Loving Our City, Part 1

Some notes from my message for tomorrow ... I think I'll post them in three parts.
How do you feel about sinners?

How do you feel about sin?

We talk about loving the sinner and hating the sin, but I think that our gut reaction to the word “sinner” is worse than our reaction to the word “sin.” This is because the concept of sin is abstract, but a sinner is a person at who we can look and whose character we judge by their most obvious flaws. This was the case in Jesus’ day, too. There were certain groups of people who were characterized by their behavior and judged to be sinners, people who were not “good Jews” but who very clearly failed to keep the law of Moses or fulfill the requirements of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the Talmud (the religiously binding commentary on the Jewish Bible). Today we’re going to learn from Jesus’ example how we are to go about loving our community, especially when they don’t look, speak, act, or believe like us. We’re going to see Jesus’ interaction, related to us in John 4, with a Samaritan woman who needed him.

I. We seek interaction with people who aren’t like us. (John 4:4-7)
A. We intentionally put ourselves in places where we can meet and get to know people who don’t believe in Jesus. (v 4)
Jesus didn’t have to go through Samaria, and a good Jew never would have. Samaritans were absolutely despised by Jews – they were held in utter contempt, they were seen as being of less value … if you want to understand the reaction Jews had to the word “Samaritan” gauge your reaction when I say “homosexual”. Now there is a difference, because it was no sin to be born a Samaritan, while the homosexual lifestyle is characterized by a particular sin. But this is still a good comparison, because what we as conservative Christians who believe in marriage and traditional values feel when someone starts talking about homosexual activists – that’s kind of like what the Jews felt when they thought about the Samaritans. It’s the same kind of gut emotional reaction.
B. We take the initiative to open communication (v 7)
You’ll notice that Jesus didn’t just sit and wait for this woman to come over and speak to him. He took the step to open the lines of communication. This is also a good dating tip, by the way. If you’re interested in somebody, don’t just wait for them to magically decide to speak to you. Take the initiative! Anyway, we get kind of shy about doing that sort of thing, whether it’s in a dating context or we’re looking to develop relationships with unsaved people (and hopefully it’s not both at the same time, because that’s a whole different issue.) But anyway, once Jesus did speak to this woman, she replied. She didn’t ignore him. She thought he was crazy at first, but at least the lines of communication were open.
C. We spend significant amounts of time with these people.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus spent enough time with “sinners” that he was accused of being one or at the least of behaving inappropriately for someone who called himself a rabbi.

Mark 2:13-17
13 Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that were coming to him. 14 As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be mydisciple,” Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him.
15 Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along
with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.) 16 But when the teachers of religious law
who were Pharisees[b] saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?[c]”

Now there are multiple instances of Jesus doing this kind of thing – he purposely detours through the hellhole of Samaria; and there are multiple accounts of his eating at disreputable people’s houses. The disciple Matthew and Zacchaeus are good examples. He did not hesitate to purposely go where he could meet and talk and laugh with and love on people who were looked down on, people who were obviously sinners.he calls a tax collector – one of the most hated sinners in Jewish society – to be his disciple and then goes and hangs out at a dinner party with that tax collector and all his sinful friends; he does something very similar with Zacchaeus in Jericho in Luke 19.
If you are a religious person in the time of Christ seeing this, or a religious person now reading this with an open mind, you have to be wondering: What is going on? Why is Jesus spending so much time with the wrong sort of people? That’s exactly what the Pharisees wanted to know, and Jesus even mentioned it in

Matthew 11:18-19
18 For John didn’t spend his time eating and drinking, and you say, ‘He’s possessed by a demon.’ 19 The Son of Man,[a] on the other hand, feasts and drinks, and you say, ‘He’s a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners!’ (Here is part of the answer:) But wisdom is shown to be right by its results.”

Application:
For us, this means that in our work, or if we have hobbies or activities that lead us to interaction with members of the community in general, we seek meaningful interaction with people who think and believe and behave differently than we do. That is what Jesus did!
I don’t want to minimize the questions that come up when I start saying that we should spend lots of time with people who drink too much and curse a lot and prefer alternative lifestyles and don’t believe in Jesus. Because the Bible also teaches us that we need to have friends in our lives who will build us up, not tear us down, and Paul specifically says in

1 Corinthians 15: 33 “Don’t be fooled by those who say such things, for ‘bad
company corrupts good character.’”

There are a couple of principles that can guide us through this difficult ground:
1. We absolutely must be sensitive and obedient to the leadership of the Holy Spirit in all of our personal interactions.
The thing about relying on the Holy Spirit is that it is more challenging than following rules. Often, it involves making decisions based on general principles rather than specific guidelines. This is true in every area, and it’s why people get into legalism. It’s why the Pharisees of Jesus’ time came up with hundreds of rules about how to keep the Mosaic Law – it was easier to have everything spelled out than to bear the weight of making decisions based on the principles of the law and God’s leading. If we have rules set up in our mind that cause us to never go where certain people are or not to speak to certain people, it’s easy to keep those rules. But it’s challenging to bear the responsibility of walking closely with Christ so that we can listen to his voice and let him guide our day-by-day actions. And even though it’s challenging, it is one hundred percent necessary. If we don’t learn to do this, we won’t live effective Christian lives.
2. We do need to be part of a strong network of Christian friends where we can support each other and build each other up and help each other get closer to God.
Proverbs 27:17 “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.”
Jesus, although he wasn’t going to sin, did as a human being have a need for companionship and Godly friendship, and he actually modeled this for us in that the people he spent the most time with were his disciples – they were believers.
3. We should focus on opportunities for meaningful interaction
When I say meaningful interaction, I mean times and places where there is opportunity for actual communication – it doesn’t have to be super deep, especially when we’re first getting to know someone, it just has to be valid. The reason I say this is because as I was talking over this sermon with my wife, she brought up the fact that when she was in high school, her non-believing friends had parties where the only purpose was to, as quickly as possible, get drunk and be sexually immoral. Should she have been at those parties? No. You can’t really have meaningful interaction with someone who’s drunk off their butt. But when the opportunity arises to pursue mutual interests, or spend time with someone in a way that you can get to know them better – go for it!