Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / April 24, 2016 | Route 66 - "The Worst Decision I Ever Made" (Matthew)

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April 24, 2016 | Route 66 - "The Worst Decision I Ever Made" (Matthew) · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Passover! Happy Pissoch! It is Passover, you know.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I came to tell you about the worst decision I ever made in my life, hoping that it may deliver one of you at least from making a similar mistake.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: When I was born, my parents named me Levi.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: After one of my uh most famous ancestors and namesakes, Levi, the third son of Jacob.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he started our tribe, the Levite tribe.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: You heard of the tribe of Levi?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you probably know that we were thought of as the religious tribe when people would come to me and they would say, I'm Levi of the tribe of Levi, they would say, Oh, the religious tribe.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I would say, no, the poor tribe.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: The poor and hungry tribe, because we were the tribe without any money.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really God's fault.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, way back when God helped Joshua take the holy land, take the promised land, take the land of Canaan, God then uh divvied up the land.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: He divided it among the twelve tribes to the tribe of Judah, he gave these rivers and hills and valleys, and then he turned to the tribe of Ephraim, he gave that section of land, and he went through all the tribes, 11 tribes, and then he turned to our tribe.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, Levi, um, I'm not gonna give you any land.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have no inheritance of your own.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to think of me as your inheritance.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: We understood, I'm sure, what he meant that he wanted us to spend all of our time thinking about him instead of thinking about crops and harvests and money and profit.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: We were supposed to help the rest of Israel think about him too.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: But how are we going to live?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: We said, how are we going to eat?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: How are we, you know, and and and God turned to the other tribes and he said, Well, you need to be generous to the tribe of Levi.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be generous with your tithes and with your offerings and with your animals, because that's how they're going to live.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So our tribe depended on the good-hearted generosity of everyone else.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know what you call people who depend on the good-hearted generosity of everyone else?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: You call them dependents.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you call them dirt poor.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that was us.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: But Levi, uh, someone said to me once, don't you realize that the people who need people are the luckiest people in the world?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I laughed.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No, they're just the neediest people in the world.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: We used to tell jokes on ourselves.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're so poor, we used to say, that a burglar broke into my home last night to give us things.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're so poor that when it rains, the mom cries out, bath time.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Mom left three peas on the kitchen table.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I took one and she said, Don't be greedy.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Our house is so small that our front door and back door is the same thing.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Once I was walking along the road with a friend of mine, I looked down and he was only wearing one sandal.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Did you lose a sandal?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, he said, I found one.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But that was our life.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not really funny.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever known what it's like to be really poor?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we knew what that was like.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: What happens is that uh you grow up with one robe that someone gave you because they didn't want it, and when it starts to wear out, you patch it.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when your sandals wear out, then you just walk around in bare feet.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: When you're 16 years old and you're thinking about girls, you know that the pretty girl that you're thinking of across town will never even give you a smile.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: When I was 18 years old, after what seemed like the hundredth meal of linthel soup and dry bread in a row, I walked out that night and yelled at God, looked up at the stars and shouted out a vow.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I vow that if I can ever get myself out of this poverty, I'm not gonna live this way.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: That was close to the worst mistake that I ever made.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I was determined when I made up my mind, I did things.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I may not have been smart, but I got things done.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: In school, uh I wasn't clearly the smartest kid.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Some of my classmates, they memorized the whole Tanakh.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's our Old Testament, that's our Hebrew scriptures, the Torah, Neveim, Ketebim, and they've memorized the whole thing.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I sat up and paid attention at one time.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's when the teacher opened up the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, and read them to say that one day we Jews would have a new king, a king like David, a king who would come in and he would reign in power and wisdom and glory, and he would free us and he would cast out the tyrants.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what we were looking for, all of us.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because we were under the thumb of a foreign power.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to you, Rome may be romantic, but to us, Rome just meant a far-off Caesar who was all powerful, who could kill us and take everything we owned at any time.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Who had established his puppet king over us, over in Sepphoris named Herod.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Antipas, actually, his name, his father was Herod the Great.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: He was an awful man.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was as bad as his father.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was a killer.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Look at him wrong, and he would take your life.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: He killed John the Baptizer, you know, just because his wife asked him to.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And later on, he would help to kill Yeshua, who his father tried to kill way back in Bethlehem as a baby, but didn't succeed.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Herod, to honor the emperor who gave him the throne, built a new capital city right on the Sea of Galilee and named it Tiberius after the Caesar.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: He was so bad, though, that one Caesar, later on, after my story ends this morning, one Caesar named Caligula just pulled him off the throne and exiled him to Gaul.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: He was that bad.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: But he was our king.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Herod was, and all of that tyranny costs money.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It costs money to build a new capital city.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It costs money to build Roman roads and Roman aqueducts and temples to Jupiter and to feed and house all of those Roman soldiers to enforce your rules.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what that meant?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: It meant Roman taxes.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: For other nations, that may not have meant much, but for our nation, that was terrible because we Israelites already had our own tax system given by God down through Moses.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Already one-fourth of our entire income went down to the temple in Jerusalem, tithes and offerings and crop taxes and firstborn taxes and head tax and so forth.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: A half a shekel, it just started out at a half a shekel for each one of us per year and rose from there.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And in an economy that was weak and none of us having all that much up in Galilee, that was a quarter of everything we had.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now the Romans came along and they taxed us another quarter.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine what that was like if you're a carpenter or a fisherman or a weaver or leather worker or something, and maybe your wife is working a little bit during the day to sew things or bake to earn a few extra pennies, and then half of that goes out the door?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you, people were angry.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we couldn't really be mad at the Jewish tax because that came from God and we'd been paying that for a thousand years.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: But we were, we Jews were very angry about that Roman tax.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Herod was a shrewd king.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: He he saw that.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: He knew that he didn't want to try to collect those taxes himself, and he didn't want to send a Roman tax collector to try to do it.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: So he came up with the smart idea of hiring local Jews to collect those Roman taxes.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: He advertised it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: No one took them up on the offer.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: People said, who would be a traitor to his own people?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Who would collaborate with the enemy?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Let the Romans try to collect their own taxes.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the king decided to sweeten the pot.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: He sent his man through all the villages and towns in Galilee, including my town.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Walked down Main Street shouting out, get rid of your money problems, become a tax collector for the king.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Get rid of your money problems, become a tax collector for the king.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: People went inside their houses, they shut the door, they shunned him, they wouldn't talk to him.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Who would volunteer to do something like that?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: But there was a deep, dark part of me, a bitter part of me.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I could not forget those words.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had made a vow, and this seemed like a door that was opening so that I could escape poverty.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: A week later, telling myself that I was just going to check it out, I went to the palace in Tiberias and knocked on the gate.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Soldier asked me what I wanted.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: I said, uh, to talk about the tax collector job.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: He let me right in and in fact ushered me right into the presence of the king himself.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the king said, Um, what's your name?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Levi, I said.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: What's your father's name?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Alpheus, I said.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: He looked at his men and they shook their heads.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: They'd never heard of him.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Are you a uh Levite?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Yes.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: He said, This wouldn't be against your religion.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: I said, not against my religion.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: He said, just why?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me why you'd want to be a tax collector and tax your own people.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, I'm sick and tired of being poor, and I'd like to see how the rest live.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: He laughed, looked at his treasury, he said, I think we found our man.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, Levi, he said, um, there's a highway runs uh just north of here.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I knew it.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was called the Via Maris, the road of the sea.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: He said it starts way off in the Orient and it comes down through Damascus, and there's caravans all over the place.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, on the run on this highway, and they come right across north, right through my property, the Sea of Galilee, and they dip down through Megiddo, and then run down by the Mediterranean, into Africa, into Egypt.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they're carrying all sorts of things.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's taxes, there's money to be made on those caravans.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I need someone to operate a toll booth, a tax stand, a weighing station right there along the highway, right there at Capernaum.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone has to go that way.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you how much money I need total, and then you can charge whatever you want and keep the extra, but you have to do this.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: You have to also you have to also get taxes from all of the Jews there in Capernaum.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Capernaum's a wealthy town, it's got a millstone factory, it's got fishing businesses.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're willing to take the job?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at him, and I made the worst decision I made in my life.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'll take the job.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, I'll supply you with a couple of soldiers, they'll help you set up the booth, they'll enforce your taxes, they'll guard you, and so forth.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: How soon can you start?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I can start tomorrow.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: When I walked out of the palace, I looked both ways.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I was going to be an unpopular person.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I went home and I told my dad and mom nothing other than that I was moving out.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I took my tattered robe and I moved down to Capernaum, found a little place to stay.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, when the soldiers showed up, I went out and we set up, set up the toll booth, set up the tax stand right there.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I began collecting taxes.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: It took me a little while to figure out how the money worked, and you know, to figure out how to keep records, but Herod had given me the total he wanted, and I added a surcharge, and it didn't take very long before my life changed.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was swimming in the money.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: I expected to be unpopular, and and of course it happened right away.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: People who knew me, when they saw that I was operating a Roman tax stand, they came up and yelled at me.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: They said, Levi, what are you doing?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: My friend said, Stop this joke right now.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: My father even came down and cried.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: He said, No one will talk to us.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Your mother and I.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I was determined.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I had made a vow, and I I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: I no longer had to be poor.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had no idea that the hatred would get worse instead of better.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I came to learn that my Jewish people may have hated Herod and Caesar and the Roman troops, but they hated something worse.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: They hated their next door neighbor who was taxing them, who was bleeding them for money.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I learned that in their eyes, I was worse than a whore.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was worse than a leper.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was a highway robber.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was a murderer.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then it got even worse.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: After a while, I didn't think it could get worse, but they started ignoring me.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: They refused to look at me.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: They would talk to me without ever meeting my eyes.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: I used to think that the worst thing in life was to be alone.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not true.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: The worst thing in life is to be in the midst of a group of people who want you to feel alone, who don't care if you live or die.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I guess for a while uh the money seemed to make up for it.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Went to my head a little.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was wearing silk from India under a seamless tunic from Egypt.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I'd go home at night, it was no more lintel soup.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: I could go down to the dock every day and pick out the best fish.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had lamb regularly with dates and uh and grapes on the side.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that I was eating all alone.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: I had absolutely no friends.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the only associates that we tax collectors have are other tax collectors.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know Zacchaeus down at Jericho?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, me too.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: We weren't friends, we were just the company of the lonely and the damned.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I was able to buy a big house in Capernaum, and I chose to buy the house right across the street from Simon the Pharisee.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: He was the most important man in Capernaum.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees now, they were the religious tribe.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the zealots, they were the political tribe who wanted to do anything to kick Rome out and bring us liberty.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then there were the Sadducees, they were the tribe of the nobility.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: But then there were the Pharisees, they were the conservatives, the religious conservatives.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Simon was uh he was he was the most important Pharisee among the Pharisees in the city of Capernaum.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you know what a Pharisee would do if they if they saw me on the road, if they saw a tax collector, they would deliberately make a show of walking across the street, spitting on the road, as they did.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: After a while it got funny.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I thought Simon's running out of spit.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: His mouth's gotta be dry.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was across the street.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: He was spitting every time he came out of the house.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: They also had rules that weren't so pleasant.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Tax collectors, Jewish tax collectors, could no longer go to the synagogue.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: They couldn't go into court and testify, for they were highway robbers.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were liars.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Who could trust them?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you could legally, by the Pharisees' rule, you could legally lie to the tax collector because after all, tax evasion was okay when you were lying to a liar.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And another rule which affected me personally was you if a tax collector invited you to eat with him, you better say no because the first bite will make you unclean for a week.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I lived in a big house, but that big house was silent, and I was alone and lonely.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And over time the light inside me began to dim.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because materially I had everything.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was the richest man in my world, but in every other way I had absolutely nothing.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was the poorest man in the world, and the light dimmed even more and went out.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it came to be that I would get up in the morning in a daze, eating breakfast, putting on my clothes, and walking out to the booth, and waiting for the soldiers to come, and they didn't even speak to me because I was a repugnant mix.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't Jewish anymore, I wasn't Roman.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was a nobody.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I would go through the day not even noticing that people weren't looking me in the eye.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually I stopped even noticing if the sun came out or not.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And when it got as bad as it could get, I became desperate.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: I began to wish, hope, and dream of leaving this life.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: What I hadn't realized is that when I walked through that door, the door had clanged shut and locked behind me.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: That I was trapped.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Once a tax collector, said the Pharisees, always a tax collector.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: No forgiveness in this life or the next.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: No place you can go, no job will have you.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: What would I do?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Where would I go?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then one morning a miracle happened.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I had, with a splitting headache, made my way to the booth.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Soldiers had come and I'd put out my shingle, IRS, Israel Revenue Service.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: People saw that sign and saw the soldiers.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: They knew they had to stop or else.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: The morning started out badly.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph Ben Jacob had brought some spices down from Damascus, and I'd put an evaluation on their price and then taxed at 5%, which was normal.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he began to argue.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: He started yelling at me, said the valuation was way too high.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: He should only have to pay half that in taxes.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was bad.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And finally I said, holding my head, whatever, just pay me and leave.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he did, and I sat down and I put my head in my hands.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then I heard a noise.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: I heard a sound of people laughing, happy people, a crowd coming up the Via Maris.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: It happened around up there in Galilee.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Once in a while, a famous person, a teacher, a rabbi perhaps would come and people would just leave.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: They'd start following, they'd follow him around for a day and just Listen to him.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought to myself, well, what how are those people ever going to make a living?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: How are they ever going to make money?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: What a waste of time.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Don't they have jobs?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: But then my next thought was jealousy.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're happy.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're free to do what they want.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trapped.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: I kept my head down, waiting for them to pass.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then as they uh apparently drew even with my booth, I heard a voice.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Levi, what?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: I said.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Levi, son of Alpheus?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was the man who was at the front of the crowd.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I said.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked at him and I looked at the people around him.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I knew them.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: I had taxed them.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: There was the Zebedee fishing family.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: There was a James and John and their friend Simon and Andrew.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had taxed them, taxed the fish they'd brought up out of the lake, and taxed them when they sold the fish.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: They'd paid their taxes.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were a wealthy fishing family.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked at the man they were following, and there was really nothing special to say about his look.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't look especially different.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you know how sometimes, you know, when you meet someone, you get a feeling about someone, you have a first impression, you sort of take a thin slice of them, and you you by the way they look or the way they talk, and you make a judgment.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Their eyes are too shifty, or they they're not talking to you, they're talking at you, and you well, it was his eyes and his voice.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: I something about this man made him utterly unique.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: His eyes, they didn't just look at you.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: They looked at you as if I felt you were the only person in the world.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then his eyes looked into me.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: I felt as though he saw who I was.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And his voice, it was something too.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't high or low or loud, it was uh, but it was it was a voice of of authority.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And now his eyes were looking at me.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I heard his voice say, follow me.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Follow me.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Just two words, just five syllables, a kaluthe moi.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Follow me.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Me?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: You and now I really had a headache.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: One voice in my head said, uh, don't be crazy, you don't want to leave your business.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the second voice replied and said, But uh isn't this what you've wanted?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the first voice said, But but what would you do for money?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: That would be stupid.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the second voice said, uh, but aren't you so desperate you would sacrifice anything for a change?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: But where will you go?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: said the first voice.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the reply was maybe all follow him wherever he goes.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: First voice said, Don't rush into things, sleep on it, don't be in a hurry.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Second voice said, Do it now.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: This opportunity may never come again.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And holding his eyes, his magnetic eyes, without looking away, I stood up and I closed my money box and I said to the soldiers behind me, guard this, I don't know when I'm coming back.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I stepped out.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he smiled and he said to me, My name is Yeshua.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Would you walk with me this morning?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I walked into a new life.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: Something inside me leapt up, and words came out of my mouth before I was even ready.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at him and I looked at those around him, and I said, Listen, would you all come to my place for supper tonight?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I could see them looking at uh at him and uh sort of shaking their heads like this.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Of course we'd be glad to, wouldn't we, Simon?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Simon was the big fisherman, and Simon said, Well, if you are gonna go there, Rabbi, then we'll be glad to go with you.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was always grateful to him for that.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: That morning was amazing.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: He walked with me and he talked with me, and my darkness began to lift.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: I went home in the afternoon to start preparing for a big supper, who knows how many, and the interesting thing happened.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: There was a knock on the door part way through the afternoon.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Who could that be?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: I walked to the door, and it was Asher for the tax collector from up at Corazine, and he said to me, Is it true, Levi?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is it true that you're having the rabbi for dinner?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Could I come?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, sure.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Could I bring Reuben from down at Magda, the tax collector?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: I bet he'd like to come too.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, they won't be any more unclean if they're eating with a bunch of us than if they're just eating with me.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Great, he said.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: If I see someone else, I might invite them too.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why that evening when uh Yeshua, Jesus, you call him, and some of his disciples came to the door, that's why there was what Simon would call the dregs of society already sitting in my living room.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: They were a motley crew.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: There were a bunch of tax collectors and a few prostitutes and a homeless drunk or two and an ex con, and they're sitting there, and you can see the disciples stop, sort of freeze at the door, and and uh, what have we gotten ourselves into?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: But Yeshua, he walked straight into the room and said, How are you doing?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Let me introduce to all of you Yeshua.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: He's a rabbi, and I think most of you know the sons of Zebedee here, and Simon and Andrew, the fishermen.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so happy to have you here.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me go out to the kitchen and prepare the food.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they started to have a great conversation.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's nothing worse than a big house that's empty, but there's nothing better than a big house that's filled with a lot of laughing voices.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And once I came to the door with a tray of bread because I heard one of them ask him, I said, Yeshua, would you tell us a story?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, sure.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: He said, once uh two men went at the same time to go pray at the temple down in Jerusalem.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: One of them was a Pharisee, the other was a tax collector.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: He knew his audience.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he said uh he said they walked right by each other, but the Pharisee stopped at the front door and he lifted up his hands to God in prayer, and loudly he said, God, thank you, that I'm uh not an adulterer, a liar, a thief, or a murderer.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, that I tithe and I keep Shabbat and thank you that I'm not like that tax collector over there.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Yeshua said, the tax collector, he was inside and he was, he found the darkest place by a pillar, and he knelt down and he just beat on his chest, crying out, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: There was silence for a little while, and then the rabbi looked at everyone, he said, I want to ask you a question.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Which of those two men left the temple that morning right with God?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the Pharisee were all thinking, but no one said it out loud.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, um, it wasn't the first fella, it was the second fella.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was the tax collector.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't be right with God without humility.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: The way up is down.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was shocked.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Holding a tray of bread, my mouth had flopped wide open.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, that's not what we've learned all this time.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're telling me it the way to get right with God is to be wrong with him?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: To break the commandments?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was a shocking thing.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Heard a noise.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: I looked over at the door, and there was Simon.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Simon and his friends, he'd heard the noise, he'd seen the guests, and he and his Pharisee friends, they were the keepers of uh what was right and proper in town, and so they'd come over and they were not happy because Simon had heard the punchline to the story, and Yeshua had gotten the punchline wrong.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: I could tell he was angry.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure that uh the rabbi knew he was angry too, but he just reached over and took the bread from me and he broke it and he started passing it out, and I didn't know what to do, but I did what a good host would do.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: I walked over to the door.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: I said to Simon, won't you and your friends come in?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: I have more than enough food.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Come and listen to the rabbi.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Simon turned to his friends, and in a whisper, he said, What kind of a rabbi would eat with tax collectors and sinners?
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a whisper, like I said, but I was to later learn you couldn't even think around Yeshua without getting into trouble.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so he spoke up, Yeshua, Jesus did from across the room.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Simon, let me ask you a question.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Does a doctor come for sick people or healthy people?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Does he come for the healthy?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: He comes for the sick people, and I didn't come to save the righteous, but sinners.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: He said it with a twinkle in his eye, and I knew what he meant.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: He meant he didn't come to save people who thought they were righteous, but of course no one is.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: He came to save people who knew they were sinners.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it all added up to me at that moment.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: It suddenly struck me that if God saves the people who are sinners and who know they're sinners, then it must not be doing good that makes you right with God, that you don't earn it, that somehow it must be a gift of God.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it made sense to me, and I believed it, and I believed him.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: At that moment, I thought, that changes everything.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: And as if he could hear what I was thinking, Yeshua looked up at me at that moment.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Levi, son of Alpheus, from now on I'm calling you Matthew.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And my legs gave way and I slid to the floor.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought a moment ago I was a dirty, rotten, highway robbing, selfish, greedy tax collector, and now I'm Matthew, gift of God?
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it means, gift of God.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Simon at the door said, Come on, to his buddies, and they walked across the street.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: I could be wrong, but when I looked at Yeshua, it looked to me like he was actually disappointed.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's how it all started.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got to tell you, the next three years went like a blur.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: It went so fast, the best years of my life.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can I tell you one more quick story?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because this was maybe the best thing that has ever happened to me.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: It happened one morning.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he woke me up.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeshua did.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus, woke me up.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh sunrise, early sunrise, everyone else was asleep, and he said to me, Come here.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I followed him and he said, Listen, I've been up on the mountain talking with my father, and we have a job we would like you to do.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Me?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: He said, you.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: He said, um, we need someone to record what's happening.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: The stories, the things that I say, we need somebody to keep records.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: These fishermen are good with nets and boats, but they're not so good with pen and parchment.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: You, for five years, you worked with pen and parchment.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can do this.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'd be honored.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how I felt?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Till that moment, I think I'd felt like the lowest of the disciples.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: The other disciples, especially Simon the Zealot, looked at me as though I was tainted.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: I had been too close to the Romans for too long.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't trust me.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: But Yeshua and his father trusted me enough to keep the records.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you'll open my record, my book sometime, you will see things there that I wrote down that no one else has.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: You'll read about Beatitudes and a Sermon on the Mount and a Lord's Prayer and a Sermon on the Plain and Upper Room Discourse.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's because I wrote those down.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: And something else, in between those sermons, you'll find stories about lost and lonely people, tax collectors, lepers, prostitutes, and sinners.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because that was the story of my life.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, don't miss the last sentence of my book.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's especially for anyone else who knows what it is to be lonely.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: The last sentence of my book, I put it in there where Jesus said, I am with you always.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I learned what it felt like when I became Matthew.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Gift of God.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, by the way, you know I'm I'm the only one of me in the Bible.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know that I'm the only Matthew in the Word of God?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: I like to think that's because more than anyone, maybe, who has ever lived, I understand how bad I really was, how lost, how selfish, how greedy, how in need of God's gift.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I came today to tell you about the worst decision I ever made.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's easy.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was the day I decided to follow money and become a tax collector and get rich.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: That decision ruined my life.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then I made the best decision of my life, and that was the decision to leave all that behind and follow Yeshua.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeshua.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: That decision made my life a gift of God.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: So to summarize, just quickly, once I was lost, I was lonely, I was in the darkness, I was at the very bottom, and then a special, unique man came from God.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: A man who came looking not for the righteous, looking not for good people, but looking for sinners.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: And by looking for sinners, he caught sight of me.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he gave me the gift of God.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a great story, I know.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's but it's my story.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for letting me share it.