Everybody, what is going on? You know what time it is. You're listening to join the Journey podcast with your host, Emma, daughter.

Thanks for joining. Did you know Jesus never told us to ask him into our hearts? The things we as Christians pick up culturally are really interesting. Mark shared some great thoughts about this in today's Devo.

Jesus simply says, follow me. You can check out today's devotional by visiting join the journey.com. But I want to

spend our time together talking about the author of Matthew, which is Matthew, because we meet him in

today's chapter, Matthew 9. Chapter 9 begins by telling us Jesus came to his own city, a place called

Copernum. Now, in the book of Luke, we learned that Jesus was driven from his original hometown,

Nazareth, by the religious officials. And so it seems as though Copernum is the city Jesus

selected to be his new home after that happened.

Copernum was full of a lot of people who saw Jesus perform miracles, but still refused to believe.

And it's as Jesus is leaving Copernum, Chapter 9, verse 9, that he, on his way out of town, meets Matthew, a tax collector.

The tax office would have been near the border

between territories, so it'd make sense that Jesus would pass Matthew on his way out of town.

Matthew's booth, though, in particular, it would have been incredibly lucrative based off its location.

And you should also know that the Jews hated tax collectors. That's really important.

Tax collectors had a reputation for being corrupt and deceiving their fellow countrymen in order to gain more money.

I mean, people would view tax collectors as they would a robber, because that's what tax collectors did.

They took money from the people by ripping them off.

They robbed them. They charged more for taxes than they should have. And Matthew was a tax collector.

But that's the beautiful part of the story. Matthew was a despised tax collector, and Jesus stopped

on his way out of town and invited Matthew to follow him. Jesus doesn't allow society's

perception of an individual to disqualify that person from his service. Matthew was extended an

invitation to follow Jesus, and he accepted it. But with his poor reputation as a tax collector,

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