In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today in the Church we remember Saint Matthew, who the Bible tells us was a tax collector that Jesus called to be one of His apostles and later on inspired to be an evangelist. In our Gospel lesson this morning from Matthew chapter 9, we get to hear a little bit more about Saint Matthew’s call and also about some the events that happened after it. Apparently, after Jesus called Matthew, He went and had dinner at Matthew’s house along with some of his friends. This led to the Pharisees ridiculing Jesus and falsely accusing Him of supporting other people’s immoral behavior. It was a classic “guilt by association” kind of argument. In response, our Lord quoted the Bible to the them and said, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’”

So, what I’d like to do in this morning’s sermon, as we celebrate Saint Matthew, is do exactly what Jesus tells us to do in our text and spend some time thinking about what it means that God’s desire mercy and not sacrifice.

Now, the first thing that these words have to do with is what God wants from us. This becomes very obvious when we consider their context, and where they show up elsewhere in the Scriptures. The phrase, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” is a direct quote from the book of Hosea. If you remember Hosea was the prophet that God told to go and marry a prostitute in order to show the people of Israel how they were being unfaithful to Him by following after other gods. Hosea represented God and his unfaithful wife represented Israel. In chapter 6 of his book, Hosea speaks the words from our text and then he adds this after them, “But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me. Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood. As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together; they murder on the way to Shechem; they commit villainy.” The problem in Israel was that even though the people were regularly coming to the temple to make sacrifices to God, outside of the temple they were engaged in all kinds of wickedness. Apparently, things were so bad during the time of Hosea that even the priests were guilty of committing literal murder. So, do you think that God was still pleased with their sacrifices given all of the other things that they were doing too? Do you think that He was still happy with them for coming to the temple and going through the motions of worship, despite everything else that what was going on in their lives as well? Of course, not!

In fact, not only was God not happy with them, but because of their unrepentant sins, even their sacrifices were something that displeased Him. This is the exact same thing that we see taking place in 1 Samuel chapter 22, which is when king Saul offered to God a sacrifice that he wasn’t supposed to. There we read, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than to sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.” Or think about what David once said in Psalm 51. After his sin with Bathsheba, David rightly confessed, “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Ultimately, what God wants from us, and the first part of what it means when Jesus says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” is for us to actually repent of our sins and look to Him for forgiveness. It’s for us to follow God’s Word, to be truly sorry for the times that we haven’t, and to trust that there is mercy to be found only in Christ.

That’s what the Pharisees got so very wrong in our text. That’s what they were completely unable to see. Not only were they guilty of doing many of the same things that they ridiculed other people for doing, like loving money and wanting stuff that didn’t belong to them, but they were completely unrepentant for it. They weren’t sorry for it. they didn’t think that they needed to be forgiven for it, because they didn’t think that they had done anything wrong in their lives at all. The Pharisees thought that God was pleased with them already because of their pious looking lives, when, in fact, their self-righteous deeds were the very things that condemned them. 

To put it into our own context, God doesn’t care about how many times a person comes to church, puts money in the offering plate, and takes Communion, if at the same time they are being stubbornly disobedient to Him elsewhere, treating other people like dirt, or only doing those things because they think that they can earn His favor by the mere act of doing them. It’s not that God doesn’t want us to do pray, come to church, and take communion at all, it’s that He wants us to do them in the right kind of way. He wants us to do them in genuine repentance and faith. Taking the Lord’s Supper, for example, which is supposed to be for the forgiveness of oursins, at the same time that we refuse to forgive someone else for their sins, is not taking the Lord’s Supper in repentance and faith. Giving a tenth of what you have to the church, when the reason why you have that money to begin with is because you stole it from somebody else or tricked them into giving it to you through bad business practices, isn’t doing it in repentance and faith. And saying your prayers at night, while you send text messages to your mistress, is obviously, not doing it in repentance and faith. Doing any of those things without repentance, and without faith, makes all of those things worthless to us. It makes God just as mad as if we’ve never done them at all.

God desires mercy and not sacrifice. What He wants from us the most isn’t our money. It isn’t our prayers. And it isn’t our church attendance. It’s our repentance. God wants us to turn away from our sins, follow His Word, and to come to Him for forgiveness and healing when we fail.

And that brings us to the second part of what these words from Jesus mean. Besides having to do with what God wants from us, which is always our repentance, the other thing that they have to do with is with what God wants for us. What God wants for us most of all, is for us to be saved. He doesn’t just want us to confess our sins, and be sorry for them, He wants us to be forgiven of them and cleansed from them too. As Jesus says so beautifully in our text today, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick… I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Our Lord did not come down from heaven in order to tell righteous looking people that they were doing a really great job on their own already, so keep up the good work. He didn’t become incarnate as a man and walk on this earth as our Great Physician, simply to tell us that we have a clean bill of health as it is. No, Jesus came to call the whole world to repentance, and then to die for the sins of the whole world too. He came to show us the real sickness that we have, which is our sinful condition, and then to bear our sins in His own body, crucifying them on a cross, so that everyone who believes in Him might be healed and saved.

The entire point of our Lord’s Ministry was for the purpose of saving sinners from their sins. The entire reason why He lived, breathed, preached, and died, was so that we, who are otherwise dead in our sins and trespasses, could have new life. Why does God want us to repent? Why does He constantly show us our sins and insist that we turn away from them? He doesn’t do it to be mean. He doesn’t do it to spoil our fun. He does it because He actually wants us to have forgiveness for them. He actually wants us to receive the cleansing that makes us whole. 

God desires mercy and not sacrifice. As the prophet Jeremiah tells us in Lamentations chapter 3, “His mercies are new every morning, they never come to an end.” There is not a day that goes by that God does not offer to us His mercy and love. There is not a sin that we commit that He is unable or unwilling to forgive. And there is not a person on this earth that He does not want to save. It wasn’t just the tax collectors that Jesus wanted to save. It was the Pharisees too. He wanted the obvious sinners, and He wanted the not so obvious ones as well. He wanted people who were secure in their sins, and He wanted people who didn’t think that they had any sins to begin with. Jesus told Matthew to come and “follow me” and that is exactly what He was doing when He told the Pharisees to go and learn what this means. Jesus was inviting everyone into His Kingdom. 

The call of God’s grace is a universal call. As the Scriptures teach us elsewhere, “God desires all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth,” and “He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.” It’s true that not everybody listens to God’s call. Not everyone cares about His invitation. Some people embrace their sins, and other people embrace their own righteousness. But that doesn’t mean that God never tried to call them. And that certainly doesn’t mean that He never wanted to save them.

Just like there are two different ways for us to understand the words, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” where one has to do with what God wants from us and the other has to do with what God wants for us, there are also two main takeaways that we should apply to ourselves this morning. On the one hand, these words from Jesus, are a clear call to repentance. If you are doing things in your life that are against God’s Word with no intention of stopping, thinking that as long as you go through the motions and act like a Christian one day a week, you’ll be fine, then think again. God will not let you into heaven just because you showed up a few times at church. He will not give you a place in His Kingdom just because you gave a few dollars in the offering plate. You can’t serve your sinful nature and also serve Jesus at the same time. Eventually, the disease of your sin will spread until it kills you.

On the other hand, these words from Jesus, are a clear invitation to receive His grace. If you are sorry for the things that you’ve done, and nervous that maybe you’ve done them one too many times in the past, then think again. Jesus is the Great Physician. He is the healer of body and soul. There is no wound that our Lord cannot mend. There is no sin that He will not forgive. No one who comes to Christ with sorrow in their heart will be turned away. No one who seeks His grace will be denied it, regardless of how much they didn’t want it before. Jesus called tax collectors and made them apostles. Jesus called thieves and made them evangelists. Jesus called sinners and made them saints.

So, go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” In Jesus’ Name. Amen.