Most of us know our own dirt isn’t the curated kind—and suspect it may be too much to clean up. In Matthew 9, Jesus walks past everyone with the polished-for-consumption sob story and stops at a tax collector’s booth, a man whose sin was public knowledge, and says simply, “Follow me.”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts “hypothetical” worries (like alligators tied to fire hydrants) with real, everyday struggles we all face. What are some ways you catch yourself spending emotional energy on things that probably won’t happen, and how might that distract you from the spiritual sickness Jesus actually came to heal?
Matthew describes his own calling with striking simplicity—Jesus said, “Follow me,” and he followed—without mentioning what he gave up or the great banquet he threw. Why do you think Matthew kept his account focused solely on Jesus rather than on the cost or drama of his own response?
The sermon suggests we often bring “curated dirt” to God—the respectable sins we’re willing to confess—rather than the messy, publicly known struggles we’re actually stuck in. What makes it so hard to bring our real dirt to Jesus, and what would it look like to stop curating?
Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” How does this challenge the way we sometimes draw lines around who is “too far gone” or who shouldn’t be in community with us—and where do you see that Pharisee tendency in yourself?
The sermon emphasizes a subtle but important shift: Jesus doesn’t just can heal the spiritually sick—he came to heal them. How does that distinction change the way you understand his purpose, and what would it look like for you to respond to his call as promptly and honestly as Matthew did?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
We often worry about things that really don’t matter because they’re not going to happen. I ran into an example of that a few weeks ago. Someone produced a map, and this map was divided into three categories: states with alligator populations, states without alligators, and states where it is illegal to tie an alligator to a fire hydrant.
Now, you can guess the states that fit into the first category, right? The states down around the Gulf—they’re the states with the alligator population. Then there are states like Missouri. We do not have an alligator population. Anyone want to guess which state there’s one in where you may not tie your alligator to a fire hydrant?
Missouri, Utah? No. New York, that’s good. These are all good guesses. Mississippi? No. I mean, maybe they’d get mad at you for another reason, but there’s a specific fire hydrant alligator statute in one state, as I understand it.
Are you ready? Pennsylvania? No. No, you need to go north. Michigan. Did you say Michigan? Okay, Brooke got it—Michigan. Yeah, good job.
I tried to imagine for a moment the state legislator going into the capital of the great state of Michigan. On his mind was one problem that had to be solved: the problem of alligators being tied to fire hydrants. I tried to imagine what motivated this distinguished, honorable representative of the people to think, “We need to make sure that alligators are not tied to fire hydrants here in Michigan where alligators don’t naturally dwell.” I can’t imagine. I really can’t imagine. But someone did. And so that law is on the books.
You run into a map like that and we laugh, right? We laugh because Mississippi would make sense. Jenny’s right, Mississippi would make a lot of sense. Some of the other states you guys rattled off, they make sense. Michigan does not make sense. Those Great Lake alligators? Why? I don’t know.
Now, to our politicians’ credit, they do also pass laws on things that actually can and do happen. Occasionally they do that. And when they do, we take those a lot more seriously, right? These are the sorts of laws we chuckle at. But then there are the ones that actually impact us and we care more about those. We confront the reality of those, good or bad, because they aren’t just hypotheticals.
Like, what happens if I’m in Michigan and I run into an alligator and there’s a fire hydrant and I’m trying to figure out how to restrain the alligator? I guess I won’t tie it to the fire hydrant. Tie it to a tree, right? Lamp post? Fine. Tree? Fine. The car down the street? Fine. But not the fire hydrant.
So, we take other things more seriously because they actually happen, right? If you pass something on a native species in Missouri that’s around here, even one that we don’t see much but is increasing, say you pass a new piece of legislation on how you deal with the wild bear population, well, you know, that’s actually a possibility. You could run into a bear in Missouri. Doesn’t happen often, but there was one roaming Wentzville a couple years ago, so, you know, it can happen. We take those more seriously.
Jesus, over the last few weeks, as we’ve been looking at Matthew 8 and the beginning of Matthew chapter 9, has been saying the idea that God will come into the world and heal what’s really broken with it. It’s not a hypothetical. It isn’t an alligator on a fire hydrant. It is a real, everyday, concrete reality you need to confront. That’s the point of the miracles: to say, this is real, the kingdom of heaven is real. The kingdom of heaven is here. You can actually encounter it. It’s not something that we just do fun little how many angels on the head of a pin type musings when it doesn’t really matter.
Importantly, if it really is reality, we need to wrestle with it. We need to make sense of it. We need to understand what God is doing and not just make a silly map. Let’s pray tonight that we do that as we encounter what one commentator said was Matthew’s view of the greatest miracle that Jesus did.
Let’s pray.
Father, would you help us to stay focused on what really matters? We get so tied in hypotheticals, not just with alligators, but with all sorts of things in life—the things that we worry about that probably won’t happen. Even when we’re thinking about You, Lord, we get into all these nitty-gritty details and we forget to confront the absolute most important reality of what You’re doing. Would You help us to understand that tonight, to hold on to that, and to live in the light of that truth? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Here’s what we saw really over the last weeks, but Jesus brings to a head last week: Jesus can heal the spiritually sick, and that’s what we’re going to see once again.
If you want to turn to Matthew 9, verse 9, here is what we read: Jesus passed on from there. He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth. He said to him, “Follow me,” and he rose and he followed him.
Jesus can heal the spiritually sick. Last week, Jesus tied the spiritual healing to the physical healing. There was the man, he’s lowered down, remember, through the ceiling. That man’s lowered down onto the floor, restored to full health. He’s able to stand up, pick up his mat, and go. And Jesus says, what? Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” Why? Because he wants the spiritual reality that we can’t see to be tied to a physical reality, so those who might doubt that Jesus can do the spiritual side of it can say, “Oh, well, he said something that God would surely block from happening if the second part weren’t true.” He raised the man up physically from the ground. But he did so by saying he was forgiving sins. Well, he wouldn’t have done that; he wouldn’t have been allowed by God to do that unless he’s actually allowed to do both. Maybe there’s something to the authority that Jesus has.
This week, Matthew is a particularly interesting case juxtaposed to that because Matthew doesn’t need physical healing. I don’t know, maybe he got up in the morning and his back hurt a little, or his feet were sore after a long day of taking too much money from people. It may have been; we all have our problems, right? Matthew didn’t have any major physical ailment. He wasn’t seeking physical healing. He wasn’t actually seeking; he was sitting in his tax booth. But Jesus knew his heart, and so somewhere in there, Jesus is approaching this man as someone he is going to call. And as he calls him, we see a miracle. Rather, we’re told there’s a miracle, but we can’t see it.
So what does Matthew do? Matthew gets up, leaves his tax booth behind, and he follows Jesus.
Last week established, and in all those miracles before that that we’ve seen in Matthew 8 established: This is not a hypothetical thing Jesus is talking about. Jesus is not talking about some kind of feel-good pop psychology. Your sins can be forgiven. You can let go of that weight. Don’t worry about it anymore, right? Think positively. Jesus is talking about something concrete that he’s doing. And he shows something physical in the weeks prior to this so that everyone can see that, and there’s no room to debate whether Jesus does things when he says things or not.
But now that he’s established that, he goes to a man who—let’s not muddy the water by talking about he had leprosy, or he was deaf, or he was anything else. Let’s just go to a man who’s going about his everyday job and heal him spiritually because the real thing that we need, the real thing that we need more than anything else, is that.
And when we’re thinking about what we really need, we spend an awful lot of time contemplating the alligators. Those, we see the fire hydrant, we think, what will I do if I run into that alligator there? You know, if you go by a fire hydrant, you’re a lot more likely to encounter a dog than an alligator, at least here in Michigan, and in most states. Here in Florida, you know, anything goes.
But if you are here, you don’t need to spend a lot of time contemplating the gators of life, but you do need to spend time contemplating the dogs. What are we going to do about them?
Jesus says here, “I’m going to show you what I really am here to do. I’m not here to tie up your hypothetical alligators, I’m here to tie up the real stray dog. I’m here to deal with what actually is happening. Not just happening a little, not the occasional blip every few years and we spend, the news channels all follow around the bear because there aren’t very many, right? We can follow the bear in the area. You can’t follow around the dog in the area because there are all kinds of them.”
What do we all have? We all have sin. We all need healing from sin. And that’s what Jesus is here to do. Not the hypothetical, it’s not going to happen at all. Not that it might happen every once in a while, but the everyday, every person thing.
We’ve moved from the individual cases that not all of us are facing to what every single person faces.
And the way that Matthew tells it, I think, is really notable because Matthew isn’t the only one that tells it. Matthew tells it though from his own perspective, right? Here is the man who has experienced this. Now let me tell you about it. And what does he say? It’s really, really simple. Jesus said, “Follow me,” and at the end of verse 9, he rose and he followed him. We’ll stop there, right?
Well, we saw earlier, what was Jesus telling people to do? Don’t spend time delaying following me. Matthew has that under control. He understands that Jesus says to follow him, “I’m following him. Boom. There we go.” But he doesn’t talk about everything he’s giving up. People would know.
We’ve said it many times before, but there was a reason why people really didn’t like tax collectors in the ancient world. Now, no one likes to pay tax, right? So even today, Bob can attest to this. I bet no one ever came to him when he was working for the IRS and said, “Thank you for making me pay taxes.” Right? I bet no one ever said that.
Generally speaking, if Bob woke up every day and had thought, “I can’t wait to meet all the people who are so thankful that I’m going to come to them and have them pay taxes,” he would have spent an awful lot of days desperately disappointed. Yeah, it ain’t going to happen. It just isn’t.
You see, the Romans, what they would do, they’d go into an area, they conquer, they’d get someone to be a tax collector for them, often from the people they just conquered. And they’d give that person privileges for working for them. And so you’d go to an area, you’d have a tax collector, you’d have a tax collector, and you’d have a tax collector, and you’d have a tax collector. And you’d have a tax collector that would purchase you as a tax collector.
The people in Judea did not want to be under the thumb of the Romans, and yet here was one of their own. And what was one of their own doing? He was taking their money and giving it to the people who were the enemy. And he wasn’t just doing that. Why was he doing it? Because he could take extra. Really, within maybe some level of reason, whatever it is, he could take extra.
Matthew would have been a very wealthy man because he could take what he wanted from the people whom he taxed. People didn’t like him. It’s not surprising that often when we see the group of the sinners in the New Testament, tax collectors are one of them. Why? Because people hated the people who took for their own benefit. They were corrupt.
That’s who we’re dealing with here: a man who has made his wealth off of other people, taking advantage of them to assist the enemy so that he can live a comfortable life.
Not everyone would have known that that lived in that world because they experienced that reality. We’re not talking about an alligator at a fire hydrant here. We’re talking about a stray dog wandering down the street. Everyone had encountered many tax collectors. They understood this.
As Matthew hears the call from Jesus, what does he say? He doesn’t say anything. Jesus tells him to follow. He just follows.
Matthew knew he was sick. He might not have had a broken leg. He might not have been born blind. He might not have had a servant in his household who was near death that he needed healing for. But Matthew himself knew that he was sick. He knew as well as anyone what he was doing. He understood what he was doing. He probably thought, “It’s too late for me. Even if I stopped now, everyone would hate me. Everyone would hate me.”
Jesus comes up to him and says, “Follow me.”
Luke gives us more detail on this story. Turn to Luke chapter 5, verse 28. It says, “In leaving everything, he rose and followed him.” That part’s the same. But now we’re going to get more detail on this man. Now he was known as Matthew or Levi. Often people had two names.
So Levi made him a great feast. A great feast. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them.
So notice two things that Luke, just two little details, but they’re crucial details, that I think speak to Matthew’s understanding of his state.
We’re going to see in a moment—we’ll go to the next verse in Matthew—we’re not told there was a great banquet. He does host Jesus for dinner, but we’re not told a great banquet. And it doesn’t say that he left everything.
Why does Matthew leave that out? Because it’s not about Matthew. It’s about Jesus. He doesn’t need to say, “And by the way, yeah, I had a lot and I left everything. Jesus told me to follow him.” Isn’t that enough? Don’t you need to know anything else? You don’t need to know what I did.
Jesus. It’s just Jesus. Two names don’t matter. The miracle of salvation here.
That’s why, like I said, I thought this was such an astute thought. If you look at Matthew’s gospel, he has all these miracles compacted here in the center of his gospel. We talked last week how it seems like he actually intentionally grouped a lot of Jesus’s miracles all in one place because, like here, let me tell you the things that Jesus did over his ministry. I’m going to put them all right here so you can see that Jesus was doing amazing things.
And right in the middle of that, what does he decide to include? A story that on its face is kind of boring. Kind of bland. A guy that wasn’t so good was told to follow Jesus, and what did he do? He followed him. Dog chases car. Not exciting. But he actually caught him, right? Yeah, he did. He caught the car.
Now what? Why are you telling us this, Matthew? Because Matthew thought about his own life and he knew his own heart. He knew what he had done. He knew who he was.
He can look at this and say, “I can tell you about all these other things. But I saw the most incredible miracle Jesus ever did. He took me and he called me, and he made me His. All these grand miracles don’t compare to mine. I was a tax collector. Jesus called me and I was forgiven. You beat that.”
Matthew, everything else just sort of fades out in the detail of that day. Luke, the historian, writes down all these other details. But for Matthew, that’s the detail. That’s all he needs to say.
Think about profound sort of inflection points in your life—meaningful moments. We have those moments. And when we encounter one of those moments, we remember them, right? Maybe it was at work, the time that you learned something new and it led to everything that’s happened thereafter, or at school. Maybe it’s a conversation with family or friends that happened.
I was thinking of one of those moments a few weeks ago. I heard from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time, and some of you know him. But anyway, he texted me just to say hi, and it made me think back to when he and I had first met.
You see, this was back when I was chaplain of the university and I had been trying to get together… One of the things that had been fundamental to me becoming chaplain was I was going to start—well, chapel services, which they hadn’t had in a very long time.
Sounds kind of weird for a school that had a continuing line of chaplains, but they hadn’t had chapel services, and so that was my job. Notably, at first, I didn’t have any budget for it. I just was supposed to start chapel services.
And as I started working on this, it was sort of like, “Well, now how do I get this to work?” Because I need things like music. And how do I get things to happen?
And so I put feelers out, trying to find help and so on. But I get this email from someone I didn’t know who wasn’t part of the university community. He didn’t work there. He didn’t study there. And he said, “I’d like to meet and talk to you about those chapel services you’re trying to start.”
And I almost didn’t even want to respond because I thought, he’s writing in because he thinks there’s an open position. Because he knows I need a worship leader. And so he’s writing in expecting to get a job.
But I responded, of course, and said, “Come on in. Here’s a time that’s open.” He came in, starts rattling off all the accomplishments he’d made. He’s interviewing for a job. And it was like, I had papers to grade and all this stuff to do. Why are we doing this? Because I’m really wasting his time and my time because I can’t hire him.
And I finally did say, “You know, this is really all very impressive, but I don’t have a budget. I can’t hire anyone.”
He looked at me and said, “I don’t want to be hired. I just want to help.” And for the rest of the time I was chaplain, he came virtually every week and played music there. And he was part of the founding of Faith Tree after that.
And I thought about that and I rattle off the things I was probably doing that day. But I have to kind of just hypothesize. I was always grading papers and always had classes to go to and teach and all this sort of stuff. I had all that stuff but I don’t remember because, you know what? In that ministry that God had called me to, that was an incredibly important thing that happened.
And all those other details, well, they’re not as important, right? Because the thing that happened was, for one, I met a really dear friend, someone I appreciated very much over the years. And in that, then God used that so we could minister together. He brought that together.
And so that thing, God orchestrating all that, that seemed unlikely. There was a thing that I remember. I found myself thinking about that a few weeks ago. And I can remember that conversation sitting in the room and how we were chatting and the whole bit. I couldn’t tell you any of the other stuff that seemed so important at that time.
At the time, it seemed like, why am I doing this? There’s all kinds of people that want to talk to me. Because for a brief moment as chaplain, I had a relatively significant amount of authority. I could coordinate things. I could do all these things. People wanted to talk to me.
But you know what? That authority went away. It didn’t last. It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t get me anywhere. Papers are grading. Well, it was good. I need to be responsible and take care of that. But those weren’t important.
But that friendship and that ministry that went on for years, that was something that was actually meaningful. And we’ve all had a lot of those moments.
If you think about the things that matter to us in life, we have those moments that matter. And we see, at least in retrospect, what really matters.
For Matthew, it doesn’t matter that he threw a really big banquet. It doesn’t matter that he gave up everything. It doesn’t matter that he was a bad person. It doesn’t matter that he gave up everything. Because what is everything? He had authority, but that authority went away.
Your authority, whatever it is, in whatever area that you have it, it will go away. It won’t last. But you know what will last? What God’s doing in your life.
So for Matthew, there’s one thing that really needs to be discussed here: Jesus called him. Matthew understood what really mattered.
But here’s the question. The question for myself is, no, I don’t.
I get so worked up about things that don’t matter. I’m a professional worrier. I’m really good at worry. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, most of those things, they really don’t matter.
Now, I can tell myself that. I’m going to go right back to worrying. But they don’t. I know that.
The Pharisees, they had plenty of things to worry about. They too had authority. They thought, we have authority. This is meaningful.
The Romans at least allow us to do what we’re doing. We can talk about all these important theological musings. All the things they’d spend their time on. Like, is it lawful to divorce your wife if she burns your toast in the morning? That was an actual real rabbinical discussion.
And they say, Jesus, you’re messing all that up. We’re doing all these important things. Why are you getting in the way?
But the tax collector has been ripping people off. Doing all kinds of bad things. Collaborating with the enemy. And Jesus just says, “Follow me.”
And he doesn’t say, “Jesus, well, let me collect some more taxes first. Let me even think of how to disperse the taxes. Let me get some affairs wrapped up before I follow you.” He doesn’t say anything. Actually, I’m not even going to ask anything. I’m just going to follow you.
And he follows Jesus and ministers to people. And what do you know, he even is one of the evangelists. Someone who gives us the story of Jesus.
He has a really, really important part to play in the story of redemption. And he’s just this average guy. No profound miracle by our standards.
Let me tell you about the miracle of what Jesus did.
They miss. The Pharisees miss what Jesus is doing because they’re so busy worrying. They’re so busy on the important stuff—the stuff that really doesn’t matter, the stuff that won’t go away, right?
We know this. We know it will go away. Most of you have experienced that, where you have something really important and it goes away.
But you know what won’t? God’s love for you.
And Matthew sees that and he experiences that. And then he tells us that so that we too can experience that.
And it’s really, really important when we look at the story of Matthew. And this is why that miracle is so important. Because it’s not just about what Jesus can do, right? If you happen to be leprous and blind and deaf and have a really great sob story beyond all that, and so on, maybe you’re going to experience that. Maybe Jesus will care.
No, it’s about if you are a person. You know what? Jesus loves you. And His gospel is for you to hear about. And you need His gospel.
It’s not that Jesus can heal the spiritually sick. It’s that Jesus came to heal the spiritually sick.
Take a look at verse 10. As Jesus reclined at the table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.
And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with the tax collectors and sinners?”
But when He heard it, He said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice. For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Jesus came to heal the spiritually sick. The Pharisees, contemplating all their important things—what they can do, what they can’t do—say, “Well, we’ve contemplated all this, Jesus, and we know there’s people you shouldn’t hang out with.” And you know the people you shouldn’t hang out with? It’s tax collectors and sinners.
They’re just—you have to watch out for those tax collectors. Don’t hang around them.
Jesus, are you sick? Jesus, are you so stupid as not realize this whole table is a VIP section of the worst? It’s a VIP section, the very worst people, right? They’re right there, right in front of you, Jesus. Don’t you understand? These are the people who take advantage of society.
They spend plenty of time contemplating who the sinners were, what people fell into that category. And there were people that, in one way or another, exploited society. One way or another, degraded society. Taking bribes and collaborating with the enemy, you’re degrading society.
Now, to a degree, the Pharisees would have acknowledged, yes, normal, everyday people, they’re sinners as well. That’s probably not what they meant here, but the common folk were sinners. Then you had the third-class people—people who spent their whole life contemplating God’s word, people like the Pharisees.
Well, yeah, they needed to offer sacrifices every once in a while, but as far as actual sin, they obeyed God’s law. What was the problem? Hell, no.
So they don’t see Jesus and say, “Wow, look at this miracle. We are all people who need to be healed. And you know what? Now Jesus is here, so we can know that he is actually the one who can bring the spiritual miracle, bring us all the eternal life in him.”
Isn’t this amazing? No, they’re not thinking about that. They’re thinking, “How can we destroy his ministry?”
And it’s really telling what they do because you can see that’s exactly what they want to do, but how they go about it.
Notice here what they do. They don’t just ask Jesus. They sometimes ask Jesus. They don’t just ask Jesus here: “Why are you hanging out with these bad people?” They ask the disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
They ask the disciples, “Why?”
The disciples start to wonder if they should be hanging out with this Jesus guy. Maybe he isn’t so good after all.
The respected leaders of the faith come to the disciples and say, “Do you realize? Do you realize, John? Do you realize, Peter? Do you realize that Jesus is hanging out with the really bad people? Did you somehow miss that? Why does your teacher do this?”
And you can imagine someone like Peter probably trying to figure out how to answer this because Peter always wants to have the ready answer, right? Even when he shouldn’t.
And so he’s maybe sputtering along thinking, you know, Jesus.
Trying to drive a wedge between Jesus and his disciples, between the people of the body of Christ thus far that are going to save the world by testifying through the saving power of Jesus.
The disciples aren’t going to save, but they’re going to be instruments of God’s salvation.
Trying to drive a wedge there.
Well, what’s Jesus doing? Jesus is trying to remove a wedge between sinners and God.
The so-called holy ones, the so-called experts in the law—they just drive new wedges.
Jesus wanted to remove them.
And so what does he say? “I came, I desire mercy not sacrifice. For I came not to call the righteous but the sinners.”
At times—and we’ll talk about this tomorrow night on Steadfast—but at times indeed God does bring judgment. He brings consequences to the things we do because that can be a form of his mercy, right? He corrects us.
Jesus himself during his ministry at times corrected people, including the Pharisees.
Someone was already broken down and fully aware that he was sinful, like Matthew. Matthew did not need to be told, “Hey Matthew, you’re sinful.” Matthew understood that he just was stuck in it, like so many of us are.
We understand we’re doing something that’s displeasing. We understand we’re doing something corrupt. We understand we’re doing something that people, if they knew, would not like us if we were doing. We understand that, but we are stuck in it.
And so while the Pharisees probably would have loved if Jesus had gone up to Matthew and said, “You evil wicked viper of a man who steals from God’s people and gives it to those Gentiles,” Jesus says instead, “Follow me.”
“I know who you are. I know who you are, and I’m ready to actually cleanse you. Follow me.”
Pharisees wanted to spend their time judging the sinners instead of actually facing down their own sin and realizing, wait, they were messed up too.
Reminds me of if you ever have had the opportunity to run into someone who sells vacuums. Anyone ever deal with a vacuum salesperson? Anyone here a vacuum salesperson? Okay. Sorry if you’re online and you’re a vacuum salesperson, we don’t have any here.
But what do you do if you’re a vacuum salesperson? And I get why, you don’t want to be unkind to vacuum salespeople.
What you do is you’re going to demonstrate how your vacuum can vacuum up whatever needs to be vacuumed up. But you’re going to put down dirt on the little sample carpet.
One, the sample carpet is the right height that is really easy to vacuum stuff up. And then you’re going to put down the dirt that you’ve already tested, and you know is the kind that comes up pretty easily.
Why? Because when you put down that dirt on that sample carpet and you run your vacuum over, what you don’t do is say, “Bring whatever dirt you have, whatever dirt you’ve struggled with your old vacuum, and bring it in a sample of your actual carpet and let me run my vacuum over it. Let me bring my vacuum and I’m just going to run it over whatever random things you want to throw at it.”
Why? Because it might not work.
The goal is to have a curated, careful kind of dirt, the kind of dirt that you can respectably get rid of and give a testimony of.
That’s what we want as Christians too, right? Testimony dirt. The kind of dirt that when you get up and you give your testimony, no one’s going to think too badly of you. You’re probably going to say the same kind of things that everyone else is going to say. And people can go, “Oh, that’s nice,” right?
You know, sometimes when I’m driving along and someone cuts me off, I don’t pray for them. And Jesus convicted me of that.
That’s the kind of curated dirt we want to bring about. And so now Jesus told me I should pray for even the people that cut me off.
If one time you got so angry you ran someone off the road and then got out and yelled at them, you’re probably not going to share that in your testimony because people are going to be scared of you.
I see some conviction.
We want curated dirt, the kind of dirt that we know that no one’s going to think too much of. And that is simple. And Jesus saved me and convicted me of that. Wipes it all away. It vacuums up, right?
Matthew didn’t have curated dirt. It was completely out in the public that he was a sinner. The people they invited to his dinner—that he just called some people, some tax collectors—said, “We’re sinners.”
But Luke reveals it’s actually a great banquet because, well, Matthew was a man of means. He could throw a great banquet and he brings his associates in. All the local mafia, all the bad elements of society, they’re all there. Throws this great banquet and everyone knows that all of them are sinners. There’s no doubt about it.
And he says, “I found the person that doesn’t need the curated dirt. The Pharisees, they can tell us how to live if we’re already pretty well clean.”
And I don’t know, Matthew might have said, “What’s going on in their lives and if they’re really clean, but I know I’m not and they can’t clean me up.”
But you know what? Jesus can. Jesus can and will take the really messy stuff. That is the message of the gospel.
He doesn’t need us to curate the dirt. Whatever you’re facing, whatever you’re struggling with, whatever maybe you tuned in tonight and you haven’t been to church in ages, and you came on the live stream and you’re thinking, “Well, if you knew my dirt, there’s no way that Jesus could vacuum up.” No, Jesus can vacuum up that dirt.
Jesus didn’t come just to do a few spectacular miracles. He didn’t come to debate the alligators at fire hydrants. He came because he knew each of us is soiled with really awful, filthy, seemingly irremovable dirt. And that’s what I claim—not a curated demo, but the real messiness of it.
Then he takes us as a people, and if you’re not yet part of his people, when you become part of his people, he’s going to take you too. He’s not going to say, “Hey, I’ll save you but I don’t want you.”
He takes us and he sends us.
That’s the message that Matthew can testify. He takes us in our dirt and he sends us, and we go testify to the one who cleanses us and will cleanse the people that we encounter. That’s our mission as a church. That’s the mission that Jesus has been doing every single day.
Lord, a lot of times, even when we pray in silence, we’re tempted to bring the curated dirt to you. I think our actual dirt is just too much.
Would you help us to understand that when you come to us and you get into the dirt with us, you cleanse us of the dirt that’s actually there. Would you help us to understand that? To feel your embrace around us in that you are there to truly and completely cleanse us.
Then as you send us out, would you help us not to lose sight of that? I’d like Matthew to recognize that yes, we are in the class of sinners. That’s who we are. That’s who we have to tell as a story for every other sinner in the world.
There aren’t those who can’t be vacuumed up. All of us are that same dirt of sin. All of us are cleansed by the healing power of our Savior. This is his precious dirt.
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