The Tragedy of The Rich Man - Part 1

Matthew 19:16-28 (The Message)

¹⁶Another day, a man stopped Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

¹⁷Jesus said, "Why do you question me about what's good? God is the One who is good. If you want to enter the life of God, just do what he tells you."

^18-19The man asked, "What in particular?"

Jesus said, "Don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as you do yourself."

²⁰The young man said, "I've done all that. What's left?"

The rich young man was obviously very religious. All the basic commandments, he had kept! That says a lot considering that God Himself says, "All have sinned, and fall short of the Glory of God." And yet, Jesus doesn't call him a liar! But the Achilles' heel to Christians is that we can get so caught up in the "don'ts" of sin that we fail to do the "do's" - and thus we are sinning! The Bible is not all about the "don'ts", Jesus gave us a lot of "do's"; love one another, forgive one another, pray, share, serve... etc... and NOT doing what Jesus asked us to do is as much disobedience as keeping from the things He doesn't want us to do!

Point in case: If I tell Anakin to clean his room, and he doesn't, isn't it disobedience? And isn't disobedience sin? So when The Rich Young Man tells him "all these I have kept", he isn't lying, and Jesus doesn't need to point that out... but yet, there was something painfully missing, wasn't there? Apparently, being religious wasn't enough because he was still seeking eternal life. He did not have it.

The end result of this lifestyle can be described as the difference between an animal in the wild or in a zoo. The Animal in the zoo can do everything it's supposed to, eat like he is supposed to, sit in a pen that looks like what his home would look like. Yet you and I both know that what we are looking at is ... not a third of what that animal really IS, what it is capable of, what it was created for!

"I wonder if the church does to Christians what the zoos do to animals? We take the danger, the risk out of being a Christian and we just want to make everyone comfortable... We forget that Christ didn't save us to take away the danger from us: He saved us to make us dangerous to the Enemy!" - Mark Batterson

We forget that when we build disciples solely on the basis of staying away from sins of commission (don't steal, don't kill, don't commit adultery...), and we blatantly ignore the sins of OMISSION (forgive, love, share, evangelize... or actually, NOT doing these things), we have clipped the wings of believers to fly on the winds of the Holy Spirit as God intended! After all, are we saved ONLY to stop doing things that are wrong? And would that mean that everything we are now doing is right? Not necessarily!

Fortunately, like the Rich Man, even if we ask Jesus the wrong question, He will always give us the right answer!