Good morning…
“Good morning Sue,” she wrote last week. “I want to highly recommend this book by Scott Sauls, The Gentle Answer. He writes: ‘Jesus and Christianity do not discriminate between good people and bad people. Instead, Jesus and Christianity discriminate between humble people and proud people. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6).”
Then she sent me the page below to share more deeply God’s enduring truth: “There is something about his kindness, something about his gentleness that makes Zacchaeus and others who, like him, have made a moral train wreck of their lives want to come out of the tree and have dinner with him. If you are Zacchaeus, you don’t say in shock, ‘Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Instead, you say with wonder and awe and gratitude, ‘Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with us.'”
“This is the fundamental difference between human religion and Christianity,” writes Scott Sauls. “Whereas human religion puts the likes of Zacchaeus, the greedy CEO, and others like them into the category of ‘them’ or ‘the bad people,’ Christianity says that we are all the same. All of us, without exception, are hopelessly stuck and isolated in sin and selfishness – unless and until Jesus looks up at us in the tree, calls us by name, and tells us to hurry up and come down to him because he is coming to our house today. Understanding this humbling reality, and letting it get massaged deeply into our hearts so that it reorients our posture, is an essential key to becoming instruments of God’s grace, peace, and gentleness in a culture of outrage.”
Jesus told him, “This shows that salvation has come to this home today. This man was one of the lost sons of Abraham, and I, the Messiah, have come to search for and to save such souls as his” (Luke 19:9, TLB).
What wonder, what awe, what gratitude! Jesus welcomes all sinners, those of us who, in selfish pride, have separated ourselves from complete dependence upon God. Searching for us, calling us by name, visiting our home, Jesus eats with us.
…Sue…
