Dining with Pharisees on the Sabbath Luke 14 (conclusion)

¹² [Jesus] also said to the one who had invited him, “When you give a lunch or a dinner, don’t invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors, because they might invite you back, and you would be repaid. ¹³ On the contrary, when you host a banquet, invite those who are poor, maimed, lame, or blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

¹⁵ When one of those who reclined at the table with him heard these things, he said to him, “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!”

¹⁶ Then he told him: “A man was giving a large banquet and invited many. ¹⁷ At the time of the banquet, he sent his servant to tell those who were invited, ‘Come, because everything is now ready.’

^18 “But without exception they all began to make excuses. The first one said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. I ask you to excuse me.’

^19 “Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m going to try them out. I ask you to excuse me.’

^{20 “}And another said, ‘I just got married, and therefore I’m unable to come.’

^21 “So the servant came back and reported these things to his master. Then in anger, the master of the house told his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city, and bring in here the poor, maimed, blind, and lame.’

^22 “‘Master,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, and there’s still room.’

²³ “Then the master told the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges and make them come in, so that my house may be filled. ²⁴ For I tell you, not one of those people who were invited will enjoy my banquet.’” Luke 14:1-24

If you want to be getting ready for heaven, you need to be investing your life now in folks who can’t pay you back.

How jarring an experience do you want heaven to be? I guarantee it’ll be overwhelming. It’s going to be wonderful. You don’t have to worry about that. But Jesus says we need to start now dealing with the people that He has chosen to invite to His meal. And it’s people who can’t pay you back. God in His mercy and grace has chosen to save a bunch of folks that the world wouldn’t choose. He chose us so that the world would recognize it’s all about His grace, not about our greatness. That’s how we got on the list.

The universal response of man is to say no to God. God manifested His sovereign grace by saying, “I’m going to save this one right there. And I’m going to save that one right there.” If this offends your sensibilities, then realign your sensibilities with the Word of God.

“I just can’t believe that God would save one and not save another.”

Do you think everybody is going to heaven?

“Well no, but the ones who are going to heaven are the ones who received Jesus.”

Yes, that’s exactly right. And what do you suppose causes some people to receive Jesus and not others? It’s only one thing – God’s grace.

“Well, doesn’t this make us lose our missionary zeal?”

Not at all.

When our son Stephen turned eighteen, he and our son Andrew traveled to Ukraine. This trip was the fulfillment of a burden Stephen had developed five years earlier when he first became a follower of Jesus. Stephen, the oldest of the three that we adopted from Ukraine, had been in this country just a short time when he surrendered his life to Christ and soon after, he began to weep. As he’d be going to sleep at night, and sometimes just sitting around in the house, he’d cry. We’d see tears on his face. This is a brave kid who had endured all kinds of suffering with tremendous courage.

My wife Susan would ask him, “What’s the matter, Stephen?”

And he would respond, time and again, “I have to go back to Ukraine.”

Finally, Susan said, “Steven, it really hurts us that you keep saying you want to go back to Ukraine when we have worked so hard to try and make you happy here.”

He looked as if he’d been hit in the face, and he said, “Mama, you don’t understand. You are my family. You will always be my family. I want to live with you, but I must go back to Ukraine because I must tell them about Jesus. They don’t know. And if no one tells them, they will go to hell.”

Well, of course, at that point, we were crying. We told Stephen when he got older, we’d pay for him to go back to Ukraine. His brother Andrew, our youngest biological son, agreed to go with him.

These relatives that Stephen wanted to share the gospel with were not just substance abusers. The mother particularly had been a hideously violent person. All three of those children bear permanent physical scars as a result of the abuse that they received before the Government of Ukraine took them away from their family. (Then, of course, subsequently we were able to adopt them.) But despite all the abuse – abuse more horrible than I can describe – those children had been praying every night for years that God would save their relatives in Ukraine. This is only explicable in terms of the supernatural grace of God.

We were not at all sure if the relatives were still alive. We were not at all sure how to locate them, because they’re not people who have a street address. We were not at all sure, if they were located, how it would go over when Stephen tried to share the gospel with them. We bathed this in prayer for years, intensively fasting and praying over the months and weeks preceding their trip.

Their very first day in Vinnitsa, they were able to travel to the village where Stephen grew up and locate his father and his grandmother and begin sharing the gospel. An anticipated challenge of sharing the gospel with his father would be that his father was illiterate and completely deaf. How do you share the gospel with someone who can’t read and can’t hear? Stephen had never seen his father read and was shocked and thrilled to find his father was able to read the Gospel of John in the Ukrainian language. They were also able to share the gospel with his grandmother.

But, would they be able to locate the mother? They took a nine-hour train ride to Odessa and were able to locate her with ease, because she was in prison for murder. She was literally a captive audience. Because she was in prison, she couldn’t hurt them. Before we learned that she was incarcerated, we had prayed that they would be able to find her and that God would protect them as they went to meet with her. Not only was she a violent individual, but she hung out with violent criminals. God had arranged her imprisonment, so Stephen was able to find her.

God is good, folks, and He is the only one who can change a heart. It was our prayer that the reason that Stephen had this passion to go and share the gospel with them was because God has already chosen, before time began, that He would change their hearts. We trusted that was why he had this supernatural longing to share the Good News with these folks. These were definitely not the sort of people that you and I would be likely to invite to share our meal.

When Stephen’s mother realized his identity she was shocked. She asked, “Why would you care about me?”

He responded, “Jesus Christ has changed my life, and He can change yours, too!” This kind of compassion comes from God.

You see, when you know that you’ve been sick, when you know that you were once dead and now you’re alive, when you can sing from the heart, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” then you don’t walk around feeling superior to other people. You don’t boast as if you were somehow better than others. Instead, you realize that you’ve been chosen to be like Jesus, a servant, serving the least of these, and reaching out with God’s love to people that the world considers worthless.

That’s why we’re here. That’s what we’re called to do.

As we conclude this series please join me in prayer
Father, thank you so much for loving us perfectly and for sending Jesus to do for us what none of us could ever do, provide salvation. We couldn’t save ourselves, much less anyone else, but you saved us. Not because of righteous things that we had done, but because of your great grace, you saved us. Father, we think about these other meals that Jesus shared with folks, with Matthew, with Zacchaeus, with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, and we see that nobody could be unchanged if they really trust in You. Lord, we can’t be the same that we were before. We can’t continue in sin that grace may abound. You have come to bring the dead to life, to bring healing to the sick. Deliver us Lord from our stuffy complacency, from our desire to have it our way, to keep things comfortable and cozy and predictable. God, please deliver us we pray and let us be open to whatever you want to do and whatever you want to say, because we know you always tell the truth. You tell us the truth, because you love us. We thank you Lord. We praise your name. And we ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.