his faith in Jesus (9). b. Jesus came for all who are lost (10). Introduction: What is repentance? What comes to mind when you hear that we are going to look at Zacchaeus? Maybe you have Sunday school memories of Jesus calling to the little man up the tree? Maybe you are reminded that God loves everyone, even tax-collectors? It is not just a story for children but a real event that teaches us some important truths. Particularly we should heed the concluding point that The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (10) I am particularly struck by the signs we see in Zacchaeus of true repentance and commitment to Jesus. He is contrasted I think purposefully by Luke with another rich man who comes to see Jesus earlier in Luke 18. He comes as a righteous man who believes he has obeyed the commandments and asks Jesus: what must I do to receive eternal life? After a long conversation, when Jesus tells the rich man to sell all he has and give the money to the poor, he goes away sad because he loves his money more than he loves God and he is not prepared to change that. Zacchaeus, also a rich man, but an unrighteous man and a rogue responds to Jesus with true repentance and gives his money away without even being asked to. I think the story of Zacchaeus in part is to show us what true repentance looks like. The first words of Jesus that we find recorded in the gospel of Mark are: "The time has come The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" Mark 1:15 Jesus call to each one of us is to repent of our sins & believe the good news of the gospel. It is of vital importance therefore that we understand exactly what it means to repent.
Today, in the reading from Luke, we have an excellent example of repentance in the story of Zacchaeus. But firstly, what does the Word repentance actually mean? In a small group I asked the question & various answers emerged. One person said it involves recognition of your wrongdoing. But is that enough? Some criminals boast of their crimes & they re certainly not repentant. Another person added that it means showing remorse and saying sorry for your wrongdoing. This goes further than just recognizing your wrongdoing but it s still not quite right as a description of repentance. Sometimes when we apologise we re not sorry at all. We just say it to get some peace. We decided that repentance should carry something of a sense of remorse, of really feeling sorry for what has happened. While this brings us closer, it still isn t the biblical concept of repentance. Many an alcoholic has felt remorse for their behaviour but still returns to the bottle, unable to shake off the addiction. Then it was decided that to show true repentance there would need to be a sense of wanting to offer restitution for any damage done or offence caused. In actual fact, all of the above are part of the biblical concept of repentance, but the basic meaning of the word is that of a change of direction. You might call it a reversal to follow the alliteration. It means to stop what you are doing & turn around & go in the opposite direction. It means to do a U turn. In the Christian sense, it means to stop walking in sinful ways, & turn back to God. A second shade of meaning of the biblical word is that of a renewing of your mind. It means to remove the thoughts you have & to fill your mind with new thoughts. When we read in the Genesis 6:6 in the older versions of the Bible that God repented for having made mankind, there was no sense of being sorry for his own sin, but rather the sense of having a change of thought. When Jesus called people to repent & believe the Good News, he wasn t asking us to: just recognise our sins, or even just feel remorse for them, or even make restitution for them, What he is looking for in repentance is: a reversal in the direction we are going; change in our way of living. a renewing of our minds; a change in our way of thinking
1. Salvation is received through repentance and faith a. Jesus message was Repent and believe the good news Mark 1:15 Repentance isn t just an optional extra in the Christian faith. It is right at the heart of the gospel & was central in the preaching of both Jesus & John the Baptist. Jesus clear message was, as we heard at the beginning: "The time has come The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" Mark 1:15 It is God s good gift to us but we can only receive it when we turn to him in repentance and faith. In this sense, our salvation or rescue begins when we repent or turn back to God. John s message was very straight forward. He said: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance." Luke 3:8 Put another way, let your turning to God be evident. Show the fruit of the change in your life. John s words were even stronger for all who showed no such repentance: The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire." Luke 3:9 The imperative is there. Time is short. Unless you repent or change, you are lost. b. Just doing good can never cancel out sin. Sometimes we think wrongly that somehow we can balance out, or cancel out the sin in our lives by doing an equal or greater amount of good things. Somehow we manage to convince ourselves that this can be true. The Bible teaches otherwise: "If I tell the righteous man that he will surely live, but then he trusts in his righteousness and does evil, none of the righteous things he has done will be remembered; he will die for the evil he has done." Ezekiel 33:13. To put it more simply, if you go to court for having murdered your neighbour, no amount of good deeds that you present to the judge will change the fact that you are guilty of murder. Our good deeds, good as they are, cannot cancel out our sin. c. True repentance will show itself in the way you live. The only way to cancel out sin is to repent & believe in Jesus Christ. Then we receive God s forgiveness and our sins are removed. This repentance, however, must be genuine. It must be real & it must be seen. When John spoke of producing fruit in keeping with repentance in Luke 3, the people ask him What should we do then?", & he went on to show some of these fruits: "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same." Tax collectors also came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?" "Don't collect any more than you are required to," he told them. Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?" He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely be content with your pay." Luke 3:10-14
When we truly repent, these things will be evident. Some say that the last part of our body to repent is our pocket. When we show with our money the fruit of repentance & true conversion, then it will be evident to all. This deep conversion is seen in the wonderful example of Zacchaeus in Luke 19, our reading for today. 2. Zacchaeus: An example of true repentance. (1-8) a. Before seeing Jesus, his God was Money.(1-3) Jesus taught in the sermon on the mount: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:21 He said just a few verses later in the reading in Matthew 6, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. Matthew 6:24 Zacchaeus had made Money his God. He had betrayed his own nation to become rich collecting taxes for the Romans. Like many tax-collectors, he over-charged many of his own people in order to make more money. Money had become everything to him. It had become his God. He believed that Money could supply all his needs, bring him happiness and even give him purpose in life. Money is a cruel master however. It promises much but always leaves you wanting. Zacchaeus had become rich, yet he never felt poorer & he realized he had chosen the wrong Lord & master. b. He risked everything to see Jesus (4-6) In the end, when he saw the alternative, he risked everything to follow Jesus. The simple act of a man of his public importance humiliating himself & climbing a tree lead him down a path of no return. He will have lost whatever public respect he ever had after this. No-one really imagined that Jesus would pay any attention to Zacchaeus, the traitor. Yet Jesus knew the searching of his heart & the hollowness & pain of his life & we read: When Jesus came to that place, he looked up and said to Zacchaeus, Hurry down, Zacchaeus, because I must stay in your house today. Zacchaeus hurried down and welcomed him with great joy. (5-6) The people couldn t believe their eyes: All the people who saw it started grumbling, This man has gone as a guest to the home of a sinner! (7) c. He gave away his wealth as a sign of repentance (7-8) Zacchaeus soon showed everyone who was now watching a sign that his repentance was true by reaching right down into his pocket, the altar of his now former God, money. Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, Listen, sir! I will give half my belongings to the poor, and if I have cheated anyone, I will pay back four times as much. (8)
Zacchaeus exceeded even what the law required of restitution. The Law of Moses spoke of restitution for such offenses in Leviticus where we read: He must make restitution in full, add a fifth of the value to it and give it all to the owner on the day he presents his guilt offering. Leviticus 6:5 Instead of adding a fifth to the value of what he had taken fraudulently, he announces he will pay back 4 times what he has wrongly taken & give half of all his possessions to the poor. He has not only turned away from Money, he has renounced completely it s hold on him, emptying out virtually all his wealth. This day, he opened a new account, an account in heaven, where his treasure will never be destroyed. His heart is now with his new treasure in heaven. 3. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost (9-10) a. Zacchaeus puts his faith in Jesus. Zacchaeus response to Jesus was spontaneous, generous & full of gratitude. It reflected a point of conversion & a turning to God. He had decided to put his faith in Jesus rather than in money and the proof was in him giving it away. Jesus response to him was no less spontaneous & generous. He declared boldly: Salvation has come to this house today. There was no hesitation or sense of I need to find out more here. Jesus could see the fruit of repentance on his lips, in his heart, & even in his pocket. Zacchaeus had shown a desperate searching for God through his climbing of the tree, a true repentance for sins in repaying four times what he had stolen, and a true turning away from his former God in giving away half of his possessions to the poor. Turning to God requires radical action & desperate faith. We should each examine ourselves & see if there is something in his example that we should follow in order to turn fully to God. b. Jesus came for all who are lost (10) Many people thought Jesus was doing the wrong thing in going to dine in the house of a sinner & proclaiming salvation to such a sinner, but Jesus had it quite clear what his mission was. He came to seek & to save what was lost. He came for each one of us who was lost in sin & needing a saviour. The sad thing is that many refuse to acknowledge their sin, refuse to repent of their sins, & refuse to accept that they need a saviour. They think they are living good lives & fail to recognize the many ways they have failed to acknowledge & obey God. They have trusted in false gods such as human effort, money, and even work for their daily needs and even for their meaning in life.
Where is your trust centred? If you think your savings will save you, you are clutching at straws. If you think your good deeds and your kind nature will get you over the line, take a good look at yourself. If you want to be right with God and receive his gift of eternal life, there is only one way and it is through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Let us daily remember the call of Jesus that we read at the beginning of this message: "The time has come The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" Mark 1:15