Forgiven Much? Love Him Much

The more time you spend with people the quicker you are able to gauge what they think of you. In reality the people who you can’t read are the one’s who make you feel most uncomfortable. Jesus seldom seemed to provoke an indifferent response from people. They either loved Him or held Him in contempt.

One of the clearest pictures of this is found in Luke 7. Jesus is invited to Simon the Pharisee’s house. It was a self-serving invitation designed to draw attention to Simon and detract from Jesus. That makes it a meaningless invite and we are appalled. Yet often that is the sort of invitation we make to Jesus ourselves. We ask Him in without extending any kind of recognition or basic courtesy to Him, almost as if He exists for our benefit. Simon didn’t have someone wash Jesus feet, greet Him with a kiss or anoint His head with oil. It was a clear attempt to put Jesus in His place and revealed much about Simon’s attitude to Jesus: sidelined not central, invited but unimportant, present but not precious.

We are offended - Yet does this not describe the approach we often have towards Jesus?

The contrast that follows is clear. A woman who has encountered Jesus before wriggles her way past security, through the people standing around the table making a beeline for Jesus. Here was someone who knew who Jesus was and through Him knew her own identity. A man called Thomas Watson once said, ‘Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.'

Some bless themselves that they have a stock of knowledge, but what is knowledge good for, without repentance?’ Simon thought that He knew a lot but that knowledge meant that he missed the key thing in this whole picture- He needed Jesus. Do you know today that you need Jesus? Is how you are going to live today likely to demonstrate a reliance on Jesus?

The woman knew this- she knew that she needed Jesus. This made her do something remarkable. She brought all that she had. That alabaster jar represented her whole future, it was her most prized, precious and profitable possession. It was her hopes of marriage, her desire to be cared for, her capacity to be noticed and she took it and poured it on feet that would soon be tramping the dusty dirty streets.

Her hair and tears represented her whole heart. People watching probably thought it was the most humiliating thing they had ever seen. Humiliation is when you do something out of a stubborn ignorance; humility is when you know exactly what you are doing and carry on regardless. The woman was not ignorant to what she was doing, or who she was doing it to. She was willing to surrender her heart and honour for Jesus.

The defining worship moments in your life will be those where beauty is displayed out of your brokenness, where humility recognises who Jesus is and where you see so clearly who you are. It is displayed as you understand in light of His majesty your own poverty. It caused her to love Him much as she understood the much that she had been forgiven of- Simon didn’t get this, do you?