Transcript
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What's going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Bryce Crawford Podcast. I'm Bryce, and today, by the title of the episode, you know, we're going to talk about Does Jesus really care about you? How do you know if God cares about you? There's millions of people, billions of people. So many people have existed before and will exist after you. How do you know that you're valuable and God cares about you? We're going to talk about that. Guys, we're going to be in Luke chapter 15 today. It's going to be amazing. And listen, the heart posture behind this was I started getting plugged into a church back in my hometown in Georgia, and Pastor James is just amazing. I want to have him on the podcast one day. But man, Pastor James, when we did this series, this little series on Luke.
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15 at church, it rocked my world so much that this has been a.
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Passage that I continually go back on, reflect on, that I love talking about. And so today we're going to share it with you guys as well. So Luke chapter 15, does God really care about you? Let's talk about it now. There's gonna be three types of parables in Luke chapter 15. Parable, the Lost sheep, Parable of the Lost Coin, Parable of the Prodigal Son. You guys might be familiar with them or may not. Don't wanna assume things, but here's the reality of parables. What is the purpose of a parable? You guys know I've talked about this multiple times, but a parable is a sifting mechanism, okay? It's a sifting mechanism to see who really wants the benefits of the kingdom over the king and who really wants the king, right? King Jesus. Do you want King Jesus or do you just want what he has offering? These parables were a sifting mechanism for Jesus to get his point across. And for those that didn't want Jesus, but wanted the benefits of Jesus, they ran away from the parables because they were like, this guy's a bozo. He doesn't know what he's talking about. But for those people that wanted to know more, they would go, hey, Jesus, what did you mean when you said this? You can see an example of that in Mark, chapter four. But let's read through each of these parables and we're going to explain them. We're going to go through them one at a time. It's going to be great. Luke 15, verse 1. Now, the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled saying this man receives sinners and eats with them. All right, timeout, timeout. We got already in this book right now three types of sinners that have been described. All right, you got the rich sinners, you got the tax collectors, all right, These guys were like the Jewish tax collectors were people who would go to their own people. Imagine Rome, the government Rome was, would hire out these tax collectors, right? And these tax collectors would be Jewish people amongst the Jews. And they would say, hey, listen, look, you got to go collect these fees, but overcharge the fee and whatever you overcharge the amount that you add on to the actual fee, that's going to be your salary. And so that's why these guys were rich sinners was because they would take more than they needed and they were taking from their own people because Rome was hiring out Jews to take money from Jews for the government. It was crazy. So you got the rich sinners, then he says, you got the tax collectors and the sinners, then he says you got the good old fashioned sinners. And back in this time period they would call them the Torah defilers, the guys that went totally against the law. And then you have the third people group, you have the self righteous sinners. And the self righteous sinners might actually be the worst one. Like, like when you think you know it all, you've already lost. When you think you're perfect in everything and you got it and you know it all, you've already lost, it's like the tiniest ounce of wisdom will make your head big. And then you realize that you don't actually know anything. When you learn that there's more, does that kind of make sense? Like, like these guys were the self righteous sinners and they make a statement, they say this man receives sinners and eats with them. Now, now we may think that that's a stupid statement, but you have to understand the perception that the Jews had of the Messiah, what they thought at least. I mean these Pharisees, they thought that the Messiah was going to be this holy, righteous, amazing person that came from a rich family, that came from a royal background that was going to bring this government that was going to overthrow Rome, okay? And so when they look at someone that is, that claims to be the Messiah hanging out with people that they don't think the Messiah would hang out with. That's why they make this statement. So sometimes like we can look at a statement that the Pharisees make like this man eat, receive sinners and eats with them and we go oh, these guys are stupid. You know, we make fun of the Pharisees and the Sadducees now. Like back in this time period, it was kind of a valid statement to make to say, this man received sinners and eats with him. How can he be the Messiah? How could this be so? Because they thought that Messiah was going to be someone who wouldn't even tolerate sin at all. They think that because Jesus is hanging out with the sinners and tax collectors that he's tolerating sin, when in reality, how can sinners come out of their lifestyle of sin if we don't meet.