Come Out of Hiding

The story we look at today has to do with taking a serious look at your life.

And I just have to be upfront with you and say what we do today may be difficult for you. You may not like it. I don’t really like it myself sometimes.

In the story we look at today we see an aspect of interacting with Jesus that often is quite painful. It has to do with facing the truth about yourself and your life.

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In a room this size, there are people who are living in hiding. There are people who have secrets.

So today I want to ask you to examine your life.

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If you’re going to open your life to Jesus, if you’re going to come face to face with Jesus, you must also come face to face with the truth about yourself.

You can only truly know Jesus if you’re willing to face truth. Because Jesus always speaks truth. He always comes in truth.

And facing truth almost always involves pain.

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I want to ask you to make a commitment today — will you, as best you can, face the truth about yourself? Will you face the truth that you generally try to avoid?

I don’t know what area of life that will involve for you.

For the guy in the story we’re about to read, it was primarily financial. He had to deal with greed.

For you, it may be something else.

It may be relational.
It may be an issue of integrity.
It may be some bad habit that you deal with.
It may involve drugs or alcohol.
It may involve your sexuality.
It may involve some secret sin that no other human being on earth knows about.

Today we’re going to do a little surgery. It’s going to be painful. But it could the most necessary thing we need for the heath of our souls.

Are you with me?

Alright, let’s look in Luke 19:1-10.

Luke is speaking here about Jesus and says:

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

But 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.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Let me start with an occupational question to get things started.

Think back to when you were a kid, when you would dream about what you might do vocationally when you grew up.

Let me see a show of hands on this one. How many of you wanted to be… or knew someone who wanted to be:

A fireman, or a policeman or something where there was rescuing or protection involved?
How about an artist, or actor, or singer, or writer – some artistic expression?
How about a doctor, or a nurse, or a therapist or something in the healing profession?

How many of you, as a kid, remember hearing someone say, “I want to grow up to be a tax collector. I want to work for the IRS”?

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Tax collectors have never been popular in any society.

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In Israel, tax collectors were a separate class of people. I need to take a few moments to explain this.

If you don’t understand what it meant to be a tax collector, you’ll never get this story.

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In Israel, there were certain vocations that carried a social stigma with them. They were called despised trades. No devout Jewish person would engage in any of them.

Religious leaders would make lists of these despised trades and warn people not to engage in them.

Some of these lists have survived for a couple thousand years now.

One list has physicians and butchers at the bottom of the list. These were despised jobs because they were tempted to cater to the rich and to be unfair to the poor.

Some occupations are listed not because they’re dishonorable but because they’re just gross. They involved disgusting tasks. One list has on it tanners of dead skins and dung collectors.

There were a few professions that were not just unpleasant but were actually considered immoral. People who practiced these were not just distasteful. They were to be shunned as immoral people. People who gamble with dice and people that were involved in lending were on one of these lists because it was understood that they would exploit the poor.

Now, toward the very bottom of all these lists were tax collectors.

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You have to try to imagine how deeply tax collectors were despised in Jesus’ day.

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As many of you know, Israel was occupied by Rome. So it was not a free nation.

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Rome’s primary interest in the countries they ruled over was how much money they could get out of them.

They had to support their army and Roman roads and so on.

Their interest was in getting as much money out of these countries as they could. And they found it was easier to collect money with native tax collectors rather than Roman tax collectors.

So they would hire Israelites to be their tax collectors.

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It worked like this – they would have Israelites bid for the right to be a tax collector for a particular region.

Whoever had the highest bid would get the job.

Someone might say, “I think I can get you $100 million from the East Bay Area of San Francisco.” And if that was the highest bid, he would get the job.

Tax collectors would collect as much money as they could. They would give to Rome whatever they had bid, and they would keep whatever was left over for themselves.

The Romans set up this system to create highly motivated tax collectors. They fought for every penny they could.

They knew if they didn’t collect more than they bid they would get no profit.

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Tax collectors were despised as traitors who sold out their brothers and sisters. They sold out the people of God to Rome for a profit.

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And they were not just traitors. It was assumed that any tax collector was guilty of massive dishonesty.

There was a saying in those days, “For tax collectors, repentance is hard.”

A tax collector had cheated so many people that if he wanted to repent, he wouldn’t know who to go back and make amends to. The list of people that he had cheated would be too long.

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Tax collectors were so notorious for their dishonesty that one Roman writer in the first century actually writes about a town that erected a statue to an honest tax collector. They had a tax collector that was an honest man. That was so rare that they built a statue to honor him.

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Tax collectors were not only hated; they were deprived of their political and civil rights. They could not serve as a witness in the courts. They were not allowed to serve as judges or as elders.

A devout Israelite would not even allow the hem of his robe to touch the robe of a tax collector.

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To get a sense of what it meant to be a tax collector and how people felt about tax collectors, think for a moment in terms of the most despised categories in our society – assassins, drug dealers, corrupt business leaders, people who want to steal your identity, or exploit little children.

You have to put it into these categories to understand the story.

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An obvious question is — what would make Zacchaeus be willing to enter a profession that would create such hatred, and hostility, and isolation for him?

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I have an idea. This is just an idea. It’s not necessarily true, it’s just a guess.

When you read through the story, you realize Zacchaeus had one physical characteristic prominent enough for Luke to write about.

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For a man to be considered attractive generally, he is supposed to have three attributes. He supposed to be handsome, dark and what’s the other one? He’s supposed to be tall.

If you grew up in the church and sang the song about Zacchaeus, you know that he was a… “wee, little man.”

He was the runt of the litter.

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Kids can be very cruel in the way they treat people who are different, especially those who look different and are small.

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And it may be that Zacchaeus decided he would show everyone and become a big man in the only way he knew how.

Maybe money became the guiding force in his life.

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In any event, he became a tax collector and not just an ordinary tax collector. He was good at it. Luke tells us he was, “the chief collector.”

That is, he had other tax collectors working for him and was over a wide geographical area.

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He was rich. And it’s fair to assume that he was thoroughly corrupt and dishonest.

He had given up on society, on friendships, on moral decency and integrity.

He was betting everything he had that affluence, wealth and possessions were what would give meaning and fulfillment to his life. He bet everything on that.

But it wasn’t working.

There was a hole in his heart that money could not fill.

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Then he hears Jesus is coming to Jericho.

There’s something about Jesus that intrigues Zacchaeus. And it’s not hard at all to figure out what that was.

I want you to see another passage in Luke 5.

This is a pretty clear reason why Zacchaeus would have been intrigued by Jesus.

The context of Luke 5 is, Jesus has just healed the paralytic that we looked at a couple weeks ago.

This is what Luke says in verse 27:

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him,

Very often tax collectors would be at booths on roadways or near bridges. They would collect tolls from people that were transporting merchandise.

Jesus comes to the tax booth and says to Levi, “Follow me.”

and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.

Now, two remarkable things happen here.

One, Jesus approaches a tax collector and invites him to be part of his group.

The other is the tax collector gets up, leaves everything and follows him.

Verse 29:

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”

Notice those two expressions. Tax collectors and sinners are two synonyms in their mind. To be a tax collector was to be a sinner.

Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

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Okay, now back to Luke 19.

Word about something like this gets around. This is not the kind of thing people would keep quiet about. — “Have you heard about the religious leader, Jesus, who goes to parties for tax collectors.”

It’s like this great, moral and religious teacher going to parties for the most despised segments of society — hanging out with drug addicts and prostitutes and those who exploit children. — “Have you heard, one of his disciples is actually a former tax collector himself.”

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Zacchaeus wants to see this moral teacher and religious leader who hangs around with people like him.

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What Zacchaeus doesn’t realize, but is about to find out, is coming face to face with Jesus means Zacchaeus is going to have to come face to face with the truth about his own life.

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Picture this scene.

Jesus is coming to Jericho. Zacchaeus wants to see him, but there’s a crowd.

Now, if you’re a tax collector, do you think you would want to hang out in a crowd?

No. A tax collector is not the popular guy. People are not likely to make room for you so you can see.

There’s probably a fair amount of shoving, pushing and cursing for any tax collector that would be foolish enough to show up.

Zacchaeus knows this but wants to see Jesus. So he climbs up into a tree to see over the crowd.

I think he also climbed up the tree to get away from the crowd. He probably wanted to hide.

Picture what’s going on. Verse 4:

So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

Verse 5:

When Jesus reached the spot

Now, put yourself in Zacchaeus’ place for a moment. He’s up in the tree and Jesus is getting closer and closer. Zacchaeus is probably thinking, “This was a good idea. I’m going to get a good look at Jesus. I may be able to hear a fair amount of what he says.”

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Jesus gets closer. All of a sudden, he’s not only close. Jesus is standing right beside the tree. He’s not just standing beside the tree. He’s also looking up into the tree.

There’s a whole crowd with hundreds and hundreds of people who see Jesus. They start looking up in the tree and asking each other, “What’s he looking at?” “I don’t know. It must be some kid up there or something.”

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Then Jesus says, “Zacchaeus.”

And that one word sets off a ripple through the crowd.

Imagine how Zacchaeus feels. He thinks he’s going to hide in a tree and watch from a safe distance. All of a sudden, Jesus and everyone gathered there are all looking up at him sitting in a tree.

The crowd is probably thinking, “He’s going to let Zacchaeus have it now. This is going to be bloody. Finally, a tax collector is going to get what’s coming to him.”

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately.

It’s hard to carry on a serious conversation with someone up in a tree. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but it’s difficult to have a really good heart-to-heart talk with a person sitting in a tree.

Jesus says:

“Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.”

Notice, Jesus doesn’t say, “I want to stay at your house or I’d like to.” Although, he does want to and would like to. He says “must.”

Luke wants us to understand by this that there is a necessity to what Jesus is doing and that God is at work behind it.

This is the kind of thing Jesus must do in order to reveal the radical nature of the grace of God. “I must do this,” Jesus says.

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I want you to imagine something. Imagine this story and this kind of a person in our day today. Imagine a person who ALL polite and decent people would stay away from.

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Then imagine Jesus walking up to that person and treating him with courtesy and dignity, and not only that, but asking to go to his home, to sit down and eat with him.

If you can imagine that then you get some sense of the shock and confusion everyone felt.

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Well, Zacchaeus comes out of the tree and finally acknowledges the truth.

His whole life has been built on greed and dishonesty. He has sinned against his God and his people. His life has been a miserable waste.

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Zacchaeus comes out of hiding.

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You see, the first step in coming face to face with Jesus and experiencing this kind of restoration, is you’ve got to Come out of hiding.

You have to see how useless it is to try to evade being found out.

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There’s a pattern that’s inevitable. Wrongdoing and sin always lead to hiding. That’s just a reflexive response of ours.

You can see it in little kids. They do something wrong. They sin, feel guilt and shame. And their first instinct is to hide and to pretend they didn’t do it.

Sin always leads to hiding. And hiding always leads to aloneness.

We see it in Zacchaeus. There is this guilt, and shame and a deep inability to receive love.

When you’re hiding, you’re unable to authentically receive love.

Deep down inside, you know. Even if you’re fooling someone, and they do or say something nice, what’s happening inside of you is you’re saying, “Yes, but if you knew the truth about me, you wouldn’t love me.”

There’s this pattern of sin which leads to hiding, aloneness, brokenness and the destruction of community and intimacy.

This burden weighs so heavily on people.

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How heavy does this kind of burden weigh? I want to show you something that will hopefully illustrate this.

I have a glass of water here that’s a little over half full. Think about how heavy this glass of water is. It’s about eight ounces of water. Does it seem like a heavy glass of water?

I want you to know, the weight in this glass doesn’t really matter. What matters is how long I hold it.

* If I hold it for a minute, it’s not a problem.
* If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm.
* If I hold it for a day, my arm will begin to feel numb.

The weight in the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.

You see, the secrets we hold onto are like this glass of water. Hold onto them for a day and nothing really happens. Hold onto them longer and they begin to hurt. Hold onto them long enough and you will start to feel numb — incapable of vulnerability, integrity, trust or receiving love.

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This burden weighs so heavily on people that they’ll do anything to try to get rid of the guilt.

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And that’s why Jesus said in Matthew 11:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest for your souls.

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Maybe that’s what Jesus is saying to you right now, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest for your souls.”

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I want to ask you for a moment to imagine that instead of Zacchaeus it’s you in the tree.

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Image that you long to see Jesus.

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I have to believe you would not be in this room today if you didn’t have at least some longing to be with Jesus. I don’t know that any of us would be here if that wasn’t somewhere inside of us.

You long to see him.

Yet the truth about you and me is there’s a part of us that’s afraid to see Jesus, because you know that your life — or my life — doesn’t quite measure up.

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Imagine you’re in the tree… half hoping Jesus will see you and half hoping he won’t.

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If Jesus were to come along right now, and it was you up in the tree, the question is — what would Jesus need to talk with you about? What in your life are you trying to hide? Will you acknowledge it today?

Maybe you’ll need to confess it before another person. You’ll definitely need to confess it before Jesus. And you’ll definitely need to face the truth about yourself.

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This interaction with Jesus means Zacchaeus must come down out of the tree and admit the truth about his life… to Jesus, to himself and – for Zacchaeus – to a group of other people he had wronged and hurt.

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If you’ve ever been involved in a recovery program or know much about them, you know they have a step that goes like this:

Admit to God, to yourself and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongdoing.

Essentially, ruthlessly face the truth about yourself, and stop hiding.

A part of the sickness in us is that we’re willing to live with huge problems in our lives, as long as other people don’t find out about them and as long as we can hide them.

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When I was a kid my mom always wanted to know that I had clean clothes on before leaving the house — not just outer clothes, but also an undershirt, socks and things you don’t see.

Why did my mom do this?

It wasn’t so I would stay warm or because it would promote health and good hygiene.

Do you know why she wanted to make sure that stuff was clean?

It was in case I got in an accident.

My mother wasn’t worried about the accident. She just wanted to make sure that when the police came, if I’d been maimed, disfigured or paralyzed, at least they wouldn’t think my mom would let me leave home in dirty underwear.

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Until I got to college, I figured that was the first thing police checked at accidents — “It’s pretty bad. I’m not sure he’s going to live. We better check his underwear and find out what kind of a mother this guy had.”

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Here’s the truth about us. We’re all sinners. All of us are unrepentant sinners.

People who are still trapped by their sin are more concerned with getting caught than with getting help.

Unrepentant sinners are more concerned with getting caught than getting help.

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Repentant sinners are more concerned with getting help than getting caught.

People in recovery are more concerned with getting help than with getting caught.

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If you’ll be really honest about those two decisions, you’ll find out a lot about the condition of your soul.

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Well, Zacchaeus is in the tree. He’s carrying this burden around and hiding.

Notice the approach Jesus takes.

If Jesus was just an ordinary, good religious teacher, he would say something like, “Zacchaeus, if you’ll clean up your life, change professions, pay back what you owe and straighten things out, then I’ll come to your house. I can’t come now. I won’t come now. It would look like I’m condoning you, and I can’t afford the criticism it would cause to my ministry. If you’ll clean up your life, then I’ll come.”

Jesus doesn’t say that.

He says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”

Jesus always leads with grace.

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Whatever your secret is, you can trust him.

Jesus pays a considerable price for leading with grace. Look at verse 7.

Luke goes out of his way to tell us that this response was widespread and not limited to one or two negative people.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

Now, this remarkable thing happens. Zacchaeus, who has gratefully and joyfully received and welcomed Jesus, now all of a sudden realizes the truth about his life; that his behavior has dishonored Jesus.

And this concerns him. In fact, that is intolerable to him.

Now he wants more than anything to be connected with Jesus. He doesn’t want anything in his life to threaten his intimacy with Jesus.

A few moments ago, before Jesus came by, his whole life was built on all of the stuff he collected. He was willing to give up his reputation, friendships, decency, being received in respectable people’s homes, all of that so that he could become a wealthy man.

All of a sudden, he was ready to give up his wealth — the stuff he had sacrificed his whole life for — in a second for the sake of Jesus.

For Zacchaeus, being in an intimate relationship with Jesus was suddenly worth the whole world.

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He does an extraordinary thing.

There’s great wisdom here in terms of spiritual development. Verse 8:

But 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.”

He didn’t have to do this.

Old Testament law said if you’ve cheated someone, you have to pay them back what you took from them with an additional 20 percent.

Zacchaeus goes way beyond that. He says, “I will pay back four times the amount.” That’s how committed he is to making things right.

Then he does another extraordinary thing. He says, “In addition to making things right with the people I’ve wronged, I want to go beyond that. I want to replace my old greedy behavior with a new behavior of extravagant generosity. In addition to what I am going to give back, I will give half of my possessions to the poor.”

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After you do an honest examination of the truth about your life, the next step might be called:

Remove and Replace

The idea here is that I will ask God to remove what it is that I have been doing wrong. Remove this sinful habit that has a hold of me. And then replace it with the opposite virtue.

We see this all the time in the New Testament.

For example, Paul writes to the church at Ephesus and says: “Put off your old self and put on your new self. Put off falsehood and replace it with speaking truth. Stop stealing and start sharing with those in need. Get rid of bitterness and replace it with kindness. Get rid of anger and replace it with forgiveness.”

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Once you’ve acquired a bad habit, the only way to stop doing it is to start doing something else that’s incompatible with it.

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Let me do something real quick. Do me a favor and close your eyes. Go with me on this.

This will just be for a brief moment. You won’t have time to go to sleep, I promise. Just close your eyes for a moment.

Now don’t picture Mickey Mouse in your mind. Don’t see those little round ears, don’t picture those big, oval eyes or hear that squeaky little voice. Just don’t picture Mickey Mouse.

Open your eyes. Now show of hands – how many of you saw Mickey Mouse?

It’s very difficult NOT to do something.

It’s infinitely harder to stop doing something than it is to start doing something else. It’s a basic truth of spiritual life.

For instance, if you have a problem with complaining, it is very difficult to say, “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to try hard to stop complaining.”

Instead, what you need to do is begin to cultivate the practice of gratitude.

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If you have a problem with gossip, it’s very hard to say, “I’m going to stop gossiping.”

Instead, you begin to cultivate the practice of affirmation and encouragement.

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Zacchaeus could have said, “I’m still going to collect taxes, but I’ll try harder not to be greedy when I get around all of that money.”

He probably would have just ended up being greedy all over again.

Instead he says, “I’m so motivated to follow Jesus that not only will I give up my greed, I will cultivate the opposite virtue. I will become an extravagantly generous person. Half of everything I’ve got I’m going to give away to the poor.”

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The clearest sign of authentic repentance is your desire to set things right.

Your number one goal is to set things right. You will do whatever it takes. You will pay any price to make things right between you and God and between you and the people you’ve wronged.

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The people who have not yet reached the point of authentic repentance are people who will continue to experience pain over the wrong they’ve done.

What they’re really doing is trying to minimize the damage and pain they feel. They’re trying to do damage control.

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Zacchaeus was so gripped by the opportunity to be close to Jesus that he was willing to pay any price. He was willing to do whatever it took. In fact, he was so consumed by who Jesus was that it became hardly even painful for him.

To him, if you put all of his money in one hand and put being connected to and being intimate with Jesus in the other hand, it was just a no-brainer. He didn’t have to go away and think about it. His choice was Jesus.

The clearest sign of authentic repentance is not necessarily that it’s a deeply emotional thing. Some people may have very deep, emotional experiences, lots of tears and so on, but when the emotion goes away, there’s no change.

Other people may not have a deeply emotional experience. They find themselves brought to the point where they say to Jesus with absolutely open hearts, “I want to do whatever it takes. There is nothing off limits to you. I will make whatever changes I need to make under the guidance of your Spirit, with wise counsel from friends and clear teaching from Scripture. I’ll do whatever it is that I need to do so that I can be in intimate connection with you and bring no dishonor to your name.”

That’s what Zacchaeus does.

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At the end of this passage in verses 9 and 10, Jesus summarizes the whole deal, looks at Zacchaeus and Jesus said to him:

“Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.

Notice Zacchaeus hasn’t done anything yet, but Jesus knows his heart, and there’s just simply no delay — salvation has come to him.

And now Zacchaeus is a son of Abraham, a member of the children of God, not physically or genetically, but spiritually in his heart.

Then Jesus says this to clarify his mission in case anyone hasn’t gotten it yet.

Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

The truth about Zacchaeus is he was wretched and despised. He was filled with guilt. His life had been a waste.

And as wretched and despised as he was. He was only one sincere confession away from intimacy with God.

He was as lost as it was possible to be, but he was as close as belief in his heart and confession from his mouth.

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I don’t know what’s going on in your life. I don’t know where you’re tempted to hide, but I’ll tell you this much. No matter how wretched that area of your life may be, and no matter how big it feels to you, you’re only one confession away. You’re only one prayer away.

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Would you pray with me as Michaela and the team come to lead us in one more song.

Blue Oaks Church
Pleasanton, CA