What Kind of Company Do We Keep?

Chew on these quotes from Philip Yancey. They raise issues that I have been struggling with for a year or so. I am embarrassed that I had so missed Jesus that I have not struggled with them for decades:

". . . the Christian church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most suspicious of Jesus on earth. What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus' day? Why don't sinners like being around us?"

"Somehow we have created a community of respectability in the church. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?"

"What was Jesus' secret that we have lost? 'You can know a person by the company he keeps,' the proverb goes."

"You can know a person by the company he keeps." That one haunts me (Rick Ross). We usually use that proverb in a negative way. But what does that it reveal about Jesus? Chew on that one today.