A Friend of Sinners

What kind of difference are you making in your workplace and in your neighborhood and in those places that God has providentially placed you in order for you to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16)? What kind of relationships are you building so that you can love those around you that do not know Jesus as Lord and Savior? How are you involved in people’s lives for the sake of the Kingdom and for the sake of their eternity?
Jesus was called a “friend of sinners” by the religious establishment of His day. They saw that He spent time in the company of those of questionable backgrounds and practices and believed that to be scandalous. But I pray that we would be bold enough to live in such a way that the same might be said of us.
While Christians are to clearly look different from the world (John 17:16; 1 John 2:15) we must live in a way that demonstrates to the people of the world that we love them. This is what Jesus did as He interacted with those around Him. The religious people of Jesus’ day looked down upon sinners; Jesus looked for sinners because He came to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke 19:10).
When Jesus hung out with sinners He did not condone what they were doing and their sinful lifestyles, He simply affirmed that these people and their lifestyles can be transformed. And He was able to hang out with sinners without becoming a sinner Himself.
So as we seek to live in the world but not look like the world we need to avoid two extremes. One extreme is to retreat. This is where the only people that we know and hang out with are those like us: they believe like us, live like us, think like us, have the same morals that we do, and have the same worldview that we do. This is retreat and this is defeat.
The other extreme is to relax. This is where we begin to look more like our unbelieving friends then we do like Jesus. We relax our morals and relax our values and the sinners and the culture begin to affect us more than we affect them. This is just as dangerous as retreat for while retreat causes there to never be a Christian witness, relaxing causes the Christian witness to tainted and therefore ineffective.
Thankfully Jesus did neither of these. He did not retreat and He surely did not relax. Jesus redeemed. And that is what He has called us to do as well. Jesus has called us to be salt and to be light, but in order to do that I must get out of the salt shaker and into a world that needs some salt and that needs the light of the Gospel.
So I ask again: What kind of difference are you making in your workplace and in your neighborhood and in those places that God has providentially placed you in order for you to be salt and light? What kind of relationships are you building so that you can love those around you that do not know Jesus as Lord and Savior? How are you involved in people’s lives for the sake of the Kingdom and for the sake of their eternity? Let us go and be known as friends of sinners so that Jesus might use us to bring redemption to those around us!