Thank you very much for that warm welcome. It really is a special joy to be back here. I was at Peace Church for 15 years and I've been the lead pastor at First Baptist for the past 10 years. And during that time I've been living in a kind of terror that some Sunday I'm going to get up in front of my congregation at First Baptist and start the morning by saying, good morning Peace Church. It hasn't happened yet, but I still live in that terror. But I can get that out of my system this morning.

So good morning, Peace Church. So thank you very much. I bring you warm greetings from your brothers and sisters in Christ down the road at First Baptist. And it really is an honor to be with you here this morning. And I'm thankful to Ryan for the invitation.

It really is a special joy to be here. And things are changing. I've noticed that. But you know what doesn't change is our message and the mission that God has for us. And I'm thankful, I'm very thankful that our two churches share that same heartbeat about the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Word of God and wanting people to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Let's pray together.

Father, we come before you and we ask that you would help us to continue to worship you by listening to your word. May you open our hearts to hear what you have said to us through the scriptures, Lord God, words that Jesus has said, and that we would hear this invitation for sinners to come to Jesus Christ. And Lord, I especially pray for anyone that's here that does not yet know Jesus Christ as Savior, that's still on the way, that you would reach into their heart and let them to know that you call them to yourself, Lord God. Lord, speak to us as Christians with our churches and instruct us with your word as far as what you want our churches to be about. So shape us from your word and may everything result in the glory of Jesus Christ, our Savior. In his name we pray, Amen.

If you have your Bibles with you, please turn to the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 5. We're going to be looking at verses 27 through 32. When Ryan invited me to speak, he asked me to give a message on something that Jesus said, and I thought, that he came for sinners.

So the title of this message is Who Needs a Doctor? And in this passage from Luke 5, we're gonna think through some questions. Why did Jesus come? What was the reason? Who was it that he called?

And what if you're reluctant to come to Jesus? And also, if all of this is true, what does this say to our churches? What our churches should be and be like. So let's read together Luke 5, starting with verse 27. It's talking about Jesus.

Luke 5:27-32

27 After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” 28 And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.

29 And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. 30 And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 31 And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

This is the word of the Lord. And this is what we're gonna be looking at this morning. And the big idea for this message is that Jesus calls sinners because it's the sick that need a doctor. It's not the righteous or the well that Jesus came for, but it's the sick and it's the sick that need the doctor. And spoiler alert, that doctor is Jesus. Think about it this way. Imagine that there's a bad traffic accident on the road and the car is mangled, it's in bad shape, and you go out there and there's somebody that they've survived the accident, but they're in bad shape. And there's blood and there's gore and there's bones in places they shouldn't be, and the person is not doing well, you call 911, the ambulance comes to take them to the hospital, and the person refuses.

And says, I can't go to the hospital like this. The doctor is there, and I can't let the doctor see me like this. My hair is a mess. I've got blood on my clothes. I've got injuries.

I won't let the doctor see me like this. Let me clean myself up first. Maybe let me spend some time healing and then I'll be ready to go and see the doctor. That wouldn't make any sense. That would not make sense.

And it also doesn't make sense to think that you have to clean yourself up first before you go to Jesus. Jesus in this passage is saying that it's the sick that need a doctor, not the healthy. And so let's just start with a point that we can't miss in this passage. The first point that if you are a sinner, go to Jesus. If you are a sinner, you need to go to Jesus. He's the one that calls you, He invites you, He implores you to come to Him.

Don't stay away.

We don't want to be like Adam and Eve that when they realized that they were guilty, they ran and they hid from God. But so often that's what people do. Because of our guilt, we don't want to be around God. We feel guilty in His presence. But the truth is, He's the only one that can actually deal with our guilt and take it away. And He wants sinners to come to Him. In this passage, notice specifically who it was that Jesus is addressing in this passage. These words are spoken to Levi, who is in the Bible also known as Matthew, and he's a tax collector. And because of that he was despised. I mean he was despised by everyone because he was a tax collector. He was a traitor to his people, and even though he was a Hebrew, he was working for Rome doing this. And let me ask, how many of you, even now, love paying taxes? Let's see those hands. Just, yeah, I love it, it's the best.

No, you don't? Okay, not many hands here. But if you hate paying taxes now, you would have hated them even more back in that day. Because the Romans had a system that was called tax farming.

And basically how it worked is they would sell the rights to be the tax collector for a certain district. And Rome would say, this is how much money, they would give you a certain amount that you needed to collect for that district, but if you bought the rights to be the tax collector,

you would get this money out of people and give Rome what they said that was owed to them, but anything over the top, you got to keep. And so it was a pretty lucrative thing that you would buy this, but then make quite a bit of money getting, extracting taxes from people. And back in that day, there's less financial records, communication, so if you feel like you have been taken advantage of, good luck trying to prove that. And of course if you didn't have enough money to pay what the tax collector said you owed, well, out of the goodness of his heart, he'd be willing to lend you that money at a huge interest rate. And so these tax collectors, they are making bank. They are getting very wealthy off the backs of the people that they're exploiting.

And so tax collectors, they were considered robbers by the Jewish Talmud. And they were considered traitors, the scum of society, rich vermin, lackeys for Rome. And in fact, they couldn't even serve as witnesses in the Jewish court because they were considered such sinners and excommunicated from the synagogues.

Yet this is who Jesus called in this passage. That Jesus called Levi, Matthew, the tax collector and said to him, follow me. This was shocking. Shocking. What would this be like today? Who would it be that would shock us that Jesus would call those people. I'll let you fill that in in your mind. But it says in verse 28, in leaving everything, he rose and followed him.

And we read the passage again, then Levi threw a great feast in his house for Jesus. And so he throws his feast, he invites his friends, and then who's gonna be the friends of a tax collector? Probably other tax collectors, because he's not a super popular guy with everyone else. So other tax collectors, other sinners, they're the ones that would come. So that's who is at this feast that he has with Jesus. And this offended the Pharisees. Remember the Pharisees, they were really good at being good. They were really good at keeping the rules so good that they would have to make up more rules so they could keep those rules too. And they were offended at this, that somebody, supposedly a good rabbi, would be someone that would call a sinner, like Levi, a tax collector, and then hang around him and his sinner friends like this. And it's in that response where Jesus says in verse 31, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." So again, if you are a sinner, go to Jesus. He is calling you. He doesn't want you to stay away. He came for sinners like you and like me and like all of us. Because the truth is, Jesus didn't come for the righteous or the squeaky clean. He came for sinners and that's what we are. We are all sinners. That's what the Bible teaches us. We're all sinners worse than sick. Jesus talks about sin as sickness here, but other places, Ephesians 2 talks about that we were dead in our trespasses and sin.

That's even worse. And Romans 3, 23 tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. If you're just measuring your goodness against the person next to you, maybe you seem pretty good. But you measure it against God and his law and his standards, we all fall so short. And sin isn't just making little mistakes. At its core, it's rebellion against God, a holy God in our heart.

And ultimately, that is what sin is. So do you realize that you need a doctor? Jesus isn't for just those other people out there. I read a story of a man named Ken at the age of 38 who was bitten by a cobra. He had a friend who had a cobra in his tank. He reached up to pick up the snake and the cobra bit him. And his friend said, you need to go to the hospital because you've been bitten by this cobra and this is a venomous snake. And he said, I'm a man, I can handle it. In fact, instead of going to the hospital, he went to the bar and brag into people like, I was just bit by a cobra, not realizing that it's a slow acting venom. And he was able to even get a few drinks in before he succumbed to it and dropped dead. We are all mortally infected with sin.

Don't just assume that you're fine. We are not, we are sinners all. On the other hand, if you do know very well that you're a sinner, and some people, they know it, but they want to stay away from that doctor. Again, if you know that you need the doctor, don't wait to get well first. That makes no sense. Here's another implication, I think, from this passage that we need to think about as churches. Church, here's something to realize. If we are churches that are about the calling that Jesus has, and he is calling sick people to himself, then expect to see sick people around the doctor. If Jesus is the doctor and he came for sick, he came for sinners, we should not be shocked when there are sinners that are coming to be around the doctor. We don't want to be like the Pharisees that were upset about this. We need to realize that's who they need.

It would be like otherwise going to a hospital and being offended that there are sick people there. Would that make sense if I said, I was going to go up to the hospital and I enjoy spending my time there, but I got up to the hospital and I just wanted to relax and have a good time, but there were all these sick people around. It really wrecked the experience for me, being around all these sick people at the hospital.

And what if we thought, well, you know, a hospital, they say it's supposed to be about making you well, but I went to a hospital and it's full of sick people, and what a bunch of hypocrites. Isn't the church something like a hospital for sinners? And if it is, don't be shocked. We don't want to say, we can't have sick people around here.

This is a hospital. They don't look healthy. They might mess up the place. They might give our hospital a bad name. Church, if we're doing what Jesus calls us to do, and if our heartbeat is the same as his heartbeat, then don't expect to be surrounded just by perfect people.

We need to expect to be surrounded by the people that Jesus called. Second point from this passage, we need to be really clear that Jesus alone is the true physician that saves. Jesus alone, he is the only one, he is the one that we need to point people to. Jesus noticed he was really, really specific about who he was telling Levi to follow. He didn't say, go follow someone, you know, pick the best one that you think. There's lots of options. He said, follow me. And when we read this passage, it's really clear that Jesus recognized that he himself is the physician that he was talking about and saying, sinners need the physician, the sick people need the physician. Sinners need a doctor and Jesus is the doctor.

So we need to be really clear and always remind ourselves that Jesus is the doctor, not you and me. But this can be easy for us to forget because, you know, we're pretty great and sometimes things go to our head. I rescued a turtle once. Actually, I've rescued a turtle a lot, because that's the kind of person I am. You know, there's two different types of people in the world. There's people, good-natured, good people, that when they see a turtle trying to cross the road, they stop and they help that turtle. There's that kind of people, and then there's the other kind of people. But I'm one of the good kind that helps a turtle when I see it. And so this one time it was right near our house and I'm driving and I see this turtle in the road so I this was my code. Anybody else have that code? You stop and you help turtles? Okay.

And so I stopped and I helped this turtle and I picked it up and recognized, oh this turtle its shell is kind of cracked already. And so I thought it was a good thing that a good person like me, a good natured friend of nature, came to help this turtle. So I took the turtle and I put it on the side of the road Or you know to where it was going in the direction. It was heading. That's what you're supposed to do and I thought to myself And I am a I'm a good person. I was I went back in my car with my heart warmed about my goodness thinking about how I am such a friend of nature and I rescued this turtle and I started driving and Immediately I ran over a chipmunk. Seriously, it was less than 10 seconds. I started driving again, and this little guy darts in front of my car and darts the other way, and then I feel, oh no.

And I look back, and all I could do was look back and confirm, yep, he's a goner. And then I got really reflective about this. I was deflated, because I was just thinking what a friend of nature I am and then I kill this other animal. So then I'm driving like, ah, what's the point of this? Is there something I'm supposed to learn from this experience? And I thought, you know, not everything needs to be a sermon illustration. Not everything has to have a deep point. Maybe the point is just animals need to be more careful on the road. But then as I was driving, it just kind of hit me. I am an incompetent savior. I am not a competent savior. I rescue a turtle and then I immediately kill a chipmunk.

I am not the hero of this story. I'm an incompetent Savior. And if the world depended on me being the Savior, it is out of luck. If the world depended on me being the hero of the story, it is out of luck. If my self-image depended on me being the Savior and the hero of the story, I am out of luck. Because I am an incompetent Savior, and you also, don't want to break it to you, but are an incompetent Savior. But we know someone that is a competent Savior. We know who there is that actually does save. We are not qualified, but Jesus Christ is. Jesus saves, not great Christians, not great pastors, not great churches. Our job, Christians, churches, is to direct people to Him, to Jesus, the one who came and actually does save, because Jesus is the God-man who saves sinners by dying in their place. That is who He is, and that's why He is qualified, and we are not.

I'm a sinner. I have done, I do terrible things. There's still sin in my heart, even with Jesus transforming me and changing me. And so I am not qualified to be a Savior. It would be like somebody that's drowning trying to save somebody else. You're not going to be a good lifeguard if you're already drowning. You need somebody that's not drowning. And Jesus is the one who is innocent, that lived a perfect life. He never sinned in his entire life. And not only that, he completely fulfilled God's law in every detail and everything that was required of him. But not only that, he was the God-man, the only one who has been fully God and also fully human together in one person.

This amazing thing. And he needed to be the God-man, 100% God, 100% human, in order to save human beings. He had to be human in order to pay the price on the cross for human beings, but he also needed to be God so that the value of that sacrifice was worthy enough to pay for it. An unlimited amount of people. Anyone at all that will turn to him as Savior is going to find that the price has already been paid and will find that they have a all-sufficient Savior accepting them because the price has been paid on the cross already by Him. Romans 5a says, but God showed his love for us that while we were still sinners, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And only the God-man is the one who could do this. One last point from this passage. That Jesus calls sinners to repentance. Look again at verse 32. And we need to notice the last two words here that Luke includes. He says, I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

And then Luke gives us two more words that he records that Jesus said that actually aren't recorded in Matthew 9 13 or Mark 2 17. Luke gives two more words that Jesus said, calling sinners to repentance. We can't ignore these words but we have to be careful to think what does this mean when we say Jesus calls sinners to repentance. Should we think here it is Jesus is saying he's calling sinners to repentance because he's coming to say, those are the people they need to clean up their act. That's not what this means. Also, does calling them to repentance mean you need to beat yourself up for your sins? When I was young, I grew up in a faith tradition that that's how they viewed repentance, as doing penance. Basically beat yourself up for your own sins. And that's not the way to think about it either. That's not what it means.

Also, we might think, well, what about being saved by faith alone? Isn't it that you're saved by, you receive the free gift of salvation by faith alone in Jesus Christ. So what is repentance?

Is it faith and repentance? They're two different things and you need both of these. Well, I wanna, can I give an object lesson that, hopefully will help make sense of this a little bit for you? But for this, I need a kid who's willing to come on stage for this. So is there a kid?

What do you guys, you want to come on stage? There's money involved. I'm here to give you money. So if that, you know, changes things here, motivates you a little bit.

All right.

Hey, thanks for coming up. What's your name? Asher. Asher? All right.

Awesome name.

Nine.

Nine. That's exactly how old I was when I was that age. Cool. Okay, this is a quarter. You've seen a quarter before. This is the head side, where there's a head on it. This is tails. I'm going to give you this quarter, but here's what you have to do. You just have to pick it up. Okay? I'm going to put it on the ground. And all you have to do is pick it up. But, but, okay.

But, I want you to pick up just the head side, and you can lift up the head side, but leave that tail side on the ground on the carpet. Okay, go. Remember, just pick up the head. The tail side has to stay down on the, why aren't you, you having trouble? Oh, now you picked up. That's impossible, isn't it? Yeah, I called you up here to do something impossible. So, thanks for being a good sport. Yeah, you can't pick up just half of it.

You have the whole thing. Here, you can take this. Thanks for being a good sport. I know it's only 25 cents, but be sure to tie that. Okay, it's two and a half cents. I think this is the way to think about faith and repentance. Faith and repentance are two sides of the same coin. And so we're saved, we receive Christ and his work by one thing, which is faith and repentance. But like a quarter, it has two sides to it. It's just one thing. It's not two different things.

But sometimes you see the faith side and some of the repentance. And sometimes in Scripture, it'll refer to faith. Sometimes it'll refer to faith and repentance, sometimes just repentance. But in the same way, if you were walking and you saw a quarter on the ground and it was heads up, you would know that the tail side is there too. If you saw it and you saw the tail side was up, you would know the head side is there too, because it's two sides of the same thing. So when you read scripture and it talks about faith, remember it always means a repentant faith. When it talks about repentance, it doesn't mean beating yourself up for your sin, but it means turning to Jesus Christ in faith as the one that paid the price for your sin. That's what it is. And so in a sense, faith and repentance, they go together because one is referring to what we're turning away from. And it doesn't mean that you've completely cleaned up your life. That's not gonna happen in this life. It'd be great if it could, but it's gonna be a lifelong battle against sin.

But it means you're turning your back against your rebellion against God. You're recognizing rebellion against God, that's terrible, I don't wanna do that. You turn your back to it and you're turning to Jesus Christ as your Lord, as the one who is the God-man that came to save you and trusting in him alone. So the faith that saves us is a repentant faith that we have. And this means that there's going to be change that God works in our hearts, in our lives. Because in this, God is giving us the new birth, he's giving us regeneration, he's not saving us because of anything good that we have done, but as we trust him and are given a new born-again heart, that heart is going to have changes in it that the Holy Spirit works in our lives. So repentance, this faith, salvation results in new life in Christ. Notice that Levi didn't keep robbing people. He didn't stay at the tax booth.

He left his tax booth. Verse 28 says, and leaving everything, he rose and followed him. When it says leaving everything, we don't think it just means, well, he left the booth for a while. But he decided, I'll add Jesus to my life, but I'm going to keep on this gig of extorting people and being a tax collector. No, he turned his back on that to trust Jesus Christ instead. It's been said many times and I think

this is true that God loves you just as you are and he loves you too much to leave you the way that you are. So we're saved the sinners just the way that we are but when we're saved in a new heart, regeneration, being changed from the inside out. And God takes our heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh. I was listening to Pastor John's message from a few weeks ago, and I was just delighted that he talked about that at the end.

I realized I'm going to hit on that in my message too. And that's what is involved in the new birth. God gives us a new heart. There's some implications for us with this. It means you don't just go to the hospital just to hang out.

You don't do that.

You don't go there just because, well, I really like the food. They have a nice bed. I like the people there. I just like hanging out with the people at the hospital. I like being waited on, hand and foot.

They got this little buzzer, you press it and people come and they give you what you want, and it's just great. But that's not the right reason to be going to the hospital. Do some people treat church that way?

Do we go to church because we love the amenities? And what if you're not really going there in order to get better? What if you're not going there to see the doctor? What if you don't want to listen to the doctor? Or what if someone's going there just to cause trouble? Because on one hand,

as churches, we want to be open to sinners, and we invite them, and they need the doctor. But if somebody was going to a hospital and just going room to room, pulling out people's IVs, and they're there just to cause trouble, then it's different. Then the staff, they have to deal with that. Let me finish with this. This is the implication for our churches. If Jesus is the true physician, then I think it really is true that we can think of the church as a hospital for sinners. It's more than that, but that's something, a way that we can think about it. But what kind of hospital?

Is it just a health spa, healthy people go to the hospital to be made More appealing on the outside. Nope. That's not the kind of hospital it is The church is a hospital for sinners that specializes in heart transplants That's kind of hospital we are it's for sinners And we specialize in heart transplants, helping people through the gospel, through the Word of God and the Holy Spirit working through that, and because of the work of Christ, they have a born-again heart, to have new life in Christ.

So instead of having their destiny in hell, they can have their destiny of enjoying and worshiping and glorifying God forever in Jesus Christ. That's what we're for. And just as in a church, there's going to be different parts of that. There's going to be diagnosis. You got to diagnose the problem. You have to do the treatment, the actual surgery, and there's a phase of recovery. These are all things as the church we're called to do. I mean, how many of you like having surgery just for fun? You just love just having surgery just for the fun. No, we don't. So people need to understand, be communicated to, why they need this surgery. And so if you're going to the hospital, one of their jobs is to let people know you are in desperate need of this.

You are going to die without this procedure. And so as a church, we need to be letting people know the bad news. And that's not unloving. People need to know that sin is sin, and that sin is terrible, and it cuts us off from God and leads to condemnation. And so be thankful that you have pastors here that are willing to call sin for what it is, that are willing to warn sinners that they are sinners, not to rub their face in their sin, but to help them to realize that there is a problem and they need to go to the doctor, and that there is one that is there and calls them to solve this problem. And we use the Word of God and the law of God to convince ourselves to help us realize that we need these heroic measures. And we're about the job of a heart transplant, a salvation, because we are flatlining in sin without Jesus. But God takes our heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh, like it says in Ezekiel, being born again, regenerated.

But then that's not it. There's rehabilitation. Because after heart surgery, you don't just leave right away. It's a process of regaining your strength, getting stronger. And so even as Christians, we don't say, well, I'm saved and I don't need church anymore, because we're in this process of continuing to grow as Christians, to grow in strength, to recover. And rehabilitation comes after the surgery, not before it. This also means that it should give us humility, that we are all here as recovering patients from a heart surgery. We are all sinners saved by grace and this should help us have patience with the other patients that are here. Let me add one more thing. There's some hospitals that are teaching hospitals where they're training other people to be about the work of the hospital and that's also what our churches need to be about. That we're not of the mindset I'm going to go get what I need and then I'm off. But we're there to be trained to be about this work. Jesus is the physician, but we're part of his staff. We're part of this work in helping with diagnosis and leading people to Christ and helping people to grow in Christ and other people being trained to serve as well. Have you had your heart transplant yet? The doctor stands ready. He's calling you. And if you're a sinner, church is the right place to be because the doctor is here. And also the doctor's people are here in order to help you.

As brothers and sisters in Christ, let's be about this work together. Let's pray.