Who is the real lawbreaker? The Pharisees thought Jesus was. In this series we’ll turn to Luke 5 and 6 to think about God’s Law, legalism and restoring grace.
Most of us know our own dirt isn’t the curated kind—and suspect it may be too much to clean up. In Matthew 9, Jesus walks past everyone with the polished-for-consumption sob story and stops at a tax collector’s booth, a man whose sin was public knowledge, and says simply, “Follow me.”
We tend to skip the genealogy at the start of Matthew—all those names, so many of them people we know nothing about. In doing so we miss something that matters deeply to ordinary people like us who wonder whether God actually works through lives like theirs.
We easily draw safe boundaries around God’s grace, welcoming those who seem familiar while overlooking those who feel foreign or difficult. Yet the distant wise men of Matthew 2 and the rejoicing Gentiles of Acts 13 confront those boundaries: Jesus came to reach the world. Who might God be placing beyond our comfort, yet within the reach of his good news?
A child at a pond knows the drill: rod, reel, line in the water. Then something tugs. Knowing how to cast is not the same as being ready for the catch. In Matthew 10, Jesus takes his “Fishers of Men” and gives them further preparation for an even more important catch.
We’ve all felt the pull to add one more pious act—fast a little longer, pray a little harder—convinced the right combination will finally make us right before God. In Matthew 9, John’s disciples bring that same assumption directly to Jesus, and his answer reframes not just the practice of fasting but the question of what season we’re actually living in.
We see lots of details but miss the main point when we come to Jesus mainly to eliminate problems here and now. In Matthew 9:18–26, two people reach out to Jesus with needs very much like the ones we have and must wrestle with the deeper point of Jesus’s ministry — just like we do.
You know what it is to walk in darkness and wonder if God will ever draw near. Israel knew it too—enslaved, exiled, occupied—praying over every generation that a child would come. In Matthew 1 that child is born, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.
A mute man speaks, and the crowd says nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel. The Pharisees watch the same moment and reach for another explanation. Matthew 9 puts those two reactions side by side.
We scramble to fix what’s broken, certain we know the one restoration that matters most. But when friends lower a paralyzed man before Jesus in Matthew 9, desperate only to walk, the first words he hears are “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” Do we trust Jesus enough to receive what he says we actually need?