Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2701
“He…received Him joyfully.” Luke 19:6.
THIS morning [Sermon #1624, Volume 27—WELCOME! WELCOME!”] I showed you, dear Friends, how joyfully Jesus receives sinners—how He welcomes them— how glad He is to find those whom He came to seek and to save. From this text it appears that when sinners receive Jesus, they receive Him joyfully, so that there is joy on both sides. It is a joyful business altogether—the Savior is glad to save and the sinner is glad to be saved! I know which of the two has the greater joy, for it is always more blessed to give than to receive, and the great heart of Jesus, in its Infinite Benevolence, is conscious of a rarer joy than even the saved sinner can experience. It is a delight to Him to save. So great is His joy that He cannot contain it all within His own heart and He represents Himself as calling together His friends and neighbors, and saying to them, “Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost.”
And when the two seas meet—the sea of the saved one’s gladness and the sea of the Savior’s joy—what blessed floods they make! How the dancing waves clap their hands with delight! Surely, joy on earth then becomes more than on any other occasion parallel with the joy in Heaven. Such joy before the Lord is “according to the joy in harvest.” And such days are “as the days of Heaven upon the earth.” How earnestly, then, you and I ought to seek to bring men to Christ! This is the best method of making joy in this sin-cursed world. This is the surest way of plucking up the thorns and the thistles that sin has sown and of making the myrtle and the rose to grow instead, according to that ancient promise— “You shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands”—even before you who are the means of reconciling men to their Maker, and of bringing sinners to their Savior!
This joyous time of receiving Christ is the turning point in character, and it is also one of the tests of destiny. By this sign shall you discern between the men predestinated unto eternal life and those who have no share in the Divine decree. He that receivesChrist thereby proves that he isChrist’s, but he that receives Him not shall surely perish as the result of his willful rejection of the Savior. The Gospel is, after all, the great fan that winnows the chaff from the wheat. It separates the precious from the vile, even as Christ said to the Jews, “You believe not, because you are not of My sheep.” Whether or not you will receive Christ when He comes your way is the all-important matter for each one of you to decide. If your door is shut when He is passing by, He may never come your way again. But if, when He bids you come to Him, as He bade Zacchaeus make haste and come down, you receive Him with alacrity, opening the door of your heart that He may enter in, then shall you prove that you are His, that you are among those who are the blessed of the Lord, and who shall be blessed, world without end! So this matter of the reception of Christ is, as I called it just now, all-important—and I want to press it upon each unsaved person here with the urgent desire and the confident hope that some, like Zacchaeus, will joyfully receive Christ.
This passage also teaches us that often the most unlikely persons are the first to receive the Savior. I would have said, and you would all have agreed with me, that the least likely person in the city of Jericho to receive Christ into his house was this rich little tax-gatherer, Zacchaeus—this man whom all the people disliked so much, that when Christ went to
his house, “they all murmured, saying, that He was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.” Yet he was the one person in that place who did entertain the Lord Jesus Christ! And many a time since has Christ been shut out of good men’s doors, or the doors of those who have reckoned themselves as good men—but He has found shelter within the gates of sinners, and such sinners as have been reputed among men to be utterly given over and hopeless. I would not pick my congregation even if I might do so—I would much rather that they should come, as they do come, by God’s choice and constraint. For the man whom I might think most likely to be blessed would probably pass the blessing by, and he whom we, in our poor, feeble judgment, might expect to be the last to receive the Savior, might turn out to be the first, the most willing and the most joyful receiver of Him! I cannot tell, therefore, who among you will take the Savior in. I wish I could hope that all who have not yet done so, would do it before the sermon ends. He is such a wondrous Guest that you may all entertain Him at the same moment! And He can come to each one’s heart—He may be the Guest of everyone who is a sinner, and yet each sinner who receives Him shall find that a whole Christ has come into his heart!