...and the Rich Young Ruler Walked Away

I'm gonna give you a quick update.

I'm gonna tell a couple of stories, probably hopefully in the midst of teaching as well.

Uh, but just to kind of give you a sense of where things are at for us as a church plant.

Uh, we've evolved a little bit since the last time we were here.

I think last time we were here, we were we went from no name church to soon-to-be-named church.

Well, now we have a name.

Okay, church officially has a name.

We are church 414.

Okay, so you can go on the website, church414.ca, uh, Instagram, church 414414 is a play on uh John chapter 4, verse 14, where Jesus says that he is the living water.

John 4:14

Whoever drinks this water will never thirst again.

Uh, and it's just a picture of God's heart that he has living water for everybody.

We want everybody in the city of Victoria to know Jesus.

That's why we moved down to the Fernwood neighborhood because we want to see people meet and encounter the person of Jesus.

We believe there's a lot of thirsty people in our city that need that water.

And so name has evolved.

Uh, church is growing by God's grace.

I think last time I was here, somebody was like, Are you depressed?

Are you okay?

Do we need to like call in some help?

And the answer to that was probably yes at that time.

Church is growing.

Um, we're in an interesting phase where we're like, we're not quite like like we're trying to figure out how do we launch a community of faith or a church without launching a church service as the tip of the spear for what it means to be God's people.

In other words, how do we launch disciples to live on mission?

How do we launch a community?

And so there's a lot of curiosity around that, and we're open to a lot of different possibilities.

And some of it is like, tried that, that didn't work great, trying this, this is working a little bit better.

Um, but what is happening right now or the stage we're at is like we're just trying to grow a team.

So we have a small team that's developing.

And our hope is over the course of this next year, you're gonna start to probably, if you like pay attention to social media and things like that, you'll start to see some more public events start to happen.

Uh, but really, most of the work, it's kind of like when you uh look at like a new construction build uh and you're like watching it, you're like, I know they're putting something there, but uh, and I see people working, but like there's nothing actually happening.

It's because they're digging deep and laying a foundation.

That's kind of the season we're in, where now we're starting to establish a team, we're starting to uh establish vision and values and rhythms for what it looks like uh for us to be a community.

And and it's going well.

We're we're seeing good things happen and uh we're seeing that that team grow.

And I'll say this about our team.

We are we are a young team, as I've already alluded to, full of faith, full of passion, which is great, um, willingness to like go charge kind of the next hill.

And some things we're praying for in this season is uh we're praying one that the Lord would bring some spiritual parents.

That's been a consistent mantra and prayer.

And so if you are uh keeping up with praying for us, that'd just be something you could pray about.

Like we we want to be able to launch disciples and households of faith, but you know, to send your kids out, they gotta be raised up into maturity.

And so we we just need some spiritual parents to help with that.

And so if you could pray to that end, that would be great.

Uh, and then we have like a slew of uh not yet followers of Jesus hanging around our community in many different spaces where our community shows up and in some pretty fantastical ways.

There's just been like some real openness to Jesus recently.

And so uh that's been encouraging.

And if you could just pray, I mean, like, you know, uh you just heard in that text there, like it takes a work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate a heart and a mind.

And so if you could just pray that Jesus would break through, he'd save some people.

We're super, super encouraged by that.

And so I just want to say thank you.

Thank you for your support, thank you for your prayers.

Uh, there's been, yeah, just just numerous ways in which we've been blessed by uh the West Village family and want you to feel like the work that is happening in the core of our city is very much an extension of the fruit and the work here.

So thank you for that.

So if you have a Bible, let's uh let's jump into this text.

We are in uh Mark chapter 10.

Mark 10 · chapter mention

And uh the text that we're gonna look at specifically today is kind of nested in this larger uh context or this larger section in in Mark's gospel.

And um, and Jesus is teaching on what it looks like to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

How does one enter the kingdom?

Last week Andrew Johnson preached uh verses 13, 14, 15, and 16.

And I listened to that, did a great job.

But what you notice is there's this theme in that text and in this text where Jesus is consistently coming back to this question how does one enter into the kingdom?

He brings it up four times in these verses, in this whole set of verses.

And if you're an attentive Bible reader, then you should be probably thinking to yourself, well, if Jesus mentions this four times, I should be, I should be paying attention because Jesus wants to say something to me about this.

But in the verses we're gonna look at specifically this morning, verses 17 to 31, uh Jesus is going to do something very intentional.

Okay, he's gonna contrast this encounter that he has with this, with this man, when, and we'll we'll get to this in a moment, but he's known as the rich young ruler with the interaction that he had with the disciples around the little children from last week.

And really, this this device of contrast is a way for Jesus to give us a warning.

What he's trying to do in this text is he's trying to provoke us to be aware of something significant that can keep us out of the kingdom of heaven.

Many of us think of wealth as privilege.

And to be to be fair, it is.

It's a privilege to be wealthy.

It advantages you in many ways.

You're able to go to the school you want to, you're able to take the vacations you want to, you're able to afford uh the food you want to buy, the luxuries of life you want to buy.

Functionally, there aren't a lot of needs, like there aren't a lot of practical needs when we have wealth.

It's an advantage.

We look at it, most of us, I can't imagine too many of us are like, man, I wish I had less money.

I wish my boss would reduce my salary.

I've never, I've never heard that.

It's never, never been a thing.

But yet, what we see in this text, Jesus' warning to us, is that when it comes to the kingdom of heaven, wealth is not an advantage.

It's actually a disadvantage.

You'll notice, you you heard it in the text, spoiler alert.

But this man encounters Jesus, he asks, What must I do to inherit the kingdom of heaven?

Jesus says, just get rid of all your property and possessions, and we're told he went away sad or grieved because he couldn't do it.

And so there's something here for us to pay attention to, that wealth, privilege, prestige, they're not an advantage.

The things that we often strive for and want more than anything else are often not advantages, but rather disadvantages to us encountering the person and the presence of Jesus.

So the question that should be on the front of our minds in light of this text is simply this: how do we avoid this fate?

How is it then that we avoid this fate?

So I want to what I want to do is give us four reasons.

Uh, there's probably more, but I'm gonna give us four reasons why I think this man in this text went away sad from Jesus.

And what I'm hoping for us is that you know, we can avoid his fate, but also these will serve as an encouragement and also a warning to us.

So the so the first reason is this.

The first reason this man went away sad was because he actually encountered the real Jesus.

So we see this in verse 17.

If you have a Bible, it says this as Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him.

Good teacher, he asked, What must I do to inherit eternal life?

We know this from the other uh gospel accounts of this story, but but this man was wealthy, he was religious, he was an influential man, he was a person of prestige, he was a person of honor by all accounts.

Um, if you were to look at somebody that you would imagine Jesus would want as one of his followers, this would be the man.

And this man had heard of Jesus, he had seen him performing miracles, heard his teaching, he was aware of Jesus' uh ministry, and there's this growing awareness of the uniqueness of Jesus.

And this man runs towards Jesus because he wants to ask him a question.

He asked a very specific question.

What must I do to inherit eternal life?

Now we'll come back to the significance of that question in just a moment, but but what I'm wanting you to see is that that this man understood that there was something unique about Jesus.

There's a reason he went to Jesus with this specific question.

Like there was an awareness that Jesus was different.

Now, now it seems obvious to us, probably, what I'm about to say, but but I think it's actually really important.

And so I'm just gonna say it super plain, and then you can say that is the least profound thing I have ever heard from the stage in a church gathering in my entire life, but I'm gonna say it anyway.

Jesus is a person.

Not very profound.

He's a person.

This man found himself on his knees, not before an idea, not before a religion, not before a set of theological truths or isms, but before a person.

Now, why is this important?

Because many of us have reduced Jesus down to a thought or down to a way of life or down to a set of theological precepts, or down to some concepts, or down to some ethics, but he is not those things, or at least not merely those things.

He is indeed a person.

He's separate or distinct from all other worldviews, all other ideologies, all other concepts of what it actually means to experience transcendence and to be a human.

And as such, like any personal relationship, to embrace a person requires so much more of us than does embracing a philosophy, a religion, or an idea.

Anyone who's married understands this.

Because to embrace a person means to give your whole self to them.

Religion, theology, ethics, worldviews, these require external conformity, can be challenging from time to time.

But to knit your heart to a person requires that you give all of yourself to them, and it is different.

But it's also more beautiful.

Because when when we knit our heart to a person, we actually get to experience the benefit of relationship.

And if Jesus is not just a set of ideas and he's not just a set of concepts, he's actually a person, then when we have relationship with Jesus, we get to experience his love, his kindness, his mercy, his grace, his hope.

And no idea, no philosophy can actually offer us that.

It's impossible.

Um I'll just share one quick story of something that happened a couple of weeks ago, and I'll change the names for anonymity.

But this is uh what we'll call this person Megan.

I was at a call, I was at a coffee shop with little June at the end of my street.

I was having a conversation with another believer, and we were we were talking about Jesus, and this um this gal walks up to us and she's um she's extremely uh like sheepish and sort of like cautious, and um, and she comes over and she's like, excuse me.

She said, Are are you guys Christians?

Yeah, we're Christians.

She said, Oh, um, she said, This is gonna sound very strange.

My um uh, but I but I think I'm supposed to find Jesus and I don't know where to go.

Can you help me?

And so we swapped phone numbers the next morning.

We had coffee, and I listened to her story, and it's it's a long story, but the crux of what I'm getting at is this.

She said, My whole life, I uh, you know, very interested in religion, very interested in spirituality, studied all the religions, all the different philosophies.

They were great.

But then when life got very hard, complicated, she had a bunch of things happen to her that she described to me.

She said, She's like, it's like those things were helpful, but they just they couldn't like, they couldn't make it better.

She's like, I don't know, I don't know what to say.

And she said, then I got this, she said, I had this visitation where an angel told me that I was supposed to find Jesus and now here I am, and I and I don't know why.

And I said, Well, I know why.

And she said, Well, can you tell me why?

I said, Yeah.

I said, Because Jesus is a person.

He's not just an idea, he's not just a philosophy, he's not just a religion, and he can actually comfort you in the midst of your pain and your hardship.

An idea can't do that, but a person can.

Jesus is so much more than an idea or a concept.

And we had a great conversation, and she's actually coming to our house today.

We're doing a six-hour uh story of God session this afternoon, and she's coming to participate in that, which is super cool.

And yeah, there's some other things I could share about that, but but the reason I say that is because some of us in our minds, we've reduced Jesus down to just an idea.

And the reality is he's not just an idea, he's actually a person.

And when it comes to encountering a person, when it comes to encountering the person of Jesus, there's really only two authentic responses.

There's the response of my friend, who was like, tears, yes, I want more.

And then there's the response of this man, which was tears, yes, I want nothing to do with this, and walk away.

The idea is we can just kind of keep them out here, but when it when it's a person, we have to wrestle with them.

And this man wrestled with the person of Jesus, and he said, No, thank you.

And that should serve as a warning to us because the person of Jesus wants us to have relationship with him.

The second reason this man went away sad was this.

Jesus deconstructed his religious assumption.

So this man comes before Jesus.

He asks in verse 17, he says, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus responds with, Why do you call me good?

No one is good except God alone.

You know the commandments.

You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your and honor your father and mother.

Teacher, he declared, all these I have kept since I was a boy.

So this man comes before Jesus.

He asks the question, what must I do to inherit eternal life, or what must I do to enter into the kingdom of heaven?

And let me just make, let me just make one comment here.

I actually, I think we can sometimes tell ourselves something that might not be true, which is most people in our city are not actually asking like existential spiritual questions.

And I just want to say to you right now, that's not true.

I think the question that that this man is coming and bringing before Jesus is a question that burns on the heart of every single human being that has ever lived.

Like the Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes that God has written eternity on our hearts.

And I think the people in our city are hungry, like in a post-truth, post-secular, post-Christian world, people are like left going, well, what's left?

What is the meaning of life?

I'll share one more quick story here.

Um, I'll change names again.

Uh, we we go to the Monday meal at uh the Fernwood uh Community Center.

It's it's like think church potluck, but for non-Christians.

Okay, so we go there just to meet people.

It's great, it's a great place to meet our friends and neighbors and have interesting conversations, very interesting conversations, depending on where you sit, and sometimes some very interesting meals.

Um you learn to love tofu when you live down in Fernwood or just not eat.

Uh intermittent fasting all of a sudden is like my new favorite thing.

Um, but young this guy comes up to me, let's call him Jim.

Jim comes up to me, he says, Hey, is your name Chris?

So, yes, my name's Chris.

He said, Hey, I heard you're starting a church.

Is that true?

Which in Fernwood could go either way, it could be really good, it could be really bad.

So I'm like, uh I'm like, yes, starting a church.

And basically what he says to me is this he said, I've grown up my whole life, uh, and I have not considered religion or God.

And I realize now I have three young kids.

I realize the world I'm growing up in is different than the world, uh, sorry, the world that my kids are growing up in is different than the world that I grew up in.

And um, and I realize I need to think about these things.

Never thought about them before.

It's like I've been watching you and your family, and I can tell you guys like seem like good people.

He's like, he's like, can you can you teach me the Bible?

This is like in, you know, Fernwood, which is like, you know, I don't know, the dragon's layer of like, you know, it's the graveyard of churches.

It's like the one of the most secular neighborhoods in all of Canada.

And here, this guy's like, I want to know more about Jesus and I want to want to know more about the Bible.

He's been coming to our Sunday evening gatherings.

Him and I meet Thursday nights after he puts his kids to bed at the Fernwood Inn.

We have a drink and we read the Bible together.

And like just the other day, we were reading.

Uh, I was just telling somebody before I got up here to preach, we're reading the story where Jesus calls the disciples to drop their nets and follow him.

And we read that story.

And I said, Hey, um, what do you think Jesus is saying to you from this story?

Like, what do you think he's asking of you?

And he said, Well, he said, I think he's asking me to drop my nets and follow him.

Like, I think you're right.

So I'm like waiting for the other shit.

Like, so what are you gonna do about it?

Which is actually the next question I asked.

He's like, Well, I think right now what that means for me is I need to stay on this journey with you.

Uh, keep asking these questions and keep studying the Bible together, reading these stories of Jesus together.

He will also be at our house this afternoon for a six-hour story of God.

And so you can just be praying because the Lord's at work.

And the whole point of sharing that story is one to encourage you that Jesus is at work in our city, but two to encourage you that there are many who are asking this question.

And so this man comes before Jesus and he says, What must I do to inherit eternal life?

And Jesus says, Well, it's really simple.

I'm gonna give you a bunch of rules to keep, which are basically the second half of the Ten Commandments.

Do this.

That's it.

Just keep these commands and you can inherit eternal life.

And the man's response to Jesus is curious.

It's curious.

And it's a bit of a tell for where his heart's posture is because he hears from Jesus that all I have to do is keep the second half of the Ten Commandments so I can inherit inherit eternal life.

And he doesn't say, wow, that's a lot.

I don't know if I could keep, I don't know if I could do that.

He says, No problem, check, been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I'm good to go.

Let me in, Jesus.

Let me in.

Now there's two assumptions in this man's approach to Jesus that I want to pull out.

The first one is this this man assumed that following Jesus was something that he had to add to his life.

It's baked right into the question: what must I do?

In other words, he comes to Jesus and he says, Listen, Jesus, here's the deal.

I've already done a lot.

Like I'm kind of in the top 1% of like awesome people in the world.

So, like, is there anything else I need to do?

Because I've already done so much.

Like, is there anything else that I need to do to inherit eternal life?

He shows up to Jesus, shows him his resume, and he's like, you should probably hire me on the spot.

You're you're kind of lucky to have me on your team.

And we hear that and we're like, nah, that's not really how the gospel works.

But the reality is for many of us, that is how we view Jesus, both in the church and in the culture.

It's pervasive.

We're good people, we're moral people.

In our culture and context, the moment we find ourselves in, there really is not a category for this idea of sin.

And when you stack on top of that, the reality that we live in, probably the most affluent, wealthy time in human history, and one of the most wealthy and affluent cities in North America, possibly the world, we really have no sense of our own neediness.

There's no sense that we need Jesus.

We've already accomplished so much.

So it stands to reason then that we could probably accomplish the eternal life question, too.

Like I'm good.

I need nothing.

Now remember, Jesus is comparing this encounter with the one that Andrew Johnson talked about last week.

And last week, Jesus says, anyone who will not receive the kingdom like a little child will never enter it.

Children are needy.

Needy little suckers.

But do you know what is true of neediness?

Needy children.

They're willing to receive.

They're willing to receive.

This man is not needy.

He's not needy.

He thinks I made it.

This far, I can probably make it to heaven as well.

Should serve as a warning for us.

Second assumption that this man brings that Jesus dismantles is that following Jesus is something I do.

So it's something I add to, but it's also something that I do.

Again, notice the encounter here, Jesus quotes the second half of the commandments.

These are sort of the, they call this the second table, like the relational commandments.

And we've, as we've already said, this man believes that he has kept them all.

But this man is equating external obedience with righteousness.

So he obviously, while he was familiar with Jesus, must not have been around when Jesus taught on the Sermon on the Mount.

Because in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn't speak merely about our external obedience.

He speaks to the disposition of the heart, right?

He says things like, uh, maybe you haven't actually killed anyone, but if you've ever had anger in your heart, then you basically wanted to kill them, and that's really just as bad.

Maybe you haven't committed adultery, but you've ever, but if you've ever fantasized about another person, then really you have committed adultery in your heart, and that is just as bad.

And here is the danger and the warning for us.

This man was not even aware of what was going on in his own heart.

Religion, modern spirituality, and really the spirit of the age tends to take a horizontal ruler and compare our hearts to the hearts of others.

And we have a unique way of grading on a curve when we do that.

And saying, I'm I'm glad I'm not as bad as that person.

I must be doing okay.

Unfortunately, that's like almost a direct quote from the Pharisees.

Thank God you didn't make me like that sinner.

But in the kingdom, Jesus does it differently.

He takes out a ruler and he measures vertically and he compares us to God.

I mean, this is what happens here, right?

This man comes before Jesus and he says, good teacher.

And Jesus says, Why do you call me good?

No one's good except God alone.

And then he proceeds to give him a list of commandments that he could never live up to.

And the guy says, Yeah, I've done that already.

Like he's completely oblivious.

And the truth is that salvation isn't found in outward obedience or praying a prayer or believing a set of theological facts or data.

Don't miss this.

It's about having an encounter with the person of Jesus, being humbled by our own recognition of need, and then being able to receive the gift of eternal life that he grants to us.

That's it.

That's it.

The third reason is this.

This man went away sad, it's because Jesus gets personal.

Says this in verse 21.

Jesus looked at him.

And notice what it says: looked at him and loved him.

And he says this there's one thing you lack.

He said, Go sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.

Then you can come and follow me.

So Jesus stops, he looks at the man, he sees him.

Like it's probably hard to put ourselves in the position of Jesus in this moment, but like he's probably thinking, Oh my gosh, bro, you don't get it.

And he looks at him and still has compassion in his heart and expresses love.

Now, it's probably wise and helpful to acknowledge here for a minute that love can show up in many different ways.

We see this all through Jesus' ministry, where he loves people well, right?

I'm thinking of Mark chapter five, where the woman with uh the issue of blood comes and touches the hem of the garment of Jesus and he speaks to her daughter, the thing that she probably longed to hear more than anything else, that she was loved and accepted.

Or he goes before lepers who are the unclean and the ones who could not be touched, and he's willing, the clean one, willing to touch the unclean, knowing that they needed that more than anything, just to feel the embrace of a person like Jesus loves and it shows up in so many ways.

But here, in the exact same way, it just shows up differently.

Jesus is expressing love.

He sees into this man's heart and he is very specific and very personal in how he approaches him.

Jesus is always motivated by love.

Notice what he says to this man, the man who thinks he lacks nothing.

There's still one thing you lack.

If Jesus was gobsmacked by the man's response, I've been doing all of these things since day one, imagine how gobsmacked this man was to discover that he actually lacks something.

He's probably thinking, okay, maybe this Jesus guy isn't all he's cracked up to be.

He's supposed to know all, see all, be able to do all.

That's why I came to him with this big and uh eternal life question.

He doesn't get it.

I lack nothing.

There's nothing I lack.

Why would he have that kind of response or posture towards Jesus?

Well, it's because it's hard to show up with our whole selves and our whole hearts.

It's hard to be vulnerable, it's hard to recognize that we have need.

And so this guy wants to take the spiritual stuff and keep it as theory, theology, philosophy, keep it out here.

Because once it gets into here, it gets kind of ugly and messy and personal.

And he would way rather talk out here.

But Jesus is interested because he's a person in our hearts, and look at what he says next.

He says, Go sell everything.

Go sell everything, give it to the poor, and then you'll have treasure in heaven.

Then you can come and follow me.

Why would Jesus say this to the man?

Is it because he has to sell everything in order to inherit eternal life?

Like, is that a requirement?

Is Jesus making some kind of pitch here for some sort of monastic life where we're like desert fathers who have no property and possessions?

Obviously not.

There's many examples where he where he actually blesses people for their wealth or tells them they only have to, like Zacchaeus, the tax collector, for example, you don't have to give away half your wealth.

Like, there's just this is not this is not a prescriptive verse where we now have to put into practice in our life.

But Jesus is putting his finger on something very, very specific.

In Matthew chapter 22, verses 34 to 40, Jesus summarizes the law like this.

Matthew 22:34–40

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together, one of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law?

Keeping in mind there's like 613 commandments in the law.

So they're trying to get Jesus, kind of trying to trap him.

He replied with this, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

This is the first and greatest commandment.

The second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.

All the law and the prophets hang on this commandment.

Now keep in mind here, back to Mark chapter 10, Jesus has quoted the second half of the Ten Commandments.

Mark 10 · chapter mention

And if you go to Matthew's uh iteration of this story, he actually includes all five of them.

And what we're what we're seeing here is this man has claimed to Jesus that he's actually kept the law.

Jesus, I have kept the law, I am righteous.

And what Jesus is doing here is he's raising the stakes or upping the ante, if you will.

Because the first commandment in the Ten Commandments is what?

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall worship nothing, love nothing more than you love me.

And so what is Jesus doing here?

Well, he's putting that to the test.

As an act of compassion, as an act of love, he's he's trying in the most kind way to reveal to this man who thinks he's kept the law, that he has not kept the most basic tenant of the law, which is to love God more than anything else.

He's trying to hold up a mirror in front of him to say the thing that you have put all of your hopes and all of your dreams in, your wealth, your substantialness, your your status, your your privilege, your prestige, just walk away from it.

Just walk away.

You can have me.

This isn't a comment on his religious obedience or his ability to keep the commandments.

It's a comment about what he truly loves.

What do you truly love?

The early church father Augustine coined this phrase disordered loves when talking about Christian discipleship.

And Tim Keller, writing about Augustine in his book, Making Sense of God, wrote this.

At age 19, Augustine Aurelius, later to be known as Augustine of Hippo, read a dialogue by the Roman philosopher Cicero, in which Cicero stated that every person sets out to be happy, but the majority are thoroughly wretched.

Truly, no one dreams as a child of one day growing up to be miserable, and yet many people's lives are characterized by conflict, frustration, and unfulfilled longings.

Augustine set out to discover why it was that most people are discontent in life.

His conclusion was that for the most part our lives are out of order.

We have disordered loves.

Augustine was convinced that what defines a person more than anything is what they love.

He said that when he asked if someone is a good person, what we are asking is not what they believe or what they hope for, but rather what they love.

He stated that what we consider human virtues, examples like courage or honesty are essentially forms of love.

Courage is not loving your neighbor's well-being more than your own safety.

Honesty is loving someone enough to tell them the truth, even if it may put them at a disadvantage.

Sin, Augustine said, is ultimately a lack of love, either for God or for your neighbor.

He famously stated that the essence of sin is disordered love.

And then this disordered love means that we often love less important things more and more important things less than we ought to.

And this wrong priority prioritization leads to unhappiness and disorder in our lives.

Disordered loves means that we often love less important things more and more important things less than we ought to.

What Jesus is saying is that this isn't about your money.

This is about what you love.

And you love the wrong thing more than you ought.

And you don't love the right thing as much as you should.

Why?

Because he had great wealth.

He was willing to trade a great Jesus for great wealth.

Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

What must I do to enjoy the goodness that comes with the kingdom of heaven?

Infinite love, infinite grace, infinite mercy, all the riches that you have to offer.

What must I do?

Jesus is like, oh, it's easy.

Sell everything.

And then you get to have it.

He's like, I don't want to do that.

She's like, well, I thought you said you wanted that more than anything.

I do.

Well then sell it.

I can't.

I love it too much.

I love it too much.

And so the question for us then is what do we what do we really love?

What is it that we really love?

See, this isn't really a story about money.

This is a story about what we treasure.

What we value more than anything else.

What is what is the one thing that we love more than anything?

And Jesus' invitation is to make that him.

I'm gonna invite the band to come up and I'll close with the fourth reason this man goes away sad.

It's because he lacks the understanding of true treasure.

This man did not understand that Jesus is the truest treasure.

I won't read the verses just for the sake of time, but down in verse 30, Jesus tells his disciples after they see this man go away, and they're like, they're dumbfounded.

They're like, wow, this guy was really good.

If he can't get saved, how's any how are any of us gonna get saved?

And Jesus responds and he says, Well, you know, if you would just walk away from all these things, you will receive a hundred times more in in the age to come.

Like there's there's more for you in heaven than there are the things that you are being invited to walk away from.

Jesus is saying, Yes, you're gonna have to give up a lot, but there's a gift here that surpasses anything else.

What's the treasure?

Well, it's Jesus.

Jesus and his kingdom is the treasure.

Uh, in Matthew's gospel, I believe it's in Matthew's gospel, Jesus tells this parable where he says, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field.

A man discovers it, he goes home and he sells everything he has to buy the field.

It's like the anti-Mark 10, right?

It's the parable that is the complete opposite of this.

And the reason the man was willing to sell everything, and Jesus says, I believe in Matthew 19, I don't have it in front of me, but believe he says, with joy, he sold it all.

Because the treasure was greater than anything he could have ever conceived of or hoped to have had.

He was staring Jesus in the eyes, the person of Jesus in the eyes.

He couldn't do it.

Couldn't do it.

It begs the question, right?

I mean, the disciples, the disciples asked this question.

They said to each other, who then can be saved?

Like if this guy's staring Jesus in the face and walked away, what hope do we have?

Jesus responds with this.

With man, this is impossible, but not with God.

With God, all things are possible.

See, what's beautiful about this story is not just that we realize that Jesus is the ultimate treasure, but we realize that we are Jesus' ultimate treasure as well.

He loves us so much, he cares about us so much that he's willing to reveal to us our neediness, and then he's willing to do something that no other idea, no other ethic, no other philosophy, no other religion teaches or even has the ability to conceive of.

The apostle Paul says it like this He who was rich became poor for your sake, so that you who are poor might become rich.

The God of the universe enters into the flesh, becomes a living, breathing person, and divests himself of all heavenly riches that he is endowed.

Goes to the cross, dies in our place for our sins, gives up his life, becomes poor in every way, physically, spiritually, every single way.

He was impoverished, and then says, I have a gift I want to give you who are poor and could never achieve the thing that you need.

And the question for us is are our hands too full to receive it?

Can we receive the gift?

Can we be like little children, or will we walk away sad?

Will we walk away sad?

Let me pray for us.

Father, thank you.

Father, thank you for your mercy and your grace.

You give so much grace.

You invite us to do the thing that we cannot do, but then you give us the power, the power and the grace to do it.

Speak to our hearts.

Make our hearts soft, able to receive your love, able to receive your mercy for your grace, for your glory, and for our good, Lord Jesus.

Pray in your name.

Amen.