As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he
said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.
The call of Matthew—as recounted by Matthew in his gospel—has almost no detail. Something happened that day, something that changed Matthew’s whole life, and yet he doesn’t tell us anything about it other than the fact that he was a tax-collector, Jesus called him, and he left everything to follow Jesus. What stirred in his heart in that moment? What new hope changed the whole course of his life?
I wonder how many years had gone by since he accepted a post that was both lucrative and despised. I wonder how he justified it to himself. I wonder about the callousness that grew from being both rich and hated, treated like an outcast and yet with too much power for anyone to ignore. It is easy to imagine that his heart was hard, the guilt buried deep, the defensive walls high.
It is in this speculative wondering about Matthew that I see a bit of myself. I too have places where it is easy to cauterize my heart, because examining the places of pain and guilt is too threatening. We all have things that we don’t want to admit out loud because it seems too painful. Sometimes it is our sin, sometimes it is the way we have been hurt by others, sometimes it is simply that God hasn’t given us the life we hoped for.
I wonder if Matthew didn’t include the details of his story so that we all could see ourselves in him. As long as he kept his testimony terse and generic, we can imagine being in his place. Shut off, hurting, angry, defensive—perhaps not because we chose a profession that was despised, but for some other reason.
My sense is that he wants us to see ourselves in his story so that we might realize that even in the hardened places of the heart, it is possible to hear the voice of Jesus. Matthew lets us see that Jesus’ voice can break through our defensiveness, our pain, our sin. He speaks, and his voice brings transformation. If, like Matthew, you have “fenced off” an area of your heart that is too painful to acknowledge, Matthew’s testimony demonstrates that this does not have to be the end of the story. The voice of Jesus can bring healing; it can transform us.
Steven+
Scripture Reflections
On Sunday, we heard Genesis 1. One thing that seems odd is the frequent refrain, “there was evening and there was morning, the _th day.” We think of days as beginning when we wake up, but Genesis presents each day as beginning when the sun goes down. There is something to learn from this, something more important than we realize: When you wake up each morning to begin your day, God’s work for the day has already begun.
According to Genesis, we sit down to dinner, read a book, and go to sleep as the day is beginning. We begin each day with rest—what a strange, countercultural thought!
And even stranger, when we examine creation, we realize that God’s work for each day begins while we are resting. When we wake, God is already at work. We discover that the dawn is breaking, birds are chirping, and plants are filling our air with oxygen. While we were sleeping, he was at work on all of us, restoring our bodies and strengthening us for the day ahead. So much happens while we sleep! Without our help, the sun rises, rains fall, and crops grow. While we are oblivious, unable to help in any way, snoring away in our beds, so much is happening! We awake and step into the work to which God has called us, but it is work that he has begun without us. We don’t begin any task; instead, we step into something he has already begun.
Psalm 127 both convicts me and encourages me. Verse 4 reads “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” The theme of the psalm is simple: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (v. 1). The psalm could be seen as a meditation on Genesis 1. God works first, while we rest, and then invites us into his work. Our work does not need to be anxious, because God is already working.
What if we began to see each thing to which God calls us as something that he has already begun for us, without our help? What if we believed that he is already present in all situations in our life, before we even get to them? What if we realized that he calls us to rest in him before we go to work for him?
The biblical depiction of work assumes that God is working first. We are like a little kid, invited by a parent to help in a task that is far too big for us! But because God is already there, we can jump in with joy, excited to be with him, eager to help.
Steven+
Song Spotlight
We don’t sing a lot of songs about the Holy Spirit. It’s not because the Holy Spirit doesn’t deserve praise. He’s God! Of course he does! In fact, that was one of the early arguments for the Holy Spirit’s divinity. As Gregory of Nazianzus essentially said, “We’re all worshiping him, and he definitely deserves it. He must be God.”
The main reason is that the Holy Spirit doesn’t draw attention to himself. Usually in the New Testament he is either pointing us to Jesus (John 16:15), reminding us what God has given (Rom. 8:16), or praying for us (Rom. 8:26-27). Like we said this Sunday, he actually joins us to Jesus, so we can receive his righteousness, holiness, and resurrection life. We can even say that the Holy Spirit, by joining us to Jesus, makes us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). We may not sing songs TO the Spirit as much as we do to Jesus, but we can legitimately say that there is no worship without the Spirit’s work.
Still, even though the Spirit is always pointing away from himself, it is also entirely appropriate for the Spirit to be worshiped, prayed to, and sung about. In fact, we need to sing about him. We need to be reminded of who he is, and we need solid, biblically orthodox language about the Spirit to settle into our hearts. There is a lot of confusion about who the Spirit is and what he does, so having this language in our hearts will help us to rightly discern his work and presence.
The song we introduced on Sunday (“God the Spirit”) is a good example of this. In verse 1 we see that he is the one who inspired the writing of the scriptures; he has been at work revealing God’s nature and character for millennia. In verse 2 he is the one who replaces our death with Jesus’ resurrection life, and who works in our hearts to make our character like Jesus’. In verse 3 he teaches and guides us as we wait for Christ’s return. The refrain that ties these verses together reminds us that the Spirit is way more than our conscience, or God’s invisible messenger who gives us nudges and hunches when we don’t know what to do. He is united with the Father and the Son; he is God, and he deserves our love and worship.
There is so much that we could say about the gift of the Spirit. God has chosen to dwell with and in us, and to join us to himself. That is both astounding and confusing, and the mystery only grows as we learn and understand more. Don’t let that discourage you, though. Let this language seek into your heart so you can learn to recognize him. He is with us and in us; he is present with us. Let’s give thanks for that and learn to recognize his leading together.
Listen here: "God the Spirit"
Justin+