Our daughter, Lindsay is with her husband and their sons in Niger, Africa. They are working as missionaries in a hospital. Sometimes people will come to their hospital desperately sick—if they had come sooner, they wouldn’t be so sick. Some even die because they wait, and then it’s too late. They waited too long. Jesus once said that it is not those who are well who need a doctor, it’s the sick who need doctoring. That’s easy to understand. When you’re healthy, you don’t go see a doctor. You just go about your life, doing what you normally do, feeling perfectly fine. On the other hand, when you’re sick, you hightail it to the doctor, right? It’s the doctor you want, the expert who hopefully can figure out what’s going on and get you on the road to recovery. You can’t do that for yourself, you need help.
Back to Jesus. Here’s the setting: Jesus was eating with sinners, people who were considered outcasts, the scum of the earth. And there was this second group—the “righteous” group—who wondered why on earth Jesus would eat with sinners? This was His answer: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). What did Jesus mean? Well, here Jesus sits, in the company of people known far and wide as sinners. These sinners made no pretense of being righteous or holy or even good. They knew they were sinners. Everyone around them knew it, and they knew it themselves. But, when Jesus had preached and said, “repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15), many heard, repented, and believed. So, now many of these sinners followed Jesus (Mark 2:15).
The other group, the righteous bunch, found this absolutely shocking. That Jesus—someone who preached about God—would actually be seen with people like this, with sinners. Jesus eating with sinners horrified them! They wouldn’t be caught dead associating with such lowlifes, such sinners! This horrified group looked down their noses. They certainly were nothing like those dirty sinners. Quite the opposite: they saw no sin in themselves. They were righteous! They were just fine. They were healthy. They had no need of a doctor. They had no need for Jesus.
You see, there were only two groups that Jesus encountered. The sinners and the “righteous.” And that’s still true. You and I are either in one group or the other. We are either sinners who know we are sick with sin or we see ourselves as “righteous” with no need for treatment. Are you one of the “righteous”? Do you reject the truth that you have a sin problem? Do you claim to believe, yet your life is unchanged? Or are you a sinner? Do you see your desperate condition? Have you come face-to-face with the truth that you can’t do a single thing about your sin? Jesus, the Great Physician, came into this world for sinners. His call is to sinners to put their faith in Him and be made well. Come to Jesus, while there is still time. Don’t wait until it’s too late. If you need prayer, or would like a Bible to be able to learn more, let me know.
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