This is really the biggest problem in the church today that we have a certain view of church as certain people who sit in certain seats on a certain day of the week and they act a certain way. As a result, we aren’t really willing to let it get messy. We’re not willing for there to be a blurring of distinction about where people are interacting and you might not really know if this person is following Christ or not.

There is a certain amount of mess to that, in other words, there was a real mess, Jesus saying to Zaccheus, I want to stay at your house tonight,. It caused this huge stir. Why? Because Zaccheus was way far from being the typical type that would be associated with a good religious person or even following God. He was stealing from people. He was like the gang leader of the city. He was knocking people off probably to make more money, but something about Jesus attracted him and Jesus saw it and saw that God was at work behind the scenes with him – I’m going to move in close. That created a mess. The religious people didn’t like it. Zaccheus invites all his friends who seemed very far God and yet Jesus enters into that very comfortable in his own skin, confident that God is already here at work and is doing something and he’s going to bring it out. He is going to make something beautiful out of what seems messy.

Unless the church is willing to enter into that place we will not see God make something beautiful out of the mess of life. And if we think that the way God does things is to make things look neat on the outside, then we’re falling into the trap of the Pharisees. We’ve got to be willing to enter in to the mess of the culture and allow God to do something beautiful in it.

Especially for Christian leaders, if our friends are not becoming the church then there is something wrong. There is either something wrong with the way we are following Christ or there is something wrong with the way we are doing church, but church is to be the representation of Jesus himself in the world. That’s what Jesus said, that we his body, his hands and feet. He is the head. So when we look at Jesus’ ministry he actually was not that, the religious people were actually pretty turned off by him but who were attracted to Jesus were the average people who had gotten themselves in all kinds of moral messes, financial messes, they were partying, they were screwing up sexually and yet for some reason they were attracted to him. That’s why the religious leaders said, they had a derogatory term for Jesus, they called him “the friend of sinners”. Well if we who are supposedly following Christ and becoming his body as we follow him together are not seeing the same kind of impact in the world around us where people are gravitating toward following Jesus because there is something life giving about him, then we are not representing him well. So we’ve got to change something – either the way we are following Christ or the way we are doing church or the way we are engaging with our friends and neighbors.