Dinner With JesusSample

Dine with Your Enemies

If you decided to have dinner with a loan shark, how would your friends and family react?

In Jesus’ time, tax collectors were viewed in the same way our present-day society disdains businesses that prey on the poor. Tax collectors were Jews who were taking advantage of their own people by collecting Rome’s taxes plus a surcharge to line their own pockets (Luke 19:8). They were considered outsiders—enemies on the same level as the Romans.

Levi was a tax collector. And yet Jesus sought him with one purpose in mind: to join his table. 

“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” (Luke 5:27, NLT). Jesus wanted this man—this enemy of the people—to be saved. By accepting the invitation, Levi became one of Jesus’ disciples. You know him as Matthew, who wrote the first Gospel of the New Testament. 

Before we came to Christ, each of us was an enemy of God (Rom. 5:10). But God loved us so much that He not only wanted to make us friends—He also wanted to make us family (Eph. 1:5). Look around you for those who’ve never known or have become estranged from their Creator, especially those who’ve been vilified as enemies. Look at their potential in Jesus and invite them to come home. 

1. Do you know any “enemies” that need to hear about Jesus through you?
2. Pray for someone who rubs you the wrong way—could God be calling you to examine your heart and see that person as He does?
3. Ask God to give you the courage to reach out to someone that society has rejected.

After over 200 years of feuding as enemies, the Bible brought two communities in Ghana back together. Read “A Story of Restoration” at wycliffe.org/feast.