Have an Open Heart // Essential Life Skills, Part 10

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

When people out there are behaving badly, our instinct, more often than not, is to close ourselves off from them. To build a wall, to harden our hearts. Hmm. Just as well that’s not the way God treats us, don’t you think?

Can I ask you today just to picture the face of the person who’s causing you the most grief, the most pain, the most problems in your life right at the moment? Ok. Do you have their image in front of your eyes? So now let me ask you: Yesterday, how did you respond to that person, in your heart, in your mind? What thoughts have been running through your head about them? What scenarios? What responses? What reactions have been playing themselves out over and over again in your head, and in your heart? How do you feel about that person right now?

I’m guessing that there are a few answers there that you’re probably not all that comfortable with. Perhaps those questions have taken you to a place where you’d rather not be because when people sin against us, we harden our hearts towards them and close off our lives, so (and here’s my final question for you today) how did Jesus react to exactly those same people? Matthew 9:9-10:

As Jesus was walking along, He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and He said to him, ‘Follow Me.’ Then he got up and followed Him. And as He sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came, and with sitting with Him and His disciples.

Tax collectors were the scum of the earth back in those days. They were fellow-Jews who’d colluded with Roman authorities to exhort exorbitant tolls from people who passed by their tax collection booth on the road. So not only did they collude with the enemy who occupied and oppressed their land, they lined their own pockets at the very same time. No wonder they were hated and despised!

But Jesus, instead of shunning them, invited one of them to become one of His disciples and then ... Then He went and had dinner with a bunch of these sinners, with the very same people who were hated and shunned by good, God-fearing Jews. Read on, and you discover He copped quite a bit of criticism for that, but His take on it was that it was exactly the people like them that He’d come to this earth to save, and let me be blunt here: If you believe in Jesus, if you claim to follow Him, it’s exactly for people like these that God has put you on this earth – to share the love of Christ with them so that perhaps, some of them will be saved.

So back to that one person I had you picturing a moment ago: Your most difficult person, your tax collector if you will. It’s that person to whom Jesus has sent you. Be open. Be engaging. Show them the love that Christ has shown you, and the easiest way to get started in doing that is to look for the good in them.

When someone’s treating you badly, and you want to write them off because they’re just too much trouble, and they’re more than you can cope with right now, I want to encourage you to do something radical. Are you ready?

Try looking for the good in them because let me tell you, no matter how badly someone’s behaving, deep-down, there’s always some good in them. That’s exactly what Jesus did when He went to dine with the sinners and the tax collectors at Matthew’s house. Matthew 9:11-13:

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to His disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with the tax collectors and the sinners?' But when Jesus heard this, He said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what it means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I have come to call not the righteous, but the sinners.’

Where others saw only sin, Jesus saw something worth redeeming. Jesus knew that if only these sinners, these social rejects, could experience the love of God first-hand, then the good in them would come to the surface. So often, the people who behave badly do so because they’ve never experienced unconditional love in their lives. No one’s ever stepped into their lives looking for the good in them, and helped them to rediscover that good that they thought had been lost forever.

I’m here with you today because when I was one of those bad people, some of those who call themselves Christians stepped into my life, as Jesus did in the lives of these tax collectors and sinners, and they believed somewhere deep-down inside me, hidden though it may have been to their sight, that there was some good in me worth redeeming. All too often, we approach people like those tax collectors and those sinners with the attitude of, ‘Well, what’s in it for me? How will they treat me? What will I experience? Will they hurt me again? What will other people say about me?’ It’s always with this me, me, me thing. Have you noticed? And yet Jesus had no thought whatsoever about what was in it for Him.

The religious leaders, the religious powerbrokers of the day, the ultra-conservative, legalistic, rule-based Pharisees, they criticised Him. ‘Why does He mix with all those undesirables?’

"Because I came to heal the sick," said Jesus. "Because I came for them; because these sinners are made in the very image of God, and I’m here to show them mercy."

We can go to church; we can sing the songs; we can hear the sermons; we can pat ourselves on the back, but let me tell you, unless and until we look for the good in the sinner, we’re just kidding ourselves.

The thing about the unconditional love of God is that it’s proactive. God stepped out of heaven, in the person of Jesus Christ, while we were still sinners. He didn’t wait for you and me to clean up our act. He didn’t sit back, like the Pharisees, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, and judge and criticise us.

God looked down on the likes of you and me and said “Hey, they need help. I’m going to do something about this.”

Of course, that was no surprise to Him. He didn’t wake up one day, shocked, at the sin that was ruining humanity. The sin that was ruining your life and mine. From before the beginning of time, He knew, He always knew, that one day, He would have to do something radical for you and for me. Romans 5:6-9:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.

That ... that’s what love is. That’s what love does. It doesn’t sit back and wait, love ... steps forward and acts. And love is proven in the suffering of Christ, which was decided upon and which happened before you and I ever cleaned up our respective acts. In fact it happened because God knew that without his act of radical love, through Jesus suffering and dying on that cross, you and I would be doomed to the consequences of our sin – here in this life and for all eternity.

And that very same love, that very same proactive; radical; sacrificial love, the sort that steps out in sacrifice, rather than sitting back in criticism, that's the love that you and I are called to live out in this world. Nothing more and nothing less.

So back to the difficult people in your life; back to the people who are hurting you; back to the people whom you want to reject – we all have those people in our lives, this love that God showed you through Jesus Christ, that's the love that he is calling you to show them, so that one day they might experience that transformation of meeting Jesus.

Their lives will be changed for all eternity because God put you right there in the middle of their lives.