Not so different from you and me...

If I asked you to think of someone in the Bible who really wanted to be pleasing to God and who had spent his whole life seeking to obey Him, whose name would you give me? There are  many people that you might think of, but I kind of suspect that it wouldn't be the person I was reading about this morning.

However, if I asked you to think of someone in the Bible who wanted to have eternal life, but wasn't sure if he was willing to pay the price... you might think of this person immediately. I was reading this morning in Mark chapter 10, which includes the story of the rich young man.

You've probably heard more than a few sermons preached about this man, and I wonder perhaps if we don't give the poor guy a raw deal. He is so often held up as an example of someone who was not willing to "give up everything" for Jesus. (At least, we don't know if he was. At this point in the story, he went away troubled and sad about what Jesus had asked him to do. We're not told whether he thought things over and finally came to the hard decision to give up everything he had.)

We do know that he was a sincere young man, who had honestly spent his whole life seeking to obey God. It could have seemed arrogant or self-righteous when he said that, but I don't think that it was - because Jesus didn't look at him with anger or judgement, the way He related to the Pharisees. Instead, we read that Jesus looked at him with affection.

But we don't remember this young man for his godly life or for his years of faithful obedience. No, for some reason, we always seem to remember him for his sadness and his reluctance to make that supreme sacrifice that Jesus asked of him.

And yet I know that my own reaction is not so very different when faced with the prospect of sacrifice and loss. Not because I'm rich (I know I probably have very little in the eyes of the world) but because I also feel a sense of sadness when I think of losing the things that are precious to me. Last year, for example, I was invited to consider leaving Spain and moving to another part of the world. I confess that I shed tears as I considered the prospect of yet again losing my home, my team, my friends, my pets...

Maybe a key difference was that I knew from the outset that I would definitely obey and give up everything if that was what the Lord was asking of me... whereas we're left with the impression that this godly young man went away sadly, unwilling to pay the price.

As I look into my own heart, however, I see the warning: the awareness that people and things, animals and places, can so easily entwine themselves around our hearts in a way that means that our obedience will sometimes have a great cost to it.

Perhaps this was the very first time that someone had asked this young man to give up the things that mattered deeply to him. It's been said that none of us knows what idol we are worshipping until Jesus puts His finger on it and asks us to give it up. 

Those of us who have been walking with the Lord for years, even decades, have probably been there a few times. We've taken steps of obedience that called for true sacrifice; we've made personal and ministry decisions, knowing full well that they would entail losses as well as gains. We've come face to face with our own hearts at the times when wholehearted commitment only came after an intense inner struggle.

Perhaps that's why the times of grief and loss, when they do happen, help to cement our commitment to the Lord and free us from the question or the possibility that other people and things could be important enough to take His place.

So let's not judge the rich young man for his sadness; rather, let's be humbly aware of the things in our own lives that would be hard to give up if Jesus asked us to.