PROSTITUTES & POTHEADS: JESUS' TYPE OF PEOPLE

> He hung out with a lady who was married five times and was now with a man that was not her husband.
> A woman comes and washes his feet and anoints them. She was publicly known to be a “sinner” which most likely meant she was a promiscuous lady.
> He asked a Tax-collector, one of the most despised people in society, to come and spend time with him. The Tax collector throws a party for him and now he is eating and drinking with other tax-collectors and “sinners”.
> He spent time with a terrorist. A Zealot who wanted nothing more then to see His countries rulers be overthrown through the means of violence so the people of the land can rule as they once did. Jesus wanted to show him a new kind of Revolution. One based off of love.

Jesus, the man who countless of people love and adore. The man who receives praise and worship daily all over the world. The man who so many desire to be like. The man that so many long to be with as they anxiously await his return. The man who longed for his people to see the beauty of God’s love for them and who was willing to go to extreme measures to let them know that truth.

When we see all that Jesus did for us, we fall to our knees in complete admiration and cry out to him because He is beautiful and awesome. But when we see Jesus hanging out with drunkards, we ridicule him. We see him spending time with prostitutes and we are in shock that he would do so. When he asks a terrorist to spend time with him, we can’t believe what we’re seeing.
The person who commits adultery is a threat to our households. The drunkards make our city pathetic. The thieves only deserve jail. The terrorist needs to be killed.
Redrum was a local head-shop business that moved locations because they realized they weren’t going to make it in the town of Cambridge, MN. Inside the store, you would find a wide variety of pipes, bongs and hookahs. The number one clientele were not 50 year-old men who smoke tobacco as they read books at home. It was young pot-heads who wanted the coolest looking bong or glass pipe. When Redrum left our community, I had heard from several people praising their exit. “Praise God! I have been praying from day one that that place would just leave.” “Whenever I’d drive past that place, I would pray that they would go out of business”. When I hear such “Praise Reports”, I am always forced to ask, “Did you ever get a chance to go and spend time with those guys that ran the shop?” The answer has yet to be “yes”.
It is so easy to love Jesus when we see him for who he is; our Beautiful Lord. But it’s so hard to love the people Jesus spent his time with when we see them for who they our: “sinners”.