While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

• Matthew 9:10-13

Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

• John 8:10-11

Boilerplate

I was born into a Presbyterian Church.  For all my life up until now, I have been a member of one Presbyterian Church or another.  It is told that the founding fathers were wondering how the organizational structure of the US Constitution should be set up and a founding father who was Presbyterian showed how it worked in his church.

So, if anyone has had enough time to screw up bureaucracy and the church as a whole, the Presbyterians are great at it.

I had someone tell me that I do not sound like a member of the Presbyterian church, and I replied that I might just be a Reformed School Dropout.  This is a play on words.  Reform school is what they used to call a special school for juvenile delinquents so that they could be incarcerated and given an education at the same time.  They do not have these schools anymore or they call them something different.  Presbyterians and a few other denominations are considered Reformed Theology instead of protestant, but the military could not understand the distinction, so my dog tags read PROTESTANT, meaning Christian and not Catholic.  And of course a school dropout is someone who quit before finishing.  Thus, I think I really dropped out of the reformed way of thinking and the bureaucracy of the denomination when I accepted Jesus into my heart.

When my heart is moved to do something, I feel that it is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Once I suggested that I was going to buy a banner to show where people were being persecuted for their faith and I simply wanted a prayer made on a specific day, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted.  The pastor said he would send that to the worship and discipleship teams for approval.  As usual, it was buried in committee until after the specific day.  Bureaucracy had triumphed and the Holy Spirit was grieved.  The next year, I bought the banner.  I handed out prayer cards to my Sunday school class.  I displayed the banner each Sunday for a month before the day of prayer, and I took the banner down before a bureaucrat caught me.

Yes, I am a Reformed School Dropout.

Discussion

This topic is about how Jesus values people over “red tape”.

The Pharisees had a procedure.  You did not eat with sinners.  For someone of the sinner class to be worthy at their table, there was a thousand things that they had to do.

Jesus had a different approach.  He sat down at their table and dined with them, and then someone invariably made a comment about how they wished this could last forever.  Jesus said, “It can. Go and sin no more.”

The Pharisee in the crowd would not like that.  They had to have proof.  It had to be documented.

I worked for twenty years for a company that went from one job to the next by the seat of their pants, but they wanted to be ISO certified.  So, everything had to be documented.  In the end, I became the Quality Manager.  So, I had to guide the ISO certification inspector from point “A” to point “B” to show we did quality work.  It usually came down to a secretary whose job was filing.  She thought that meant filing her nails.  And the inspector found the necessary paperwork to prove the job was completed properly in the three foot high stack of documents on her desk.  I think she was going for a world record.

The deal is that the company got the job done and then they worried about the paperwork, and since they were no longer being paid to work on that job, they had already moved to the next job.

I was a lousy Quality Manager because I could not get their boss to make them do their jobs properly.

Let me illustrate this when I was on the other side of the project.  I finished the job.  The structure was complete.  The inspector asked where the paperwork was.  Without the paperwork, how could you prove the job was finished.  Instead of pointing like an adult, with one finger, I turned to the structure, a one-story business building.  I pointed with both hands, all ten fingers.  The inspector said with disdain, “You can make funny gestures all you want, but you can never prove the building is there without the paperwork.”

Jesus dined with sinners and when they were willing to do anything to have this wonderful moment last, He told them to stop their sinful life and follow Him.  Some people wondered about the paperwork.  Others thought the idea was crazy.

But for the ones Jesus had come to save, they asked, “Where do we sign up?”

To be saved, it costs you nothing.  To live the life Jesus wants you to live, being a Christian costs you everything.  And guess what?  No paperwork is necessary for either of those things.  The church may demand it, but Jesus does not.  “Welcome brother or sister, and sin no more.”  And somehow, without all the signatures and documents, your name is in the Book of Life.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.