He entered Jericho and was passing through. There was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but he was not able because of the crowd, since he was a short man. So running ahead, he climbed up a sycamore tree to see Jesus, since He was about to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, because today I must stay at your house.”

So he quickly came down and welcomed Him joyfully. All who saw it began to complain, “He’s gone to lodge with a sinful man!”

But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, I’ll give half of my possessions to the poor, Lord! And if I have extorted anything from anyone, I’ll pay back four times as much!”

“Today salvation has come to this house,” Jesus told him, “because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:1-10)

Jesus did not worry about looking good. Jesus was concerned only with doing good: with loving his neighbor as himself. Sometimes that neighbor was a genuinely evil person, like a tax collector. A tax collector gained his job by bidding for it from the Roman government. Whoever promised the Romans the most money got the contract for the district or town. His pay came from whatever he could get above that promised amount. So tax collectors got rich by ripping off their neighbors. No one liked them. Their greed, their rapaciousness, their essential graft and legalized embezzlement branded them as sinners in the extreme.

It was such a man, and those like him, that Jesus sought out and spent most of his time with. When Jesus saw Zacchaeus in the tree, Jesus did not tell him to give up his line of work. He did not tell him to change his lifestyle or to give back the money he had stolen. And yet Zacchaeus did just that: he accepted Jesus’ invitation to lodge in his house and responded by changing his life.

And that’s the way it works for you today: you can’t have God take up residence with you without it having profound implications. You’ll never be the same afterwards, any more than Zacchaeus could be the same after having Jesus in his home. Meeting Jesus changes everything.

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