International Welcome

Well, today is our international welcome Sunday. So if you are here from another country, to work or to study, we’re very glad that you’ve come this morning.

Now this may be the first time you’ve been to our country. And if so, I wonder what idea you had of Britain before you came? One international student said to me that before she came to Britain, she thought it must be a very big country, because it had such a big influence all over the world. But when she flew in on the plane and saw our country on the map they show you, she was surprised it was so small. Another international said to me that before he came to Britain, he thought it was going to be a little bit colder than his home country, but he was surprised that it was very much colder. And can I say: if you think it is cold now, it will get much colder. And another international said to me that before he came to Britain he thought it was a very Christian country, but he was surprised to find that the church is small and that people’s behaviour is often bad.

You see, our idea of what a country is like is not necessarily true. And in the same way, our idea of what God is like is not necessarily true. And I wonder: what idea do you have of God? If you’re from China or Europe, you may believe there is no God. If you’re a Muslim I assume you believe Allah is God. If you’re from India or Asia you may believe there are many gods. But the question is: how can we know what God is like? How do you know if your idea of God is true? Your parents may believe it; many people in your home country may believe it. But that doesn’t make it true.

So the question I want to ask this morning is this. How can we know what God is like? And how can we relate to him personally? Well, the different religions in the world – like Hinduism and Islam and Christianity – all give a different answer. In fact, the answers all contradict one another. And that means they cannot all be true. So we have to ask, ‘Which one of them, if any, is true?’

Just have a look at this next picture:

The stickman in the box stands for us. The box stands for the universe we live in. And the crown above the box stands for God – because God is the ruler of everything. And the big problem is that we can’t see God. So, how can we know what God is like? Well the unique claim of Christianity is that God has come into this world, so that we could see him and know what he is like.

You see, Christianity claims that God is not just one person, but three persons completely united – God the Father, his Son and his Spirit:

And Christianity claims that 2,000 years ago, God’s Son came into our world – that he became a man, the man Jesus, who really lived, and whom you can read about in the Bible. So people saw God and heard God in human form. And if you’d been there in Israel 2,000 years ago, you could have seen him and heard him yourself:

And at this point, can I say: Christianity is ,i>not a western religion. Jesus was not born here in the west, but in the Middle East. But he didn’t just come for people in the Middle East, but for all people in all nations.

Now we were not there 2,000 years ago. But the people who were there wrote down what Jesus said and did. And one of those people was a man called Luke. And earlier in this service, we had someone reading out part of what Luke wrote in the Bible. Now if you read for the very start of what Luke wrote, he tells us how Jesus claimed to be God and how Jesus did miracles to show his claim was true. (And we heard about one of those miracles – the healing of a blind man – in the reading we had earlier – in Luke 18.35-43.) But the part of Luke’s writing that we are looking at this morning is about the last few weeks of Jesus’ life. Just look at Luke, chapter 18 and verse (little number) 31. Luke says (verses 31-33):

31Jesus took the Twelve [ie, his twelve followers] aside and told them, "We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man [ie, Jesus] will be fulfilled. 32He [that is, Jesus] will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him. 33On the third day he will rise again.

So Jesus said that very soon he was going to be killed and that then he was going to rise again from the dead. And within a few weeks, that is what happened. Because some people did not believe his claim to be God. They thought he was lying, they thought he was bad, and they wanted to punish him. So they sentenced him to death and he was killed by crucifixion, put to death on a cross. But three days later, he did rise again from the dead. They found his grave empty and they saw him alive again after he had been killed. And finally, Jesus returned to his Father – to where he’d come from – a bit like an international student returning to his home country after completing his course:

So as we read about Jesus in the Bible, we’re not reading about a dead person, a person in the past – like the Buddha or Mohammad. As we read about Jesus, we’re reading about God’s Son, who is alive in heaven today, and whom we can relate to personally.

So when people ask, ‘How can we know what God is like?’, Christianity says, ‘Jesus is God, so he shows us what God is like.’ So for the rest of the time, we’re going to look at what this part of the Bible (Luke 19.1-10) says about Jesus. We’re going to look at Luke’s account of how Jesus met a man called Zacchaeus and changed his life. And we see,


First, JESUS IS THE RIGHTFUL RULER OF OUR LIVES (vv1-5)

Look at Luke chapter 19 and little number (or ‘verse’) 1. Luke says:

1Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. (verses 1-2)

So he had a job with lots of power, and it earned him lots of money. Well, just imagine yourself in twenty years’ time. Imagine that you are back in your home country and you are the chief executive of a company, and earning lots of money. And everyone would look at you and think you were successful. And people must have looked at Zacchaeus and all his money and his big house, and thought he was successful. He looked successful on the outside. But on the inside, he was not a success. In God’s eyes, he was not a success. Because later in this part of the Bible (verse 8), we discover that Zacchaeus had got his money by cheating and lying and stealing. He was dishonest and people hated him for it.

But look down again to verse 3. Luke says (verses 3-5):

3He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. 5When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.

And that is a very surprising thing for Jesus to say. He has never met Zacchaeus before. And yet he says to him, ‘I must come and stay at your house today.’ Now, I guess that some of you are here this morning because someone invited you to this welcome service and to the welcome lunch afterwards. And people in this church will also want to invite you into their homes for meals on other days. But just imagine that next Sunday, you came back here and you went up to someone you had never met before and you invited yourself to a meal at their house. Imagine you said to them, ‘I must come to your house for a meal today. You must have me as your guest.’ I think the other person would be very surprised. Because you do not have the right to invite yourself. You do not have the right to say that kind of thing.

But that is exactly the kind of thing Jesus says in v5. Jesus thinks that he has the right to come into people’s lives and take charge. And that is because Jesus is God. He made us. He gave us our lives. And he is therefore the rightful ruler of our lives. And Jesus is saying to each one of us this morning: ‘You need to stop living your own way, as if I was not God. And you need to accept me as the rightful ruler of your life.’ And a Christian is someone who has done that. A Christian is someone who is living for Jesus as the ruler of their lives.

So you may have come to Britain thinking that this is a Christian country, and that if someone was born here, it makes them a Christian. But that is not true. No-one is born a Christian. You have to become a Christian, by accepting Jesus as the rightful ruler of your life. And, sadly, only a minority of people in this country seem to have done that.

So that’s the first thing we see in this part of the Bible: that Jesus is the rightful ruler of our lives. We see,


Secondly, JESUS ACCEPTS US BY FORGIVING US (vv5-7)

Now the other religions in the world basically say that God will accept us if we’re good enough or do the right things. But Jesus says, ‘I will accept you just as you are, by forgiving you.’ And you can see that in the way he treated Zacchaeus.

You see, Jesus knew all about Zacchaeus’s life – because Jesus is God. He knew all about Zacchaeus’s cheating and lying and stealing. He knew that Zacchaeus didn’t care about truthfulness or about people. And above all, Jesus knew that, up to this point in his life, Zacchaeus had ignored him, and lived as if there was no God. And that is what we all do, by nature – we ignore God, and live our own way, as if it didn’t really matter. But the Bible says it does matter. It matters more than anything else in the world. Because by behaving like that, we offend God and deserve his judgement – in other words, his punishment.

Now what would other religions say to someone like Zacchaeus? They would basically say, ‘Zacchaeus, you must change yourself. You must try hard to be good and to do the right things. And if you do enough, then God will accept you.’ But what does Jesus say? Well, look again at v5 of this part of the Bible:

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.

Ie, Jesus says, ‘I will accept you now, just as you are, by forgiving you all the wrong you’ve done, so you can have a new start in life, with me as your ruler.’ And look how Zacchaeus responds in v6:

So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly [ie, joyfully, happily].

Because he is amazed that Jesus is willing to accept him, even though he has lived such a bad life. But now look at how the people respond – look at v7:

All the people saw this and began to mutter [ie, to complain, to criticise Jesus, saying], "He [that is, Jesus] ,i>has gone to be the guest of a 'sinner [ie, a wrongdoer].'

So the people are saying, ‘If Jesus really is from God, how can he possibly accept a bad man like this? Is Jesus saying that cheating and lying and stealing don’t matter?’ Well, the answer is that God can never say that wrongdoing doesn’t matter. The Bible says this about God: ‘Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong.’ (Habakkuk 1.13) The Bible also says about God that, ‘he does not leave the guilty unpunished.’ (Exodus 34.7) So if that is true, how can God forgive someone like Zacchaeus for his wrongdoing? And how can he forgive you or me for our wrongdoing? The answer is: through Jesus’ death on the cross.

At the beginning of this part of the Bible (Luke 18.31-33), we saw that Jesus said he was going to be killed and then rise again from the dead. And the Bible says that his death was the most important part of God’s plan to bring us back into relationship with himself. It says that when Jesus died on the cross, he was taking on himself the punishment we deserve for our wrongdoing, so that we could be forgiven and yet our wrongdoing would not go unpunished.

I said earlier that if you are an international, you are invited to our welcome lunch after this service, and that it is free. So if you come to the lunch, you won’t have to pay for it yourself because the Christians in this church will pay instead of you. And that is an illustration of what Jesus did when he died on the cross. He paid the price for our wrongdoing instead of us, so that if we accept his invitation, we will not have to pay the price, the punishment, ourselves.

I said earlier that the unique claim of Christianity is that God has come into this world in the person of Jesus, so we can know what he is like. The other unique claim of Christianity is that God’s Son then died instead of us, so that we can be forgiven and know for sure that God accepts us.

So that’s the second thing we see in this part of the Bible: that Jesus accepts us by forgiving us. And Jesus is saying to each one of us this morning: ‘Accept me as your rightful ruler, and I will forgive you and accept you, just as you are.’

Then we see in this part of the Bible,


Thirdly, JESUS CHANGES US BY FORGIVING US (vv7-10)

I was talking to someone from another religion. And he said, ‘But if you believe God accepts you by forgiving you, won’t you just go and do more wrong things because you know he’ll forgive you?’ Well, the answer is, ‘No.’ Look again at vv7-8 of the Bible reading:

7All the people saw this and began to mutter, "He has gone to be the guest of a 'sinner.' "8But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, "Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.

You see, knowing that Jesus has forgiven him and accepted him completely changes him. It changes who he’s living for. So, in the past, he lived for himself. But now in v8, he calls Jesus ‘Lord’ – ie, ‘Ruler’. So now Jesus is the person he wants to live for and please. And that then changes the way he’s living. In the past, he was happy to cheat and lie and steal and hurt people. But now he wants to live in a way that the Lord Jesus is happy with – so he wants to be generous and honest and to repay those he’s robbed.

And that’s the change which happens when you know that Jesus has forgiven and accepted you by dying for you on the cross. When you come to believe that someone has done such a great thing for you, it makes you want to love them in return.

Now many internationals have told me that they want to change for the better, and want to change the world for the better. That is often why they are studying here. I was talking to a Chinese man earlier this year and he said to me, ‘I want to live a good life in harmony with other people, and I am not sure you need God to be able to do that.’ So I said to him, ‘But can you be good? In your experience, are you able to live in harmony with other people, with no problem?’
And he thought for a while and then said, ‘No. Even when you know what is right, it doesn’t make you do it.’

And that’s true. All religions and societies have rules of what is right and wrong. But rules cannot change us on the inside. Rules cannot make us want to live the right way. And I want to say to you this morning: only Jesus can.

So what have we seen in this part of the Bible?
• We’ve seen that Jesus is our rightful ruler – and how Zacchaeus accepted that.
• We’ve seen that Jesus accepts us by forgiving us – and how Zacchaeus experienced that.
• And we’ve seen, also, how Jesus changes us by forgiving us.

And when Jesus saw how Zacchaeus had changed, look what he said about him in vv9-10 of the Bible reading:

9Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man [that is, Jesus] came to seek and to save what was lost.

I said near the beginning that on the outside, Zacchaeus looked successful. It looked like he had found the right path in life because he had power and money. But in v10 Jesus says Zacchaeus had actually been totally lost in life. If you’ve recently arrived here, I guess you have probably got lost in Newcastle since coming. You left your room and went out wanting to go the library, but very soon you took a wrong path and ended up at the swimming pool or Marks & Spencers – far from where you wanted to be. Well, Jesus says Zacchaeus was lost in life. On the outside, he looked successful. But in God’s eyes, he was lost – he’d taken the wrong path of ignoring God, which would end him up facing God’s judgement and far from God forever.

And Jesus is saying to each of us this morning: ‘Without me you are lost. Without me, you are on the wrong path, and will end up far from God forever, where you really do not want to be.’ And Jesus is also saying to each of us this morning: ‘Lost people need finding and saving, and you cannot do that for yourself. Only I can.’

Other religions talk about us trying to find God and save ourselves. Only Christianity says God came to find us in the person of Jesus, and died on the cross to save us. So if I had to sum up what this part of the Bible says about Jesus, I would say this: Jesus came to bring people who are not living for God into relationship with God. And I hope what I’ve said this morning has made you begin to ask yourself: ‘Is this true? Am I lost? And do I need Jesus?’


If you would not yet call yourself a Christian, but would like to find out more about Jesus, we invite you to join our International Christianity Explored course.
If you do call yourself a Christian and you decide to join this church, we encourage you to join a small group, and our group especially for internationals is Globe Christian Fellowship.