Christianish: What If We're Not Really Following Jesus at All? by Mark Steele

Author:Mark Steele [Steele, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Spiritual Walk, Lukewarm
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2013-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE PAINFUL GIVE

Our current cultural state most resembles the moment in Matthew chapter 19 when a young man who had everything came to Jesus and asked what it would take to have eternal life. Christ told the man to obey the commandments. When the man inquired as to which ones, Jesus answered …

“Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

The man, feeling pretty good about himself at that point, told Jesus that he had kept all of those commandments. What was there left that he had not done? That’s when Jesus dropped the bomb:

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

And the young man went away sad, because he had great wealth. Yeah. He got served. That’s when Jesus told His disciples that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

We’ve all heard this story before and it has been utilized often to paint a picture for both philanthropic giving and living an open-handed life, both of which are important pursuits. But there is a more subtle truth here as well.

Yes, Jesus harped specifically on earthly wealth with this young man, but one of the reasons this was certainly the approach was because earthly wealth was what this young man actually had. Earthly wealth was his point of strength and value and confidence. When the beggars came to Jesus, He didn’t drop the same gauntlet. He didn’t ask them to sell their few meager belongings and follow Him. Jesus always asked for the painful give. From a blind man, Christ required faith. From a prostitute, Christ valued innocent and untainted affection like tears on His feet. From Pharisees, He required an abandonment of their hypocrisy, and from the disciples (the ones who thought they knew the most about Jesus and were closest to Him)—from them, Jesus required a move to the back of the line. In Mark chapter 9, as the disciples rattled on, arguing endlessly about which of them was the greatest in Christ’s eyes, Jesus’ response to them was this:

If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.

We certainly don’t perceive that we go about in modern culture with an attitude of “which of us is the greatest,” but the reality is that we do. We are not more immune to that temptation than those who walked daily with Jesus Himself. The truth is, we serve Jesus with very little openness to how He might mess with our perception of Him. Instead we lock in our opinion and daily chase that opinion, with very little love for those who oppose, and very little malleability to allow Jesus to upend our thinking. We reach a point in our Christian walk where it would be too embarrassing to discover we were wrong about some detail.

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