Luke 5:30-32 “But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Today's episode shows us that we don't have to have it all together before we come to God. It talks about Matthew West's song Truth Be Told and how it reminds us that Jesus said to come as we are. God loves us just as we are! Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Truth Be Told
Luke 5:30-32 “But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
The theme for my Tuesday night mentoring group is “Come As You Are.” I chose this because too many of us feel we aren’t worthy to come to God as we are. We think we need to get it all together before we come to God. We think we need to clean up our lives and then we can come to God. I can see why we would think this because that is what society tells us. That is what it looks like on Social media. It looks like everyone else has it all together, so we need to get it together before we are good enough to ask God for anything. We can’t attend mass or church service because our kids don’t behave, or we don't have the right clothes, or because we make bad choices.
I love a song called Truth Be Told by Matthew West. Let me read you some of the lyrics because I wish we all knew the truth.
Lie number one you're supposed to have it all together
And when they ask how you're doing
Just smile and tell them, "Never better"
Lie number 2 everybody's life is perfect except yours
So keep your messes and your wounds
And your secrets safe with you behind closed doors
Truth be told
The truth is rarely told, now
I say I'm fine, yeah I'm fine oh I'm fine, hey I'm fine but I'm not I'm broken
And when it's out of control I say it's under control but it's not And you know it
I don't know why it's so hard to admit it
When being honest is the only way to fix it
There's no failure, no fall
There's no sin you don't already know
So let the truth be told
How true is this song. We think that we need to keep it all together because everyone else is keeping it all together, but that’s the thing, they aren’t keeping it together either. We are all just pretending. I love it when it says, There is no failure, no fall, there’s no sin you don’t already know. Why do we think we need to keep our mess from God when He already knows about all of it? There isn’t anything we can keep from Him, so why are we so ashamed to admit it? The song goes on to say…
There's a sign on the door, says, "Come as you are" but I doubt it
'Cause if we lived like it was true, every Sunday morning pew would be crowded
But didn't you say the church should look more like a hospital
A safe place for the sick, the sinner and the scarred and the prodigals
Like me. Well truth be told The truth is rarely told
This is where Matthew West reminds us what Jesus said in the verse above. Not what the world says, but what Jesus says. Come as you are. Imagine how filled churches would be if everyone knew they could truly come as they were. If we all knew that God wants us, even when we don’t have the right clothes or did the wrong thing. Even when we yelled at our kids or our spouse, even when we stayed out too late drinking, God wants us just as we are. No matter what it is, you can come to the Lord. The songs ends with…
Can I really stand here unashamed, Knowin' that your love for me won't change?
Oh God if that's really true Then let the truth be told
This is the truth that I wish everyone knew. The truth that God loves us completely and fully before we are even born and that love never changes. It doesn’t matter what we do or even what we don’t do. He still loves us the same. We can do nothing to make Him love us more or less than he already does.
When we see how the world sees us, we think God is the same. We think that we're not worthy of his love until we get it all together.
However, in the verse above Jesus tells us something different. God sent Jesus to die on the cross for us while we were still sinning. If you want to know how much God loves you, it says in Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Hear that again while we were still sinners Christ died for us.
This is how God demonstrates his love for us. This one statement shows us that we don't have to be perfect to come to God. Jesus didn’t wait for us to have our lives together before he died on the cross for us, so why should we wait until we figure things out to come to Him?
The verse above says that those who are well have no need of a physician. Those who are righteous, those who are not sinning, those who are praying perfectly, and those who are getting it all right have no need for Jesus.
Jesus died for us, for you, and me, and he did it strictly because he loved us. He did it because the Lord wanted us to come to him. The Lord didn't want anything to be in between us. When Adam and Eve sinned, there had to be a separation, and God hated that. He hated that we couldn't be with him.
He hated that they brought this upon themselves and wanted to redeem them. God could have done that in any number of ways, and the way he chose to do it was to become human and to take all of our sins upon himself, and when he did that, when Jesus died on the cross, the veil between us and God was broken, and that means we don't have to be perfect to come to God. We don't have to get it right before we come to God. We can come to God just as we are, and God loves us just as we are.
If we look through the scriptures, we will find God repeatedly telling us that we don’t have to have it all together to come to Him. He is calling us to come to Him just as we are, in our brokenness and woundedness, and He can fix us and heal us. When we look at the people that Jesus was drawn to in the Bible, it wasn’t the most religious people or the people who were doing everything right. It was the tax collectors and the sinners. If Jesus can use those he chose to use in the Bible to do amazing things, then we can come to God and lay our problems at His feet, and He will help us. All He wants is for us to invite Him into our mess. Will you invite God in today? Even in the mess?
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless each person listening to this today. Lord, we are sorry we don’t come to you more often. We are sorry we let our shame and our guilt put up a wall between us. Lord, we invite you into our mess right now. We invite you to sit with us in the mess and help us clean up our mess. Lord, we want to be with you, and we want to come to you. Please help us. Show us how you think of us instead of how the world thinks of us. Lord, we ask you to take away our shame and our guilt. We ask you to remove anything that is getting in the way of us coming to you. We love you so much, and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and Jesus’s holy name, Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. If this podcast has been blessing your life, would you consider making a donation to my ministry? Click Here to donate. I have placed several links in the footer of the show notes. One of them is to make a donation. Please pray about it, and if you are led to make a donation, I would really appreciate it. I look forward to meeting you here again tomorrow. Remember, Jesus loves you, just as you are, and so do I. Have a blessed day!
Today’s Word from the Lord was received in January 2024 by a member of my Catholic Charismatic Prayer Group. If you have any questions about the prayer group or these words or would like to join our group, please email CatholicCharismaticPrayerGroup@gmail.com. Today’s Word from the Lord is “Do you know that you were born for this time? Do you know that you are the first of many? Do you know that everything I do is for you, for the kingdom? Do you know how much more I'm going to do from the tip of your toe to the top of your head so that I can use all those little roots that are your brokenness?"