Discovering and Rediscovering Jesus

1. Read 1 John 3:13-15. What does this passage say is a defining mark of eternal living now? And where have you seen the fruit of this in your life?
2. Read Luke 19:1-10. What kind of obstacles did Zacchaeus have to overcome in order to see Jesus? What personal challenges or obstacles have you faced in seeking God?
3. Notice the sense of urgency in Luke 19 with the use of the word "hurry." What would it look like in your life to silence the temporal rush of our lives and run into Jesus’ presence with a sense of urgency and an eternal perspective?
4. How can we help others discover who Jesus really is? What are some specific actions you can take this week to help someone see who Jesus is?
5. Pastor Pete highlighted how self-righteousness can blind us to Jesus and to others around us, emphasizing the need to dig wells instead of building fences. Can you think of a recent situation where you might have judged someone instead of reaching out to them? How could you approach it differently next time?

Prayer + Practice:

Jesus' vision of Eternal Living Now found in John 17:3 is one where we are in loving relationship with God. This happens because of his sacrifice on the cross, so our mission is to help people discover who Jesus really is and live with, like, and for him, now and forever. The three rhythms of Worship Together, Life Together, and Serve Together connect you to that heartbeat to start experiencing that kind of life. This is the best way to get connected and start growing at Hillside.

We started last week by kicking off basically for the fall, this whole ministry season with just a three part series on the vision and mission of our church. It's called eternal living now. Sort of encompasses both of them, but it's what we call the, the vision of our church is eternal living now. And last week we looked at Jesus definition of eternal life, John, chapter 17 and verse three. Jesus says, eternal life is knowing the father, knowing God, the true God, and then knowing him personally.

So it's a relationship. It's an experience, personal and intimate relationship. It's not so much in Jesus mind. They're a destination, you know, eternal life out there and isn't even something Jesus wanted you to think in terms of time, as if it were something that you think of duration. So it wasn't a destination or a duration.

It had to do with a relationship, which means it's not something you have to die to get.

The moment you enter into relationship with God, eternity begins for you, and you can begin to live an eternal quality of life immediately. I love that line in there in the song that we just sang. If through his love, God befriends you, that's a great, great line. You become a friend of God, a companion of God, when you come to know Jesus Christ. And so you enter into relationship with him.

Eternity begins because his rule and his ways take over your life immediately. Here's a couple of verse. Here's a verse I've known for a long time. But look what John says in another book. In one John, this is the testimony God gave us, eternal life.

He's going to explain this, and the life is in his son. So if you have the son, you have life. Whoever has the son has life. Whoever does not have the son, son of God does not have life. And I write things.

This is the reason I'm writing to you, to those of you who believe in the son of God, that you may know that you have right now, eternal life. Now, when I was a, when I first came to Christ, I was in a baptist church. And, you know, I started growing and I started going out. We would do all these little missions and go out, visit people and share the gospel with people all the time. And we memorized one John 513, King James version.

And I'll never forget one of the first verses I ever memorized. And I remember how I used to use it when I was winning people to Christ. I would say, and John said, after I tell them how they can have the gospel, Jesus forgive their sins. And I said, and I said, and john writes these things so that anyone who believes on his name can know that he has eternal life. And I always interpreted that as that, you know, when you die, you'll go to heaven.

That is not what he is saying here. He's saying, you're going to believe, and the son's going to come into your life, and you're going to start living that eternal life right now. If he's in your life, it's not something that happens to later. In fact, John will actually say in this same book, it's only five chapters. It's a treatise on what eternal life is.

Five chapters. And then he says this. How do you know you've passed from death to life? This is a great line, one of the best ever, describing this. How do you know you've passed from death into life?

You're like, oh, do you have to die in order to know that? No. If you love the brothers, you have stepped over into eternal life.

If something happens inside of you that comes out to other people, then you're living an eternal quality of life already. Whoever does not love is still living in a death like existence. And John will give you other ways besides love. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that. No murderer has eternal life when he dies.

No abiding in him right now, it comes into you now, and you start to live an eternal quality of life. One of those qualities, we're going to look at it next week, is loving the brothers. So whatever eternal life is, it's something that happens in you. It comes on you, and you start living it long before you ever enter into heaven. And so when I say.

When you hear. When somebody asks you, what's the vision of Hillside? You should say, it's so that people come to know Jesus Christ and start living with them. Now, that's what you want. That's what you say.

Well, that vision leads to a mission. It means every day we leave here, there's got to be something we're about that's bigger than everything else we're doing. It doesn't matter what it is in the world we're doing. Visiting family out of state, going to work tomorrow, taking care, running errands, taking care of people.

Whatever you do, there's a mission above all of it. That vision gives us a mission. Now, when I say vision, that's something I'm hoping. We come to church every Sunday. We hope somebody shows up that needs life with God.

Or maybe you have neighbors, you have friends, you have people. You just you're hoping mission is not hoping mission. Mission is what you're doing about it. With our vision, we're hoping with our mission. This is what we do.

This is what we're about. This is why we get up tomorrow morning, not just as a church, but individuals. And what we're trying to do, since we want people to have eternal life and you have it in his son, then we're trying to help people discover who Jesus is really is. Because in our culture, the Bible belt, the southeast of everybody has some idea of who Jesus is. Not always accurate.

It's not always a full picture. And so we want people to see who Jesus really is. That's not easy in our culture, the one we live in, because everybody thinks they know who Jesus is. Everybody thinks they know what he would do and what he would say.

They don't really know him personally. They don't have an accurate picture of him. The second part of this is we're going to look at next week is not only once you come to know who he is then you live now, not life later. You live now with like and for him. And that's why we add this phrase, eternal living now, now and forever.

Whatever Jesus, whatever life you encounter when you encounter him, it starts to take place now and it goes on forever. It's an eternal quality of life that begins today. That's our mission. And so in this little short series, we're just reminding ourselves, what's it all about? What are we doing?

Why do we show up here? This is it. So in case your heart's not really beating fast over that, we're going to look at a text today. We're going to be reminded so that this vision will take over your life. And we're going to look at Luke, chapter 19.

Because Luke, chapter 19, I encountered it so much this summer and it was just amazing to me. But it's a mission text. This is how it ends. Jesus says, here's my mission. I have come to seek and to save the lost.

The lost.

Now, who are the lost? Anyone who's not in that life, anyone who does not have life with the son is lost. You can describe it any way you want, but at the end of the day, you don't have the son and you're not living the life with them. That's a lost person. And based on what we talked about last week, very clearly, to see how lost you would be if you don't have that, we're going to look at this text.

This is the text itself. This is Luke 19 110 story of Zacchaeus. Many of you know it, but I wanted you to see, no pun intended, that it's about seeing.

It's about seeing and seeking. You got a person who starts out seeking, and you got a person at the end who ends up seeking. But in between, you got all this looking going on, and this is. This is what's really critical. So in the very beginning, Luke is going to say, hey, I want you guys to see something that's really behold.

All that. All behold means is look, hey, look. I want you to see something. He's going to show us what that is. And then, whatever it is, we're looking at this person, actually, that we're looking at.

He's actually looking for something, too. So we're looking at him. He's looking for something.

And then Jesus comes along and he's looking, and then it turns out there's a crowd of people who are also looking at the same thing. They don't see what he sees. Then you get to the very end and he says, look again. Except this time, you're looking at first, you're looking at this guy. Secondly, this guy's asking you to look at him.

Look at me now.

It's amazing, and I love it. And here's what's going on in this text, because this is what we have to do. Two things are really happening here. You're going to see what it looks like to discover Jesus for the first time. What does it look like?

Since that's our mission, is to help people discover who Jesus is, we need to see what it looks like for somebody to discover. And some of us need to remember how wonderful it is because we've forgotten. Not only do we have to help people discover who Jesus is, many of us have to rediscover who Jesus is because we have forgotten what his heart is like and what he sees, and we're not seeing what he's seeing. So it's a mission text. It's the mission Jesus has for lost people.

It's also a reminder that some of us have lost sight of that mission. And so there's two lost people in this text. There's the one who doesn't know Jesus, and there's the one who does, who's not living like him and who's not loving Lichen, that have to discover or rediscover Jesus. You decide which one you are, but this is how the text starts, right here.

So he goes to Jericho. He's two weeks away from dying on a cross. We just celebrated communion. He's two weeks away from that happening. And Luke says, beholden.

Look, take a look at this. And he points out this guy named Zacchaeus. And what does he say about him? He's a ruler. He's a tax collector, and he was rich.

Now, in verse seven, you're going to see how the crowd describes him. Is a sinner. He is all these things, all the colors of evil in Luke's mind. All the despised people, the wealthy, the greedy. In Luke, the greedy, the guy who misuses his power, the tax collector who was a traitor to his own people, turned his back on his own nation.

And then the immoral person, because he's all of these things. He's a liar and he's a cheat.

This is all of them right here. This is every despicable person in Luke, all in one person. You go through Luke, you see tax collectors. You see sinners. You see the wealthy.

You see the rich young rulers. You see rulers. He is all of them. When Luke says, look, he's basically saying, look at the most despised person you could ever imagine. I want you to think of the most despised person you've ever thought about, because I'm going to tell you, you can't be on mission unless you do this.

You got to look.

He's the supreme sinner.

He is a laughable character. You're like, he can't be all those. He's all of them. Remember, in just the chapter before this, this is the reason this story is so big is because just the chapter before Jesus runs into that rich guy, remember, the rich guy comes and says, what do I have to do to have eternal life? What do I have to do to go to heaven?

And Jesus knows that his really, he's counted on money to save him.

And so Jesus says to him, you're going to have to let go of that money.

That's what you're going to have to do. And this guy recognizes that. He's like, no way. He goes, I want heaven, but I don't want to lose anything here. Think about that.

I would like heaven, but I don't want to lose anything here in the process of getting it. And so remember what happens. He goes away sad.

The disciples are watching this. Jesus says, it's really hard for wealthy people to come into the kingdom. It's really hard if you're in this category to come into the kingdom. Just this category.

It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, Jesus says, than for a wealthy guy to get into the kingdom. The disciples are standing around like you and me, and we're going, wait a minute. What then who can be saved? They say, who's going to get in? And Jesus says to them, with man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.

And you're like, oh, my goodness, this is. And we're about to encounter a guy who is every despicable person. And when we're done with this conversation, you think the disciples said, it's impossible for him to come to Christ. We're all looking at each other going, there's no way that guy is who's on your no way list today. Because that's what Luke is asking us to do, is to look.

Look at this guy and think of the guys or the people in your life, you know, who's out of reach, who's on your list, and who have you mentally said impossible for them to come to God?

It seems like in our day we've added categories. It's like we have more categories of people that. More people fall into the categories here today than they ever did. In Jesus day, you had lepers. So there would be a physical issue, like physically, he can't come in, or there'd be social issues.

She's a prostitute or she's immoral, or she's a gentile, you know, or her gender or she's a woman.

All kinds of reasons, ethnic reasons. You had. You had every single one of them. And today I think there's even more of a prominent one. As I was thinking about this, an intellectual one, how many times have you said, how dumb are those people?

You're way too dumb to come to Jesus. You're just dumb. In our day and age, because of the widespread amount of exposure we have to one another, we're always looking at people and going, that's the dumbest person I've ever seen in my whole life. I mean, on a regular basis, you're encountering the dumbest people ever. And you say, those people can't come to Christ long before their moral issues.

They're just too dumb.

Well, it turns out that this person, for whatever reason, we don't know why, but he starts to look at Jesus differently. You could spend some time, if you want to, trying to figure out what it is. But if you're all these things, if you're all these things and they're not working, and don't forget, every one of us still try to let power run our life or to let money run our lives, or greed or some other moral issue that we just can't seem to shake. And we just think if we could just have it, it would change our lives. We've misused all of these.

And he's realizing at some level in his life none of them are working. If you're wealthy, you might think, well, maybe power would help me. And if you have wealth and power, then you might think, well, maybe if I was a tax collector and I could just get money from everywhere and I'd be willing to lose everything. I'll do it. Okay?

And then morality, forget honesty and forget which one of these will save me. And none of them do. And at some point this poor guy realizes it and he wants to see who Jesus is because he's heard some things about him, but he doesn't have an accident. Accurate picture, he doesn't have a full picture, but he wants to know what Jesus, not what he looked like.

Let me just see what this guy is like.

The interesting thing about him being a tax collector, which certainly was one of the worst things you could, is that in Luke, Luke, chapter three. Luke chapter five. Luke, chapter 15. Luke, chapter 18. Luke, chapter 19.

This guy is viewed positively by God, by Jesus, and by Luke. The world despises him, but he's viewed positively. They're the ones that show up to hear Jesus talk. They're the ones that inquire about Jesus.

And so they're viewed positively in this book. They show interest and Jesus is attracted to them.

So if you've given up on anybody, political figure, if you've given up on anybody, then the first thing you have to do is rediscover Jesus. He's looking to see Jesus. Jesus is telling us in Luke, you need to start seeing people different.

So we're rediscovering Jesus. He's trying to find Jesus. And so you got verses three and four, which go like this, or I'm sorry, let's see where it is. So crowd's too big. He can't see Jesus.

He's a small guy, so he runs ahead, climbs a tree. He runs and he climbs so that he can see Jesus. Now here's the thing. This is what I would say to any seeker, and maybe as true in our age as ever before, but truly seems like now if you're going to see Jesus, you're going to have to climb a tree and you're going to have to look over the crowd.

Now what does that mean? Well, he wants to see what Jesus looks like. He doesn't have an accurate picture and he's about to be really, really surprised. In fact, everybody is. Even the people who think they know what Jesus is like are about to be surprised.

So he's got to climb a tree. This is the up and over, up the tree, over the crowd, up and over principle. And it works for both, by the way. You discover who Jesus is for the first time or you rediscover him because you've lost sight. So the first thing he does is go up this tree.

Now, if you're seeking Jesus and you got to go up that tree, that's incredibly humiliating. He's drawing attention to his stature. This would get right at the heart of insecurity in any one of us, and it ought to make you insecure if you start looking at Jesus life, because you better know you're going to find something that your life doesn't match up to. It should really humble you and in this day, incredibly undignified. First of all, to run.

Remember in Luke chapter 15, just a few chapters earlier, the father runs. It's a shameful act. No self respecting man or jew would run because it just looks like you're out of control, desperate.

He certainly wouldn't climb a tree.

Part of it was just what you were wearing. You'd look funny doing either one of those activities. You just look funny. My kids, one of my kids with his daughters has a big old, big old tree in his yard. It's causing problems, but it's a big tree.

And I pull up to that house every once in a while, the kids will be climbing in it and they want, grandpa, grandpa, look, I'm climbing a tree, and it's so great. If I pull up to that house and see my son in that tree, I'm just going to keep driving, all right? I'm not going into that yard with a man and a woman in the tree with their kids. Even in our day, we'd be like, what's he doing in the tree?

That's how it would have been here. And so you say, what does that mean? What does it mean to climb the tree? Well, it means to put your pride away. You're going to feel a little bit foolish.

You might feel a little unenlightened in our culture, like, I wonder for some of the people we know in our lives, maybe it's you. How ridiculous would it look to somebody in your life if you told them you were interested in learning a little bit more about God or you were going to start reading the Bible or you might start attending church regularly? Who in your life would say, what's wrong with you? What happened to you? That's sort of ancient.

Aren't we way past that? In our culture, there's a lot of ways in which it's communicated to us. That's ridiculous. Backward.

This summer, I finally got around to reading Nabil Qureshi's book, seeking Allah and finding Jesus. It's a pretty long read, but it's fascinating. Here's a muslim kid, grew up entrenched in Muslim, believed it. So his upbringing had these deep seated convictions and beliefs about Allah and about the spiritual world as presented to him in the Quran.

But he meets somebody who intrigues him a little bit. And even though he's not really happy about it, he's not happy about it. He starts to read the Bible, and he starts to look at things a little bit different, and he realizes how offensive this is going to be to everybody in his life that's important to him. His mom and dad are probably going to reject him. His friends probably won't have anything to do with him.

He will literally lose his entire heritage and possibly his family to climb that tree. And climbing the tree in our culture, you know, what I would tell you is just read the Bible. The best way to get a view of Jesus is to just open your gospels and start reading them.

And so you could let pride keep you from climbing that tree. It'll take humility.

Second thing you have to do if you're a seeker is you got to look over the crowd. And that's because here's what the crowd's doing now. We don't know who's in the crowd. Look, there's no specificity around the crowd. We can guess and speculate different groups that are within that crowd, but it's a lot of people.

It's not just one group. So now the crowd's looking at the same thing we're looking at. Luke said, hey, look at that. Hey. This is how the crowd sees it.

This is how the crowd sees that guy. They're mumbling to themselves, oh, my goodness. I don't know who this guy thinks he is. Jesus, going anywhere near this fella, he's about to be the guest in a sinner's house. So this guy, they don't like him.

They call zacchaeus the sinner. And, of course, jesus is worse. You know, if you were to. When you enter into somebody's house, you, especially somebody who was known for ill gotten gain, it was as if you were a partner in crime.

Look who jesus is partnering with. So this is how they see the crowd. Now let me tell you who the crowd is, because its us, judgmental.

We're the moral majority, self righteous.

When we use the word sinner, we use it like they use it as a club, pounding people over their head for their wrongdoing or their evil. And it's designed to keep people out. Stay away from him. Don't go near him or her.

That's who the crowd represents. They do not see this man the way jesus sees him.

And somehow Zacchaeus not only has to get a clear view of Jesus, he's got to somehow get past the hypocrisy of the crowd.

That's very common. We've got a lot of people don't want anything to do with Jesus because of us.

And if they're going to find him, they're going to have to really get a good vantage point of him, maybe read the gospels, watch it, him and other people's lives. But they're also going to have to get over some of the hypocrisy. It's everywhere. So Jesus is telling, Luke is telling this guy, yeah, that's part of what you have to do. And here's what I would say to both to these groups.

I would say to the Seeker, it's a beautiful thing. Jesus does not let their attitude about him keep him from getting to Zacchaeus. He does not let their hypocrisy, their high and mighty morality keep him from getting to Zacchaeus. So Luke is suggesting. So Zacchaeus, don't let their hypocrisy keep you from seeing Jesus because it's not going to keep him from getting to you.

Isn't that great? Almost both of them have to separate from the crowd in order to carry out the mission.

That has a lot of powerful ramifications for us.

Because their hypocrisy does not change who Jesus is. You can actually get a vision of Jesus outside of the realm of some of the hypocrisy that's keeping you from seeing it. And remember this, if you're mad at the hypocrites, be very careful because you'll become just as self righteous as they are if you do that. You can't win that war. You'll do just what you say the hypocrites are doing.

They're saying you're not righteous, you're saying they're too righteous. And you both have the same hate filled and it's all self righteousness. At the end of the day, self righteousness will ruin you.

So sin. All those things we looked at, all these things can keep you from Jesus.

Guess what else can?

Morality.

If I'm moral enough, I don't need Jesus. Sin will keep me. You know, I'll avoid Jesus because of my sin. I'll also avoid him because of my perceived righteousness. I don't really need him.

He owes me. I'm good enough. I can save myself either money and all this stuff. Zacchaeus is going to save him or our morality saves us. Either one.

Both are lost, right?

So you can use your morality to avoid Jesus. I'll just stop sinning so I don't have to deal with Jesus. I'll just stop doing some things and you avoid.

I want to give you a window into this.

I had to go home this past summer right as the break started, because I'm moving my dad from Florida to here.

It's time, and it's necessary, and it's an ordeal. He's struggling with it, we're struggling with it, and it's nightmarish on emotional levels, financial levels, geographical levels, physical levels, all relational levels. Either way, I have to go down there and finally convince after years that this is something we have to do. So I go down there and I meet my mom and two sisters. We haven't been together, all of us together in the same place, and I can't even remember when my mom would be my dad's ex.

They've been divorced a long time, so now we're all going to meet together. And I've got, on my head, I got the emotional weight of this. I am the point person for the whole process, bearing the weight at multiple levels. When you get all the family together, even though we really do love each other, you never know what's going to happen. All right?

It's risky business. And so all this is being managed. Meanwhile, there's a few other couple of other family members. One of them is living with a guy, and they're going to be a part of this over the years. I don't live there anymore, so I don't know.

But I. A lot of bad mouthing happens about family members. You get bad mouthing happens about family member, and then you finally meet these people, and you don't know how to see them any other way than the way people have told you to see them.

And so I won't go into all the details, but I get there, and I got all this weight, this mission, I got to do it in four days, and I'm looking out of the corner of my eye at these folks.

And I spend two days just focused on the mission at hand. And it's not until one night, second night, sleeping at night, and I realized I have completely missed what I'm here for. What I'm really here for is I've got some family members I'm not connected to. I can show them Jesus Christ in these four days, and I am off mission. I'm looking out the corner of my eye at them.

I have put them on my no way list. I don't want to admit that to you.

And for two days, out of the corner of my eye, you know, mister, go around, get it all me now.

Lost sight of what I was there for. Woke up that next morning, said, not today. And I got an opportunity to share Christ and to talk about faith the very next day in what I know will have significant steps down the road.

But I was off mission because I was looking at people the way the crowd is. That's how you get off. You know what I had to do? I had to rediscover Jesus. Took me two days to even remember.

And I don't care where you're going, and I don't care what your goal is, and I don't care how messy it is, and I don't care how big of a problem you've got to solve. At the top of all of that is the biggest problem in the world. People don't know Jesus Christ. And you cannot let any mission eclipse that mission, no matter how serious of a mission it is. That's what Luke is trying to get at here.

And that's why Jesus, you gotta love this line in the story.

When Jesus arrives, he goes right to the spot, literally. That's how I interpreted, right to the spot where Zacchaeus is, looks up at him and says, Zacchaeus. His name comes down and invites himself to his house. This is not what you expect of Jesus. By the time you get to it, you talk about being surprised.

Zacchaeus has no idea what he's dealing with. Jesus is blowing all kinds of circuits culturally, surprising everybody. The crowd, Zacchaeus single, focused crowd didn't affect him one bit. Walked right up to that tree. Let me just say something for a second just so you don't miss it.

Don't you love that? Who doesn't love that? Jesus did that. How many of you would have loved the story to be? Well, Jesus got lost in the crowd, and he was hanging out with people, and they were all looking up that idiot in the tree.

Would that be a Jesus you would want, do you want to be that way? Because I was.

That's what I want to be like, hurry, come down. Stay with me. Jesus invites himself to his house, and he basically says, you know what, Zacchaeus? You're looking for me. But I see you.

I see you rectomy, and not only do I see you, I want to enter your world. You entered somebody's house in that culture, you entered their world, man. Can you imagine Jesus coming into your house and you're running around trying to clean up a little bit because you're a slob, and you know you're a slob and you got candles that aren't working, and now it's dark in this part of the house. You're like, oh, my gosh, I'm a wreck. And your wife's mad at you and your kids half naked running around, and you're like, oh, my gosh, he's in the house.

What's going to happen when he comes in the house? And Jesus just, I don't know. Some crazy things happen in that house with Jesus there. But this is Grace walking in. He didn't say to Zacchaeus, I need you to change some things before I walk in.

Hey, can you make sure those candles are lit? Can you make sure those kids are dressed? Can you make sure that your wife's smiling?

He didn't do any of that.

And so what does he do?

He hurried. Who wouldn't came down out of that tree and received him. He welcomed. And this is okay, you can come in. You want to stay at my house?

You can come and come on in, man. It's a mess in here. My soul is as big a mess as my house.

And the text says he received them joyfully in Luke. That's a clue that says that means there was a genuine experience here. The father rejoiced in Luke 15. The rich guy goes away sad because he doesn't want Jesus in Luke 18. And here he's joyful.

And the reason he's joyful is because something genuine is about to happen to his whole life.

And memo last week, I said, I said, this is sort of a picture of the Trinity, the Father, son, and the Holy Spirit. And they're just communing with one another before anything exists in the world, they're communing with one another. And then we know that Jesus steps out of that communion to come and die on a cross so that God's life can be opened up to us. That's what eternal life is. We get to come into that communion immediately through the son.

And I said to you, you gotta get in there. You gotta find a way. And you can't just be, oh, God loves me. And that's it. No, no, no, God loves you.

You gotta get in that love. And you say, how do you get in there? Well, Luke 19 tells us, you welcome him, you invite him into your life. You let him come into your life. How do you get into his life?

You let him into yours. You open your home, you say, come in here, we need to relight a candle. We need to do that. Whatever we need to do, we're going to do it. You come in, and you just renovate this place with your life.

That's what Zacchaeus will say.

So God makes his life accessible to you, and you guess what you get to do? Make your life accessible to him. Come on in to closets, medicine cabinets, garages.

Come on in, Lord. And you know what's so beautiful? This is so great. It's greater than we can fathom.

Zacchaeus has a moment. We don't know when it is, but the presence of Jesus in his house for probably days does something inside of him. He stands up and look what he says, look, lord, you know, everybody's been looking at me, and if we could stop it, we would stop every crowd from looking at us. Please don't look at me. Please don't see what I've made of myself.

Please don't see those things.

Zacchaeus says, look, lord, you can look at all of it. There's nothing I'm not going to give to you. In fact, that's the two main verbs in this text. They both mean giving. Give and give.

I've been a taker all my life. Look, I've ruined my life taking. I don't want to be a taker anymore. I want to be a giver. So he literally doubles down.

I mean, this massive shift has happened in his life where the whole center is just upheaval, where money once ruled him. He counted on money to save his life. Money won't save you. So he doubles down. He says, I'll give half of my goods.

In Judaism, if you gave 20% of your income away to the poor, you were considered a moron.

And he's like, I'll give half. And then he says, and, you know, I know you're only supposed to give 20% when you make restitution to people you've stolen from. I'm going to give double that. He doubles down. So at once, where he was one time when money was everything to him.

Here he doubles down on Jesus, make. Yeah, it's a complete heart change. Luke is showing a complete heart change. I read the story of a guy who read the story of a guy who went to Harvard. He said, every day, got his MBA from Harvard, and he was.

He would go into class in the Harvard professor, would start every class on business by saying this. Who's winning today? Greed or fear?

And I love what the writer said after he said, are they my only two choices? It's a great observation. And for some people who don't know Jesus Christ, that's all they have. Just what they want and what they're afraid of not having. Just what I want and what I'm afraid of runs my life.

That's Zacchaeus. Jesus comes into his life and says, those aren't the only two options. Let me give you a whole other way to live.

And so this corrupt tax collector takes on the eternal quality of life, starts living eternal kind of a life. And that's why Jesus can say, right here, today, right now, not in eternity, not when you die today. Salvation comes into your house when. When you let jesus in and you let him have the run of the mill. You let him rule the roost.

Come into my house, shake it up. That's when salvation has come. You let him in. Grace comes in, and you cannot help but let him have rule over everything. I love that.

He says he came into his house, not his heart, his house. Of course he came into his heart. But you're not getting out of that house alive. You're not getting out of that house without making some changes. And then he calls him a son, as if to say, you know, everybody's ousted you out of the family back in.

It's a great picture. Jesus rescues him from his self and his stuff. Something else I read a couple weeks ago, old tradition. I didn't, never heard this before, but on large australian ranches, you can keep. If you have a large australian ranch, it's like, how do you keep the cows in?

Well, you could build a fence, or you can dig a well.

When I read that, I thought to myself, here's the difference in this story. I can be a person who builds fences to keep people out, or I can dig wells to attract people to this Jesus I want them to see. That's the mission. It's the mission above all the missions.

Wrap this up by telling you a story. So I have a neighbor who I've been trying to reach, and I've been frustrated because it just seems like we're at a deadlock. I can't get. For years, we didn't have any relationship. Now we do.

And I'm trying. He's. They don't have kids in there. You know, he's a little rough around the edges. And partly he was.

He's a retired police officer. He was abused as a kid. Some struggles in his life, and it's affected him. And the first time I really had a great conversation with him, you know, because of his questions, I had to tell him I was a pastor. And turns out he's been hurt before.

And so, of course, I've had to navigate being a pastor and trying to be his friend and loving and all these things. And so I'm very careful, and I just try to be loving, and all I'm doing is digging wells everywhere I can dig. And we've done it. Gail's doing it with wife. They're sweet people.

And so he. Because he had such a rough childhood, he talks to God a lot, and he feels like he gets a lot of dreams that talk to God. And he said, most of my relationship with God has basically been me showing up at the complaint department. And so it's just very touch and go kind of a thing with him. So this has been going on for a couple years.

And so I'm walking around the block this past week. Whenever I walk by his house, which he's my neighbors, as soon as I get to the inn and I walk by my house, I always pray for him. Usually he's sitting outside. That's something he does a lot, is sit outside. He'll come out there in the middle of the night and sit in his driveway.

So I walk by and I see him, and I don't know if he's going to want to talk. I never know.

So I wave. Always do. And this time I said, hey, how you doing? And I was just feeling it out to see if he was in the mood. Pops up out of his chair, and he runs to the street and, oh, my goodness, we got to hurry.

I know we do. Jill, come on down here already and just be ready to pop up here as soon as I'm done. So you can do what you got to do, because I'm really late and I'm in the middle of this story. You want me to wait or do you want to hear it?

Okay. Everybody's going to be mad at us. That's the crowd. You're just going to have to put up with it. Okay.

Okay. So I'm standing there with him, and he goes, you know, because this is how we. This is how we get to it. I don't know how we get there. Just, you know, because you're a preacher.

I haven't told you most of my life. Cause I didn't want to offend you that I've been hurt. Bye, church. Or by people, you know, who are christians. But I want to tell you something that happened to me.

He said, three weeks ago, I'm sitting. I come outside, and I'm sitting in my driveway, sitting in a chair, and I had one of those dreams I've told you about. And I go to the complaint department, and there's an out to lunch on it. And I come back to it. This is figuratively how he talks about his relationship with Goddesse.

And he goes, and he said, pete, I want you to know something. I realized in the rest of this story what I've been missing all my life. He said, it seemed like when God showed up there, he opened the door, and he just pointed to another door. And I opened the door, and for the first time in my life, I really see who Jesus was. This is what my neighbor's telling me.

I go, you got to tell me about that. So he says, yes, you know, I've known some things about Jesus, but I've avoided him.

And he's come into my life, and I cannot believe the joy that's on his face. And I said, oh, my goodness, this is incredible. And so we start talking about that. We're going to get together next week, talk more about it, but he says, so he's coming into my life, and I want you to know it's only been three weeks. Everything about my life is starting to change.

My wife keeps telling me, you're not the same person.

Road rage and all these things. He said, I was the worst. The last three weeks off, it's gone. The hate is leaving me. And I was like, oh, my gosh.

Jesus has showed up in his house just like he did in Zacchaeus life. Cause that's what happens. And so many things come together there. God will reach people. I walked away from that house, and part of me said, you know, lord, I would have liked to have led him to you.

You had to do it in a dream. I mean, I was trying. I've been trying for years to win this guy to Christ. And you let a dream do it.

The other part of it is, I have to make sure I see people the way Jesus sees them so that I can be living on mission all the time.

All right, why don't you bow your heads if you're seeking him, climb the tree. Get as best vantage point of him as you can.

And if you have not been living on mission, then you. You gotta rediscover who Jesus is. Get back on. Help us to do that, lord. Whichever one we are today.

In Jesus name, amen.