Immerse: Messiah - Flipbook - Page 28
16
IMMERSE
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MESSIAH
5:27–6:7
wonder and awe, and they praised God, exclaiming, “We have seen amazing things today!”
Later, as Jesus left the town, he saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at his
tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be my disciple,” Jesus said to him. So
Levi got up, left everything, and followed him.
Later, Levi held a banquet in his home with Jesus as the guest of honor.
Many of Levi’s fellow tax collectors and other guests also ate with them.
But the Pharisees and their teachers of religious law complained bitterly to
Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with such scum?”
Jesus answered them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people
do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those
who know they are sinners and need to repent.”
One day some people said to Jesus, “John the Baptist’s disciples fast and
pray regularly, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees. Why are your disciples always eating and drinking?”
Jesus responded, “Do wedding guests fast while celebrating with the
groom? Of course not. But someday the groom will be taken away from
them, and then they will fast.”
Then Jesus gave them this illustration: “No one tears a piece of cloth
from a new garment and uses it to patch an old garment. For then the new
garment would be ruined, and the new patch wouldn’t even match the
old garment.
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the new wine would
burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine
must be stored in new wineskins. But no one who drinks the old wine
seems to want the new wine. ‘The old is just fine,’ they say.”
One Sabbath day as Jesus was walking through some grainfields, his disciples broke off heads of grain, rubbed off the husks in their hands, and
ate the grain. But some Pharisees said, “Why are you breaking the law by
harvesting grain on the Sabbath?”
Jesus replied, “Haven’t you read in the Scriptures what David did when
he and his companions were hungry? He went into the house of God and
broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests can
eat. He also gave some to his companions.” And Jesus added, “The Son of
Man is Lord, even over the Sabbath.”
On another Sabbath day, a man with a deformed right hand was in the
synagogue while Jesus was teaching. The teachers of religious law and the
