How committed are you to following Christ? Don’t just read through that question without genuinely putting your mind to task in figuring out your answer. Don’t read any further until you’ve come up with an answer that is genuine. Don’t cheat yourself to pretend you’re more committed than you are, and don’t sell yourself short. But truly analyze exactly how much of yourself you commit to following Christ.
I’m somewhat breaking from my typical Monday lyric breakdown blog post to discuss this topic because we went over it in Sunday School yesterday, and I wanted to approach it from a different way than the book we’re using did.
We started discussing with Mark 10:13-16, which says, “Some people were bringing little children to Him so He might touch them, but His disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw it, He was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to Me. Don’t stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I assure you: Whoever does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ After taking them in His arms, He laid His hands on them and blessed them.”
Often, we approach these verses from the faith perspective: You should approach God with the unquestioning, confident faith of a child. And that’s a perfectly fine way of interpreting these verses. But I also challenge you to view this through the lens of commitment.
When kids choose to do something, they rarely, if ever, do it halfway. If a kid finds a perfectly breakable vase in the house, he’ll smash it into minuscule pieces. If she scatters 10 Lego bricks, she’ll scatter 1,000. If a kid wants to be obstinate… well, there’s nothing you can do to break through the stubbornness. It’s a neat thing about children, but they don’t truly understand the concept of limiting how they apply themselves and their energy to tasks. Whereas adults tend to jog through multiple things a day, kids sprint full out through one thing until they’re exhausted.
Y’all know it’s true; I know it’s true, and I don’t even have kids. I know this idea seems out of context with those verses, but keep that idea of childish commitment in mind until the end. I promise I’m going somewhere, starting with verses 17-20.
“As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘Why do you call Me good?’ Jesus asked him. ‘No one is good but One—God. You know the commandments: Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.’ He said to Him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these from my youth.’”
Scripture lends itself here to a few ideas. Firstly, that the man was looking for affirmation of his own beliefs. He likely wasn’t looking for a real answer to apply to himself. There’s no guarantee this is the case, but Jesus telling Him the textbook Jewish answer to his question, reciting the Ten Commandments, is pretty good context.
The second, though, comes first, and it points to the fact that this rich young ruler wasn’t paying attention at all. When Jesus says, “No one is good but God,” and the man follows the Ten Commandments with, “I have kept all these,” it’s clear that he missed the point. Jesus is telling him that the affirmation he’s looking for won’t be found because the man was convinced the way to Heaven was keeping himself in the lines of the law.
Here’s where the important bit comes, and where I differ from the textbook interpretation of scripture. Verses 21-22 say, “Then, looking at him, Jesus loved him and said to him, ‘You lack one thing: Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.’ But he was stunned at this demand, and he went away grieving, because he had many possessions.”
Rightfully so, many people attribute this to greed. And I won’t deny that greed is contextually what is being referred to, as confirmed by the following verses, which you can read on your own. But even more than greed, I think Jesus is referring to selfishness, which breeds a lack of commitment. Why? Because, up until this moment, everything the man obeyed was easy for him to do because it was selfish in nature.
I think it’s important that Jesus doesn’t mention all 10 of the Ten Commandments in verse 19. He only lists six. The interesting thing about those six commandments is that they’re all designed to protect the person who abides by them. Committing any of the actions these six commandments advise against could lead to genuine real-world, legal/cultural punishment.
These are the selfish six of the Ten Commandments because living them out can only benefit the one who adheres to them. This rich young ruler followed them not because he wanted to do as God commanded but because he knew that doing so would benefit him, keep him out of trouble. He was following these laws out of pure selfishness.
We know this because he didn’t follow the commandments that were hard. He didn’t follow the first two commandments, and we know this from his reaction to Jesus’s command in verse 22. It was clear to Jesus that this man was greedy and his idol was money, so He commanded the ruler to give up his idol. He had the idol of money because he was selfish and benefited from it; it was easier to make money his first god and God his second. He wasn’t truly upset at losing the money; he was upset at having to be selfless when, his whole life, he had been selfish. He was upset that he couldn’t continue trying to serve himself and God simultaneously and make it to Heaven.
Now bring back the idea about a child’s commitment and that metaphor about jogging and full sprinting. Commitment is something that can’t be parsed out to multiple things simultaneously. You can’t commit yourself to a round of golf and a church service at the same time. Likewise, you can’t commit yourself to yourself and God at the same time.
When we talk about commitment to God, we must commit everything in a full out sprint to God, like little children, else we risk selfishly holding back parts of ourselves from Him, and that’s no way to enter the kingdom of God. He wants all of you, and He’ll settle for nothing less.