Deeper Daily Podcast- March 20, 2026

0:00Hello friends, welcome to the DDP for the 20th day of March on Paul. It's a Friday. It's day two of starting a new sermon, although we didn't get but a couple of minutes in yesterday. But I'm not going to backtrack. Let's get going from where we stopped yesterday right near the very beginning of a message called the Great Physician. Of wrestling over, not just wrestling over the Scriptures, but of encountering Christ a new. You know what I mean by that? Encountering Christ a new. I met Jesus a long time ago. But I didn't meet Jesus once. I've met Jesus over and over and over again. In so many encounters, I don't count them any longer. I don't just count a freak once a year or twice a year. Go to camp, meet and go to revival encounter with Jesus. But I believe in encounters that happen over and over again. People looking for the second coming of Christ, I say, man, if you told that to the early church, I think they would have said two. Two. We see them constantly. And so I don't just believe in a second.

1:03I believe that you can encounter them all the time. So I'm constantly wrestling out Christ a new. And one of the things that's been wrestling in me with this Christ is what his role is as a physician. I want to take you to the text tonight in Matthew 9. Let's read a few verses beginning in verse 9. And this starts with the call of Matthew, which almost seems out of turn for where the story goes. But I only show you how I believe they connect. As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew setting up the text booth. And he said to him, follow me. And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and centers came. And we're sitting with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and centers? But when he heard this, he said, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. And go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and sacrifice for I have come to call not the righteous, but centers.

2:08I like with the old King James, as I've come not to call the righteous, but centers to repentance. That flowery statement to bring centers into mind change. And for a long time, when I saw this text, what I thought Jesus was doing was using a metaphor. Sick people need a doctor. People that are not sick don't need a doctor. And so the sick people are always in need of an encounter in which they can be healed. And I looked at it like him saying to the Pharisees, you're wondering why I'm with these because, hey, some people need it. You may not feel like you need it, but these most definitely need it. But I see a connection of Jesus calling Matthew and bringing him with him to the meal, setting down the room full of tax collectors and centers to mean something else. There are honestly no sick people in this room. This is one of those moments in the ministry of Jesus where he doesn't heal somebody. We don't see Jesus turned to the crowd and find a paralytic man or a leper or blind man or a deaf man and say to them, receive your sight, receive your hearing, rise, take up your bed and walk.

3:13These are all things Jesus does multiple times across four gospels with none of this story. In this story, he's walking down the street and encounters a tax collector who by Jewish standards is the lowest of the low. This is a traitor to his own people. A tax collector is a man who is a Jew but who is employed by the empire, the Romans, to tax his own people. And he can tax them above what is necessary in order to receive the taxes due to the empire and whatever he can extort out of you and extorting is exactly what he does, whatever he can extort out of you that is above what he owes Caesar, he gets to pocket for himself. So usually on the back of everyone, the tax collector was a richest man in town. And Jesus invites the tax collector to come and follow him and he does not wait for prayer repentance. And he does not wait to see if Matthew is going to shut down his tax collecting business. He just invites him to dinner, a dangerous proposition because what if Matthew comes to dinner and goes back to tax collecting tomorrow. And now we got ourselves a tax collector at our church and this is about as bad as it gets because you can't get worse then.

4:16This is a reputation destroyer for the local congregation. And so Jesus doesn't seem to care. He doesn't ask Matthew's credentials or whether Matthew prays the prayer or whether Matthew wants to go get baptized. He just invites him in. And that one little detail really bothers the Pharisees because not only is Jesus eating with publicans and sinners not only is he eating with the wrong people but he's eating with Matthew. And we don't know if Matthew is going to go right back to being a tax collector tomorrow and you want us to embrace him as an equal. And he might rob us blind tomorrow. What are you talking about? And Jesus says it's the sick that have need of a physician. And what Jesus is doing is not pointing out lepers and paralytics but pointing out the Matthews and the Pharisees that are in the same room. Because this is not Jesus saying some people in here need a doctor but not everybody in here needs a doctor. It's Jesus saying every person in here needs a doctor and that's exactly what I am here to do but we couched that too often in terms of physical healing.

5:19You and I are part of the Western church world. And as part of the Western church world we have ideas about salvation that are couched in certain terms. Now I'm in a grace community. I'm going to grace conferences preaching in grace churches. Grace people have a language. They have a lingo. I know it well. I helped establish some of it. I'm also trying to work really hard to get rid of some of it too. Because as I grow and wrestle this out in my own journey sometimes I see that we've limited things in the way that we've spoken. We get so used to saying things a certain way. We shut the doors on being able to see it another way because we've already got it figured out. One of the dangers I notice in grace communities that people have already got it figured out. There's not a lot left to learn when you feel like you've already accomplished everything you need for righteousness and holiness. We've already got that part nailed. And that doesn't sound a whole lot like the Jesus who continues to stir the soul.

6:24Some of it's terminology but the terminology runs deep because once you start putting titles on things you limit them and you categorize them. And one of the things we've done in the Western church is that we've treated sin like a judicial problem. And so we couch sin in terms of guilt, justification, redemption, penalty, condemnation, conviction, these are Christian words, right? There are also grace words. You're not condemned. You're not guilty. Christ was made, Christ was the ransom for your sin. Christ paid the penalty. Notice how it's all judicial terms, legal terms. And we get it honest, man, because Paul likes judicial terms and we're a people that like to read Paul. And Paul loves judicial terms. He loves to tell you that God was in the world reconciling the world back to himself, not counting their transgressions against them. That's an accounting term. God literally not writing down all that you've done wrong. That's good news.

7:28It's good news. God's not writing down everything we've done wrong. And that's not just for church people, by the way. God was in the world reconciling them back to himself, not counting their transgressions, our transgressions against them. It's not just church people that don't have them counted. It's everyone that doesn't have them counted. If you're going to get judicial, get judicial all the way across the board. You don't get to pick and choose who wins in court. I'm going to jump in right there and stop for today. Tomorrow's podcast will pick up the sermon at that point. Also, we will not be introducing the Sunday sermon because the time I'm putting these podcasts together, I haven't preached it yet. I do believe that I know what it's going to be, but it's a little too early in the week for me to land on a title. You'll just have to find out like the rest of the world when it drops on Sunday. Otherwise, we'll be back tomorrow, continuing the great physician. See you then. God bless.