A compassionate doctor has traveled deep into the jungle to provide medical care to a primitive tribe afflicted with a contagious disease. He's had his medical equipment flown in, correctly diagnosed the problem, and the antibiotics are prepared and available. He's independently wealthy and has no need of any kind of repayment. But as he seeks to provide care, the afflicted refuse. They want to take care of themselves.
Finally, a few brave young men step forward to receive this care. And guess what it produces in the doctor? Joy. His joy increases to the degree that the sick come to him for help and healing. It's the whole reason fact that he came.
How much more if the diseased are not strangers, but his own family?
So with us and so with Christ, he does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for fresh forgiveness, for renewed pardon, the distress and need with sorry, with distress and need and emptiness. In fact, that's the whole point. It's what he came to heal. He. He went down into the horror of death and plunged out through the other side in order to provide a limitless supply of mercy and grace to his people.
These are words from Dr. Dean Orland's book, gentle and lowly. And we'll continue our series through the Gospel of Luke this morning, looking at just that, that Jesus came to serve those who have no way of repaying Him. And he asked us then to do the same. And brothers and sisters, that really is the whole of the Christian life, isn't it? We see these aspects about Jesus, who He is and what he's done, and then he commands us to do the same.
He says, be holy as I'm holy. And so we be holy, we become like Him. We follow more of what he has to say. As we become, as we're transformed from one image of glory to the next, that's what we're looking to apply together today. You've heard me say this before.
Every passage of Scripture is trying to primarily do one of three things. It's trying to explain, explain something, prove something, or apply something. And how do we know that to be true? Because that's how humans communicate. And God gave us His Word in a way that we can understand, in a way that we can receive.
And so this passage this morning, of course every passage is doing all three of those things. But there's a primary thrust to it. This passage is primarily God giving us something to do, something to be applied. So this is our big idea. Serve those who have no way of repaying you.
Serve those who have no way of repaying you. Three ways that the text gives us to apply three verses, three different applications of how to work out this big idea. First is that stop only serving those who can repay you. Purposefully seek out those who cannot repay you. Look forward to being repaid at the Resurrection.
First, one, stop only serving those who can repay you. Two, purposefully seek out those who cannot repay you. And three, look forward to being repaid at the Resurrection. Those are three ways that we're given to work out this big idea of serving those who cannot repay you have no way of repaying us. Our passage is Luke 14:12, 14 this morning.
It's on page 927 of the Pew Bibles. Luke 14:14, 12, 14.
God's word there says he also said to the one who had invited him, when you give a lunch or 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. On the contrary, when you host a banquet and invite those who are poor, maimed, lame or blind and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. This is the word of the Lord, our big idea. Serve those who have no way of repaying you. First way the text gives us to work this out first way Jesus shows us how to do this is he essentially says, stop only serving those who are who can repay you.
And maybe you're looking your Bibles as you write, as you're following along in the text, making sure we're not making this up this morning. He says, stop or don't invite. And maybe you're thinking, why are you using the phrasing of stop only serving? Because Jesus is speaking here in a sort of idiom. He's speaking in an extreme sort of example to kind of get his point across.
Similar to when Jesus says, you should hate your father and mother in order to follow me, he doesn't actually mean you should hate them, you should condemn them. No, because that'd be contradicting what he says in the Ten Commandments. Honor your father and mother. No, he's trying to say it should look like you hate your father and mother compared to how much you love me. That's a similar language to what he's using here.
Dr. Robert Stein, in his commentary on Luke, writes, jesus did not prohibit having friends over for a dinner or banquet. His words are better understood as reflecting the Semitic idiom, not so much friends or neighbors as. As rather invite over the needy. The Present tense of the verb is perhaps better translated, stop continually, or stop only inviting those who can or pay you having someone over for dinner now is an important thing, right? Like, you clean the house, you make a trip to the grocery store, or maybe you make a trip out back to whatever animal but you take care of.
And you get things out, you get the house ready, you maybe prepare a special dessert and you flirt with the idea of getting out the wedding china. But then you decide, now, that's only if the King of England stops over. We didn't get any wedding china and I'm okay with it. I don't think we'd use it. That's besides the point.
It's a big deal to have somebody over for dinner. Like, you're not having people over for dinner that you don't like. You're not having dinner with people that you maybe can't get something from at least. Usually the same is true, but even more so in ancient Israel, Pastor Robert pointed out last week, it was an incredibly intimate experience. You physically close, you're not having people over for dinner that you don't want to spend time with, especially when you're quite literally shoulder to shoulder.
The principle goes deeper than that, though. Yes, it was expected in ancient Israel, kind of like today, that if you invite somebody over for dinner, they should invite you back. The principle goes deeper, though. Jesus warns us to stop only serving those who can repay us, who can only repay you. But maybe you think, why is it such a problem?
Why is that a big deal? Jesus, it's kind of a natural thing. The problem is Jesus says, gives us a command because he wants us to be holy. He wants us to be like Him. Maybe you're thinking, maybe we're thinking, what does that have to do with dinner?
Well, it's natural human instinct to only want to do something for somebody, that we can get something in return. When Jesus calls us to do this, he's calling us to be like him because he served us who had no way of repaying Him. We're called to be set apart. We're called to look like and be like our God, our God who cannot be repaid, at least fully, by his creation. Acts 17:25, we read, neither is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since He Himself gives everyone life and breath in all things.
If we only ever do things for people, who can repay us, we are not any different than the world. If we only ever do things for people who can repay us, we are not any different than the world.
It also says something about the state of our heart. If we're always concerned with getting something back, there's probably some more significant heart issue. If we're worried about always doing something and needing to get something in return, it should be treated as a check engine light that there's something wrong here. God's people are called to be radically generous because our God's radically generous. So should we stop having friends and family over dinner?
No, of course not. But the heart of the passage is saying that these people should not be the only people we have over for dinner. These should not be the only people that we spend time with. These should not be the only people that we serve. But how do we do this then?
Well, we start by being aware of the fact that we're doing in the first place. I gotta confess to you, I have a pronoun issue when it comes to this kind of stuff. I use the words my and mine a lot, or ours. My, mine, ours, friends, nothing belongs to me. Ultimately, it all belongs to God.
How I spend my money, how I spend, and I'm doing it again. How I spend time, how I serve, all of that belongs to God. He gives us these things and these efforts and this space and this time to steward. That all belongs to God. I'm guessing for you too, maybe some.
I mean, some people are just radically generous and naturally this way, but a lot of us, it's not our first reaction. So the question we can ask ourselves is simple. Who have I ministered to lately that had no way of repaying me? Who have I done something for that really needed the help, who really needed to be served? And we might be convicted of this for a lot of reasons because it's against our instinct.
But if we're new creations in Christ, and 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, we are. If we're new creations in Christ, the old has gone, the new has come. We are becoming more like Jesus. We no longer get the option of saying, yeah, well, I'll let the next guy. Let the next lady take care of this.
No, if we are followers of Jesus, we don't just get to slump back into our old ways. We are commanded to become holy, to be more and more continually like Jesus, to not pass on this. So how do we serve those who have no way of repaying us? Well, one way is to stop only serving those who can repay us. Another is to purposefully seek out those who cannot repay us, who cannot repay you.
Turn our attention to verse 13. One way we serve those who have no way of repaying us is to purposefully, or maybe you could say to go out of our way to find, to seek out those who cannot repay us. Jesus gives the command to invite the needy, the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and these people who are specifically mentioned here, these four groups of people are kind of the Bible's way of describing, like the least of these, those who you wouldn't. Maybe you'd walk past and maybe not try to make eye contact if we're being real honest.
Sorry if I'm talking about sin in church, but those people who are indeed mentioned the Bible refers to as those who cannot serve themselves in the ancient world, all four of those disabilities would have been a much bigger deal. It would have been a much bigger deal because if somebody couldn't find their way to the marketplace, they couldn't eat. If they couldn't find their way to the temple, well, maybe they would not also be banned from the temple, but also they couldn't go through the, the ritual rights of becoming ceremonially clean again.
In the time of Jesus. These, these disabilities would have made independent living practically impossible. Unfortunately, too, a lot of times people caught in these situations would get abandoned by their families because they would have been viewed as just too great of a bother for the family to take care of. Jesus is commanding in this passage to invite the people that the culture would consider nobodies, that the culture would consider unimportant or bothers. Praise God that we've made strides away from this by and large as a culture, but we still have a lot of room to grow.
The point still remains, Jesus commands here in verse 13 to care for the least of these.
Now, it's hard to overstate just how dramatic of a comment this was from Jesus. It's hard to overstate just how much shock and awe would come when he makes a statement like this. They would. In a culture that was obsessed with being ceremonially clean, to be near somebody who is perpetually and often permanently ceremonially unclean would have been appalling. Like the gasp would have been loud.
They would have been stunned. They would have thought that Jesus is misunderstood at best and irreverent at worst. They would have said, how dare this teacher of the law say these things? These people he's describing in the scenario would have been culturally unclean in just about every scenario. They would have not had access to much of customs or marketplaces or basic commodities of daily life.
And so when Jesus says invite them, the people sitting around would have been shocked, would have been Stunned, and a lot of them would have been deeply offended.
He's saying, do for someone who not only can't do something back for you, but do something for someone that you would not have wanted to spend time with otherwise.
Friends, if we're doing the Christian life right, our church should look like a group of people who don't make sense. If you remove Jesus from the situation to the outside world looking in, our church should look look like our Sunday morning gathering. Our small groups, our ministry should look like a group of people that doesn't make sense if you remove Jesus from the situation. The same is absolutely true for those that we minister to. So the outside world looking in, if we're, if we're following Jesus and we're growing to become more like him, it's going to look weird to the world how we serve the person that maybe votes differently than us, maybe has different ethnic heritage than usual, that maybe is this, that or the other thing and just going to look different.
We'll get to the why we do this in our next point, but for now, let's consider how to do this. What might it look like practically to stop serving only those who can repay you? One way to do this is to meet a need anonymously. If you hear it, for example, if you hear somebody struggling to pay for a car repair, well, you could do that is stop by the mechanic and just pay for the repair yourself. If you have the.
Of course you have the means to do it. If you hear of somebody who's struggling to find help fixing the gutters, well, you can maybe offer to pay for that service to be done, or you can do it when you know that they're at work and they can't help you back. So you can do it anonymously, but it doesn't have to be anonymous. The folks invited to dinner in this passage aren't anonymous. They knew that they were being invited.
So we ask ourselves, who in my circle of influence, who do I know that has these needs? Who needs to be served this way? Or maybe who can I add to my circle that needs to be served this way? Because when we do these things, we show them that they're loved and we're cared for. But more important than that, when we do these things, we reflect the very heart of Christ towards them.
Because when we were unlovable, when we were undesirable, when we were far worse, when we were light years worse than being considered one of the least of these, Jesus came to serve us when we were actively working against God and His good. He reached down to us. He invited us in and he said to us, come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. He says in John 6:37, come all those everyone the Father gives to me will come to me. And all those who come to me, I will never cast out.
In Hebrews 5:2, we read, he is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray. Since he is also clothed in weakness, he invites us to come to him. When we were far worse off than being considered one of the least of these, he invites us to come to him.
He invited us in knowing we would have no way to repay him. We purposefully seek people out who cannot repay us because Jesus did it first. That's one way we serve those who cannot repay us. The last way we'll look at is to look forward to being repaid at the resurrection. Shift our attention to verse 14.
How do we serve those who have no way of repaying us? We look forward to a reward at the resurrection. Here Jesus gives us the why? Why are we doing these first two commands? Because we look forward to the reward at the resurrection.
When we are raised to resurrection bodies on the last day, those bodies that will be incapable of breaking down and yes, and amen and praise the Lord for that. When we have resurrection bodies in the last day, we will receive our reward. This is also talked about in First Corinthians 3. 14 Says, if anyone's work that he has built survives, he will receive a reward. Yes, we'll believe we'll experience reward.
What it exactly looks like, we're not sure. We have some ideas, but we don't know the exact details of it. But we will certainly care about on that day seeing the Lord and those who we help bring to the Lord. Because we we meet tangible needs. We take care of people who are hungry.
We take care of people who are hurting. We meet physical, tangible needs. Yes, and amen. And we should do that. But we do that so that we can proclaim God's goodness to them with our mouths.
Because that's a need that's even deeper than a spirit, than a physical need, the that we have in Jesus. Sometimes people will say, well, just live a good life. And then people kind of follow it. That's not how that works. The gospel is needs to be proclaimed with our mouths and we get to do that.
That's a great way of serving people. Yes, meet the physical, tangible needs, but then tell them about the hope of Jesus and It's not up to us to do the same, but we get to do that. We get to bring hope. We get to hopefully bring people with us. We get to see that reward, hopefully someday, again.
How this works, we don't necessarily know all the details, but we do know is that we'll get to experience some incredible face to face intimacy with God. And we'll get to enjoy a reward. We should look forward to being repaid at the resurrection. And even if we're never acknowledged on this side of heaven, even if we're never told, thank you, it's okay. Because we know repayment is coming.
We know that blessing is coming. So this should motivate us to press on, to do the thing that makes absolutely no sense to the. To the watching world.
Because it's not what saves us. No, we know that comes from Christ and Christ alone, but we know that we'll get to be repaid by the One who made our eternal life possible. We do these things to care for the people that we're ministering to, that we're serving, that we're helping, that we're being with. Yes, because we love them, but ultimately because we love Jesus. That should be what motivates the service.
That should be what motivates our health. That should be what's at the forefront of it. So how do people do hard things? I would imagine for a lot of us, this is a hard thing to do. There's a whole field of psychology dedicated to it.
How do people do hard things? Whether it's going to the gym, whether it's losing weight, whether it's reading or whether it's doing hard math, People have a hard time doing hard things. That's why they're hard. And ultimately, when you read a lot of that stuff, it comes down to the reward. Do you think the reward's worth it?
I can tell you a secret that's not really too much of a secret. I absolutely love Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs. And it is the season for Reese's Peanut Butter eggs. And they're not in the stock on the shelf of the pigs, so somebody probably let them know about that. But you cannot.
If you told me that there was a lifetime supply of Reese's Peanut Butter eggs, and I'm not talking little miniature ones that come in individual, like little tin foil wrappers. Those are gross. Well, I'll still eat them, but I don't like them. I like the full size ones. But if you told me there was a lifetime supply of Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs waiting for me at the finish line of a marathon.
I am not going to do it. I'm not. I have asthma. I don't like running. I'm not going to do that.
That reward is not worth it to me. But a reward that would be worth it to me if somebody said there's a blank check waiting at the finish line for Piper's college. Or maybe it's a business adventure for her someday. Or a down payment on a house. You better believe I'm gonna grab the inhaler and start running.
Not because of the money. I mean, yeah, that's a great perk, but because of my love for my little girl. That love will motivate me to do just about anything. How much greater love then should. How much more.
Sorry. How much greater should our motivation be by the love that we have for Jesus? To do hard things, to follow his commands, to do what he asks us to do?
People don't do hard things often because of fear. Sometimes that can help. But the greatest motivator is love and should be love for Jesus. We're motivated, yes, by this love we have for these people, of course, but ultimately we should be motivated by our love for Jesus and the reward that only he can bring.
So what's our big idea this morning? Serve those who have no way of repaying you three ways. We saw a text give us to do that. Stop only serving those who can repay you. Purposefully seek out those who cannot repay you and look forward to being repaid at the resurrection.
We stop only serving those who can repay us by becoming aware of the problem and by asking ourselves a hard question. Especially if this is not a natural thing for us. We need to ask the hard questions and we need other people to ask us hard questions. That's why we have the body of believers here church. By checking our heart and seeing what real motivations are driving our actions, what motivations are leading the way?
Are they God's or are they our own? When we purposefully seek out those who cannot repay us, we are showing them the heart of Christ. We show them this by going out of our way to care for them. We can meet that need either anonymously, or we can go out of our way to purposefully know and say, hey, I want you to know that you're loved and that you're cared for. And we do all this by looking forward to the reward we'll receive at the resurrection.
And our motivation has to be. It must be a love for the people, but even more important, love for Jesus. Doing these things, knowing that someday we'll receive a reward from him on the last day.
Serve those who have no way of repaying you. We do this, of course, to be obedient to his commands, but to reflect Jesus to those we interact with. Because the Son of God took on flesh for you and I. And the greatest display ever of serving those who have no way of repaying you. Jesus Christ came and lived a perfect life, died an innocent death, rose again.
He promises to come back someday to pay for the sins of those who trust in him, but also to make all things new. One of the greatest hopes of the gospel, friends, is that everything sad will come untrue. He came to seek and save the lost. He came to serve us. He knew that we needed his life to count for our own.
Can we bless him with our words and our actions and how we live? Yes. But does he need that from us? No, he does not. We can't repay him.
Why does Jesus ask us to care for the least of these, for the culturally unimportant, for the least impressive, for those who have no favor for humanity? Well, because he did it first. He did it for us first, John says, because he first loved us. And when we're doing this for others, we reflect in the very heart of Christ for him. We're reflecting the heart of the God man who says, come to me.
Reflecting the heart of Jesus. When we do these things and we protest though, don't we? Just like sometimes if we've tried to help people and say, no, I don't need it. I don't need the help. I'm good.
Jesus says, come to me. And sometimes we'll say, jesus, well, you don't understand. You don't understand what I've done. He says, come to me. He says, come to me.
He says, come to me. Come to me. Come to me and let me serve you. And he says, I know you have no way of repaying me, and that's okay. That's exactly who I came to serve.
Brothers and sisters, we can find forgiveness of sin in no one else other than Jesus. We also find a heart that is so very much for the least of these in Jesus. In fact, I would say no one is more for the least of these than Jesus.
Let us come to him and bring others with us. Let us do this by serving those who have no way of repaying us. During this last song, as the worship team comes up, you're going to get the chance to respond to God's word proclaim this morning, remember, I told you this is something to do. So maybe it's something you need to pray through with somebody. We're going to have prayer team members in the back.
Go ahead and find anybody who has a prayer team badge on. They'd be happy to pray with you. If you're curious in hearing more about who this Jesus is who came to serve those who can't repay us or can't repay him, they'd be happy to talk through that with you too. Maybe just ask yourself just one simple question. Ask God, how can I reflect and be more like Jesus towards those who have no way of repaying these how can I reflect and be like Jesus towards those who have no way of repaying me?
Go ahead and find those prayer team members during the last song or right after service and don't put it off.
I'm going to pray and I'll give you the space to do just that this morning. God, you are good, gracious and kind. You are slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. And we thank you that you sent your son to not only be a payment for sin, but to serve us knowing we could never, never repay you. You led the way.
We pray that your spirit would encourage us in this area and convict us where we encourage us where we need to be encouraged and convict us where we need to be convicted. That we would care about, care for the least of these because that is who we were and are so very much before your throne. But God, we thank you that you didn't leave us that way and that you came and you radically changed our lives and the course that we had for ourselves. And we pray that you would do here what you need to do in Jesus name. We.