13 Why Do You Call Me Good? (Mark 10:17-31)

Speaker: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. This is the 13th lesson in the series titled Questions Jesus Asked. Today we are going to talk about being good and just how good we are. Our questions today are why do you call me good? And what must a rich man do to enter into the kingdom of heaven? Mark chapter 10, verses 17 through 31. Krisan Marotta: When my kids were in elementary school, they attended Covenant. And at the time, Covenant had this award that they gave out every other week. It was called Fruit of the Spirit. Or maybe they gave it out once a month. Do they still do that? They still give that award? Okay. Well, it was a really big deal. And it was just in the the elementary grades, and they would give the award out at this whole lower school assembly, and the chosen child would be called up front and presented with the award. And usually their parents would be notified in advance that they were going to get the award so their parents could be there. And if they had older siblings, they were excused from their classes to come see this child get the award. And then a teacher and maybe a couple of their classmates, uh child's classmates, would tell stories about the winner, usually how they were caught serving or in some act of kindness or displaying the fruits of the spirit. Neither of my children ever won. But we we carpooled with a family who had a boy the same age as my son Brendan, and then a girl the same age as my daughter Megan. And one day we were picking up the carpool, and the girl, I'll just call her Sarah, she pulls open the van door and very it's just this glowing face, she says, Guess what, Mrs. Marotta? I won the Fruit of the Spirit Award at school today. So I, you know, congratulate her as all the four kids were piling in the car, and of course they're jostling for the prime seats, you know. And so Sarah's brother says, Sarah, could you please move so that I could sit next to Brendan, who's my son, to which Sarah turned around and goes, No way, creep. Okay, so the fruit of the spirit. We are so today we're gonna talk about being good and just how good we are. And somehow that I should tell you she is a wonderful child now. She's in freshman in college and uh just a lovely girl. Um so I don't but you know, she was elementary school then. Okay, so we have been studying the questions Jesus asked, and we're looking at the book of Mark, and the focus today, we're gonna look at the passage of the rich young ruler, which is probably a familiar passage to you. And the question is, why do you call me good? So, uh turn to Mark chapter 10. We're gonna basically pick up where we left off last week. So we're gonna start in Mark 10, we're gonna start in verse 17, and we'll go to verse 31. But we're gonna take 17 to 22 at the moment. So Mark 10, 17, and as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 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. And he said to him, Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth. And Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, You lack one thing, go and sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me. Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. We're going to stop there and we'll look at the rest in a minute. But Matthew 19, 20 adds the detail that this man was young, and Luke 18, when he tells a story in Luke 18, he tells us that this man was from the ruling class. So he had all these advantages, and yet he wants something more. And basically he comes to Jesus with great enthusiasm and says, What must I do to inherit eternal life? And essentially the answer Jesus gives him is what you must do is impossible. You cannot do anything to gain eternal life. But he gets there in a teaching way. He doesn't just come out and give him that answer. So he says, Keep the commandments, and he gives him an assortment of the commandments, and the young man says, Done that, check those off the list. And Jesus gives him one more that he cannot do. But what I want you to notice is this young man clearly expects that he can achieve eternal life, that there is something he can do. There is some standard, some performance that he can achieve that will gain him eternal life. So I think he's sincere and he's he's just naive. He lacks understanding. But I think he sincerely wants to follow God and he sees himself as someone who cares about God and the things of God and he wants to do the right thing. And Jesus answers, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. So he's answering a nutshell is, look, the standard's up here, and there's only one person that meets it, and that's God alone. Why do you he even implies that he is not, as I think referring to him as a man, that there is only one good as God. So the standard required is keeping all the commandments, and the only one who can do that is God and God alone. All right. So let me just give you a little bit of background. That's kind of an overview of where we're going. But let me give you a little of background, I think, of why Jesus asks him to sell all his possessions. At the time, family and home were your most important values in life. It was considered more important than everything else. So in that kind of ancient Middle East culture, the family and the family estate were your prime importance, and that would have been this man's highest commitments. And it was so important, they would go to incredible lengths to keep the family intact, and it was considered more important than life itself. One of the ways you see this in this is in the parable of the prodigal son, when he sells everything and leaves, it was a highly offensive thing to do because he had sold his inheritance, which was his land, and he had broken the family by leaving. So the setup for that story is that this is an entirely offensive thing to do. So Jesus comes along to this young man and says, Give all that up. Essentially, what he's saying is, I want you to place me above your highest loyalty. So you think your your highest loyalty is your family and your family estate, and I want you to get rid of all that and make me first. Come and follow me. And that I think is what's radically shocking to this rich young man. Um I think he turns away not maybe because he loves money too much, but I think uh also because he realizes there's something he has to do that that this is beyond him, that he cannot cannot break that commitment. So he must have realized at some point that whatever was required to eternal life, he's not going to make it. Now, I don't think Jesus is asking him to give up his money just because he's rich. He's asking him, I think, to sit to put Jesus first. So Jesus is saying, don't give up your money just because you're rich, but put me ahead of that. Make me the number one priority in your life, and that's what the young men box at. So if you want to gain eternal life, Jesus has to be a higher priority than whatever your highest priority is. Now, why does Jesus give him all the commandments and he says, Oh, yeah, I've done that? I think part of what he's trying to get him to see is the same reason all of us are given the law, in that we're given the commandments to teach us that we're sinful and that we need a savior. So remember from Romans 7, Paul writes, indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law, for I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, Do not covet, do not covet. That's Romans 7, 7. And Paul in that chapter says, he got to the law, he got through the commandments, and he suddenly realized, I can't, I don't meet this. So he was going down the commandments and look, yep, not murdered, not committed adultery, check those off. But then he got to this one that said, you can't even want to do that. You can't even want to have something that someone else has. Not that you just refrain from stealing it, but that you don't you shouldn't even want to steal it. And he realizes I've fallen short. So the law was not intended to stir on up, stir up in us a sense of accomplishment. Rather, I think the law is intended to stir up in us a sense of, oh my gosh, I'm not gonna make it. I can't, if that's what the law requires, I don't get there. We fall short of God's standard. And I think that's what Jesus is trying to do with this young man by giving him a list of the commandments. And for the young man, he sees them, at least from what little evidence we have, it suggests that he sees them as a testimony to his success. So look how well I've done. I have done all these things. So Jesus gives him one more commandment that it puts too much on him, which is sell everything and follow me. Give all that you have to the poor and follow me. Now, you may say, but how do you know he's not just saying money is dangerous and you should get rid of all your money and we shouldn't have rich Christians? There are a lot of other passages I think we could pull in that would um would you could speak to that, but the one I want to bring to your attention is remember chapter Mark, uh chapter 14 of Mark. There's the woman who anointed Jesus' head with a very expensive jar of perfume, and the disciples present rebuke her harshly, saying, We could have sold that perfume and given money to the poor and fed them for months, and Jesus rebukes them. He says, No, she did the right thing. So why would she have done the right thing when she essentially wasted in the disciples' eyes all that money? She put Jesus first. In her life, she took what she had and she gave it to him and essentially laid it at his feet, and he commends her for that. And I think that's the same kind of thing going on here. He wants the young man to put him first. So the New Testament doesn't teach that all wealth should be given to the poor, but I think in this case the rich young man's money had insulated him. He didn't have the temptation to steal because he was rich. He probably didn't have the temptation to seek favor from other men because he was rich, he would have been given favor. He had been protected by his lifestyle, and he hadn't had a chance yet to, I think, experience his own need and his own insecurity. Now, think of what in his case giving all his money away and dealing with the poor would have done for him. Today, if we want to give money to the poor, we can just write a check, you know, or we can do an electronic funds transfer and transfer money from one bank account to another, and we barely even know it's gone. But in his day, you couldn't just write a check to some charitable organization. If you wanted to give money to the poor, you had to physically take the coins and go to where the poor lived and give them the money. There was you had to interact with them. You had to leave your kind of your comfortable surroundings and find those who were less fortunate than you and get involved in their lives and give them the money. And that is a very different thing. That would have exposed this young man to a lot of things that he had probably never been exposed to before. So I think part of the point was not just you're rich, you shouldn't be rich, but his point was go and interact with the poor, get to learn how the rest of the world lives. You know, leave your cocoon of rich financial security and see what life is like. And that would have taught him about himself. So I think that's part of what Jesus is after here. And notice we don't know how his story ends. We don't know if he went away and eventually learned that he was sinful and that he needed a savior and came to faith later on. He may have, he may not have. Before we move on, I want you to notice one more thing about how Jesus treats him. He treats him very kindly and very tenderly. He um first he responds to him with a question and asks a question of his own, I think to draw him into conversation, to draw him out, and hopefully to get him to discover his deepest need. Verse 21 says Jesus looked at him and loved him. And that struck me because I thought, as a rich young man, how many people looked at him and just loved him? Would he ever have been certain that people loved him for him? Or they just saw rich young man, you know, he's part of the elite, or maybe he's a great marriage prospect, or maybe he's, you know, he can get me a job, or you know, for rich people, you you can be seen as a dollar sign or as a deep pocket. And I think the indication that Jesus looked at him and loved him was pro might have been something new for him, because the indication is Jesus just loved him because, regardless of whether he was rich. And then he instructs him. He takes the time to interact with him and to try to teach him and draw him out, and again, I think that's an indication of the kindness and the tenderness with which he treats him. So the young man says, I've kept all these commandments, he's been insulated by his advantages, life for him had probably been easy and secure, and Jesus tries to teach him a little and draw him out of that. Okay, so that's the setup. Now let's look at where Jesus goes with this. Go back to verse 23. And Jesus looked around and said to the disciples, how difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. And the disciples were amazed at his words, but Jesus said to them again, Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. I don't know about you, but I read these and I think it's thinking, oh dear. You know, for all of us in this room, no matter where we think we are in the social scale, we are richer than most of the world. So I want to talk about what's going on here. First, it's impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. And that's his point, basically. This is impossible. You may have heard the story that there was a gate called the needle's eye. It was uh, and that a camel could pass through this gate by getting on its knees. That story is not true. But if you got, especially if you have some of the older commentaries, you'll find it. It was first suggested in the 1800s by a man named F. W. Ferrar, and what he suggested, it was at the time, you know, Holmes had these huge double doors in there, like the wall or the gate, uh, that cut them off from the street. And they were the doors could be 10 feet by 12 feet, uh like 10 feet high and 12 feet wide. So it took this huge effort to open them. And so they cut smaller doors in the big doors, so that for ordinary comings and goings, you could go just go through the small door. But if you needed like a fully loaded camel to get through, you had to open the big gates. So Ferrar suggested that that little door was called the Needle's Eye, and that uh a camel, if it wasn't carrying anything, was unloaded, could get down on its knees and squeeze through that door. That was a story, but it's not true. There's not any evidence at all to suggest that the door was called the needle's eye, um, either at the time or any time since. The door did exist, um, but it wasn't. It's just Ferrar himself later rejected the story. I mean, he himself later said, no, that's, you know, I don't have enough evidence, that's not what Jesus meant. But the story got around. Everybody started quoting it because it's a great story, but it's one of those urban legends. So if you had an older commentary and you ran into that, it's not true. Um the point Jesus is making is uh it's impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. This is something that cannot be done. And uh the point, it's the same point he made to the rich man when he said, Why do you call me good? His point is it's impossible for us, through our own efforts, to enter the kingdom of God. We um salvation is a miracle. The fact that any of us are saved is a miracle. It's all a gift of God's grace. So a rich man or a poor man is not going to uh get into heaven unless God saves him. And a rich man will not give up his riches unless God changes his hearts. None of us will be saved unless God does something. And you can see that's how the disciples react. In verse 26 and in 24, it says they're amazed. And when he says twice, this can't happen, in verse 26, they were exceedingly astonished and said to him, Then who can be saved? They're reacting to, you've just told us it's impossible. So what's the rest of us? Um remember at the time the Jews believed that riches were a sign of favor from God. And if you were rich, they believed you had been blessed by God and you had earned his favor. So to say the rich are not going to get into the kingdom of heaven is saying, wait a minute, those are the good guys. Those are the ones God has rewarded in this life. So if they're not going to make it, what about the rest of us who aren't living in the lap of luxury because God has not so blessed us? So if God's maybe a little ticked off with us, what hope is there for us? And that's how they react. They are exceedingly astonished, they're amazed, and they say, then who can be saved? Um I think Jesus is picking on the rich here because wealth can keep us from discovering our need. Money solves a lot of problems. You know, I mean, there are a lot of things you can solve with money, and it's easy to assume that because I can solve those problems, I don't need anyone else. I don't need a savior, I don't need to look to someone outside myself because I can solve all these problems with money. And the more kind of stuff we have, the easier it is to think we're better off. And then in their culture, given the idea that they thought that riches themselves were a sign of God's favor, you could see how you could easily slip into the mindset, I'm doing okay. I have it all. And then you add to the fact that the rich are able to do great things. They can build synagogues, they can endow orphanages, they can give money to the poor, they could refurbish the temple, they could do any number of these extraordinary charitable acts and worthwhile projects. So if anyone's gonna be saved, it must be them, right? They have so much potential to do good, they look like they're enjoying God's favor. And now Jesus comes along and says, No, it's impossible. They're not gonna get there. So, verse 27. Jesus looked at them and said, With man it is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God. This is the context of salvation. God makes salvation possible. If any of us are going to be saved, it is going to be because of the grace of God. No one enters the kingdom of heaven by their own merits or by their own efforts. So what he's saying is salvation is impossible for us. No one is good but God alone. He's the only one that can reach the standard. It's impossible for even the best of us to enter the kingdom of God, and yet God makes it possible. So he's not saying you should give up all your money, nor is he saying if you're poor, you have a guaranteed ticket to heaven. So you don't um don't draw either of those inferences. The poor can't get into heaven any easier than the rich can. They're just more likely to know they need something. Because they don't have the uh the scapegoat, not the scapegoat, but the solution of money, then um it's easier for them to see their need. But the point Jesus is making is who's gonna get into heaven by their own efforts? No one. But it's impossible for us, but not for God. Okay, so look how Peter responds to him. Verse 28. Peter began to say to him, See, we have left everything and followed you. Jesus said, Truly I say to you, there's no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father, or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. That many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. So he says, basically the point he's making is what's impossible for men has been shown to be possible by God in the lives of the disciples. They wouldn't have left everything that was theirs and followed Jesus if God had not changed their hearts, and that's a sign that he is working. So Peter's saying, look, we left our home and family, we did what you asked the rich young man to do, what's there for us? And Jesus basically says, You will receive eternal life, but you will receive it. It's a gift, it's not something you've earned. So I think it's important to note that this exchange between Jesus and Peter does not teach that Peter and the maybe the other apostles have earned their king their place in the kingdom of God. It's a gift for them just like the rest of us. Let me give you an analogy. Suppose I make a deal with my kids. I say, okay, if you take out the trash, I'll give you a million bucks. And they say, Great. And they take out the trash and I give them a million bucks. Have they earned it? That's the position we're in with God. What we do for him is taking out the trash, and he's giving us a million bucks. And that I think is what Jesus is saying when he says, you will receive a hundredfold what you've done. Everything we gain from God so far passes what we do for him that you can hardly say we've earned it. Yes, we might have been obedient in some things. We might have done some acts of kindness or responded to him. Those are all gifts from him. So I think the force of Peter's exchange is all that they have done demonstrates their faith, and that is a gift from God. It's not that they earned it. It's like they took out the trash and God gave them a million dollars. Which is great news if you think about it, because what we have to gain is so much more than the persecutions and the sufferings and the trials of this life. So they took out the trash, they're getting back a million dollars. Then we have this great statement, the first will be last, and the last will be first. I think what he's saying there is those who think they are the most deserving of righteousness, that's the first, those who think they are righteous will find they're sinners or they're the last. And those who know they are sinners, that is, those who are the last, will be given righteousness. That is, they'll be first. Follow all that? So the idea is those who look like they're earning their way into the kingdom of God, maybe the Pharisees or the religious leaders of the day, or anyone who thinks themselves righteous will find in fact that they're not righteous because they can't truly keep the law. But those who are are begging God in his mercy for righteousness will receive it because it's an act of grace. So the first shall be last, the last will be first. Okay, just to drive this point home, I want to bring in one more passage. In Mark's telling of this account, he follows it with a very interesting parable. So turn to not Mark, we're in Mark, in Matthew. Turn to Matthew 20. If you look at chapter 19 in Matthew, you'll see the same story we just covered in Mark. And it ends with the same statement. The first will be last, and the last will be first. And then Jesus tells this parable, and I think this parable so aptly makes the point. I I didn't want to leave it out. So Matthew 20, verse 1. For the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace. And he said to them, You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you. So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour, and the ninth hour he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing, and he said to them, Why do you stand here idle all day? And they said to him, Because no one has hired us. And he said to them, You go into the vineyard too. And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last up to the first. And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, The last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat. But he replied to them, Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity? So the last will be first and the first will be last. Now, the key to understanding this is a denarius was a day's wage, and that was the amount of money you needed to buy food. So if he paid them less than a denarius, they would not have had enough money to buy food for the next day and they would have gone hungry. So in providing for them by giving them a denarius, he's basically giving all the workers what they need to eat. So he's giving them what they need, not what they deserve. And that's the key. And that's the I think the point Jesus is making. Just as the landowner gave each one what he needed and not what he earned, so God gives each of us what we need, which is salvation and righteousness and not what we earn. What we earn is the equivalent of taking out the trash. He's giving us a million dollars. The whole point of the parable is we don't work for rewards. We can't earn our righteousness. We can't obey our way into the kingdom of God. So God, but God in his mercy and his grace, just as the master of the vineyard was generous, gives to us what we need. And that, I think, changes everything. We don't do good works to impress God. We don't do good works to prove to him that we deserve something from him. Instead, we do them because he has changed our hearts. He has given us the desire to do them. So insofar as I have any genuine acts of compassion or kindness or self-sacrifice or obedience, I should look at that and say, this is a gift from God. This look at what he has done for me. Salvation is his gift for me. So the workers' attitudes, I think, in the parable is similar to the rich young man's. They're saying, We worked, we earned it, we deserved it. Similarly, the rich young man is saying, What can I do? How do I earn my way into the kingdom of God? What must I do to obtain eternal life? How do I essentially get my claim on God? And the worker said, Well, we earned it. The rich young man says, I kept all the commandments. And Jesus' answer is, Why do you call me good? There is no one who is good enough. There is no one who can be good enough to gain the kingdom of God. So in the few minutes we have left, I want to start some application on this. Because a lot of you, you've probably heard this since Sunday school. You've probably read these parables or read this story. And you think, yep, been there, done that. I know I'm I can't earn my way into the kingdom of God, but think how easily we slip back into that mentality. And there's a movement in the Christian church today that I think is very dangerous. It's a mixed blessing. There are some things that are very good about it, but there are some things I think that are really dangerous. And you've probably heard it called the spiritual disciplines or those kinds of there are several books out, the spirit of the disciplines, and there's another websites. And we live in a generation of Christians for whom it is becoming settled fact that there are certain things you must do if you are a believer. So there are certain practices you must practice, and it varies from region to region what the list is and how you practice them, but there's a real danger in it. I mean the list varies. You've usually fasting, uh, meditation, confession, fellowship, Bible study, service, uh, studying the word, missions, silence, it comes up a lot, solitude, prayer. All of those things. I'm going to call those religious practices. Now I'm not talking about moral practices, things like compassion, mercy, kindness, generosity, honesty. I'm thinking about the things you do that say I'm a Christian. And they are good things to do. I want to be clear on that. I'm not questioning their worth. What I'm saying is, what is should our attitude toward them be? And we are in this is a PCA church which is founded on reform theology, and as you may or may not know, one of the tenets of reformed theology is that salvation is a gift of God from beginning to end. There are other theologies, Armenianism, for example, believes that you are saved and then you cooperate in your salvation, and you can speed it up or slow it down, and you may or may not get there, you can lose it depending on how well you do. So in this, I'm completely orthodox. This is reformed theology, that this is a gift from God from beginning to end. And the danger of spiritual practices is it's easy to think, I did these things, therefore God owns me. I practiced my practices, whatever there are. I've done all the things that God required of me, so I am better or earned more than someone who hasn't. And that is a dangerous attitude to have. If you see them as a mark of saving faith or a sign of spirituality, or conversely the neglect of them as a sign of I'm not doing what I need to do for God, then you ought to start, uh it ought to raise a red flag. I would say that our religious practices do not cause our spiritual res growth. They result from our spiritual growth. And that is a key distinction to make. So that when I do something, is my attitude, look, God, look how good I am. See how well I'm performing? See how much I've learned? Or is my attitude, thank you, God, for giving me a heart to make me that kind of person? Apart from your grace, I would never have been a kind or thoughtful person. And that attitude difference is key. We may look exactly the same on the outside, but that attitude is key. So whatever measure of joy I find in Bible study, I should be thankful that God has given me the desire to do that. Or whatever gratitude or trust I feel that results in prayer, I should thank God for making me a person who wants to pray and not look at it as I'm a worker in the vineyard and I've worked all day in the hot sun and therefore God owes me. The key difference is realizing it's all a gift from God. I don't do these things because it's now my job to do them, I do them because God saved me and made me the kind of person who now wants to do them. And insofar as I have that desire, it's a gift from God. So the attitude is the essential difference and it is key. So, how would I apply that? Check your attitude. If you're doing things out of a duty or an obligation, that ought to raise a red flag in your mind. And maybe the thing to do is stop doing them and pray that God would give you the desire. Change your attitude, change your heart. Uh if it's a joy to do all those things we call religious practices, then thank God for it. And don't start getting in onto any kind of self-righteousness of now, God owes me. The other, I think, key is don't judge other people. We can look at other people and say, gosh, she really doesn't measure up. You know, she doesn't come to church often enough, or she doesn't pray before every meal, or she doesn't do the things that I think a Christian ought to do, and therefore I would you want to avoid that kind of judgmental attitude. We don't know what's going on in someone else's heart. It's interesting, the whole book of 1 John is devoted to discerning true believers from false believers, and uh he's got he has a lot to say, but the main theme is how do you know a true believer from a false believer? Never once does he mention religious practices. And in that shell, what he says is you can tell a true believer by whether or not they confess Jesus is the Messiah and whether they desire righteousness or not. Not what they do so much as what they desire, what they long for. So he goes into a bit more detail than that, obviously. But essentially that's the point. That you can tell a true believer by whether or not they confess that Jesus is the Messiah, and all that involves who he was and what he did for them, and whether they long for righteousness. Not that they're perfectly obedient, but they pursue righteousness as opposed to pursuing sin. So we ought not to condemn others based on their religious practices. God is responsible for their spiritual growth and he'll do it. Remember, um I think the passage in Ephesians 2 where it says, God prepared good works beforehand for you to walk in them. The first uh five verses of 1 Peter chapter 1 also make the same point that salvation is God's doing from beginning to end. Romans 5 makes it again. The point is it's a gift from God. It's what He's done for me, not what I do for Him. Now, you will say to me, because I've heard this one before, wait a minute, Chrisan, you're missing something. Religious practices are commanded, so they're just part of obedience. So we should do them because they are commanded, because they are are part of obedience. So whether we feel like it or not, we ought to do them. It's not necessarily part of spiritual growth, it's part of obedience. There's value in doing them just because we're obeying. And my answer to that is I don't think the practices themselves are commanded. What's commanded is the principle behind them. So, for example, the command to study your Bible is really the moral principle, love the Lord your God with all your heart. That's what we ought to strive for. The same thing with prayer. The prayer is not, there's not value in clocking so many minutes of prayer per day. The moral command is seek God first, seek his kingdom, trust him and not in yourself. And those are the things that we ought to seek after. And you could go through every one of the practices and look at the moral principle behind them, and that I think is what we ought to strive for. The practice itself is just an expression of that command, and it's not necessarily the only one. In a hundred years it may look different. So, the lesson of the rich young man is I think we can easily deceive ourselves into believing that we are good enough, and we're not. And that is the that is the one thing to take away from this. That um apart from God's grace, we cannot do what is necessary to gain eternal life, that it is not within our grasp. No one is good except God alone. He's the only one who could keep the commandments, and our job is now to recognize that, if you will, to see our brokenness and seek the one who can change us. And the good news is all you have to do is take out the trash, recognize you're broken, and get it back a million dollars. So all right, let me pray and then I'll give you, I'm sure you want to respond. Father, thank you that we can come before you and we can look at these difficult questions and hard texts, and I just pray that you would open our eyes to the truth and teach us where we're right, where we're wrong, give us a loving heart, to deal with others who think differently, to um know that none of us has perfect doctrine, none of us completely understands, but that we're all on the path of learning and growing and and trying to learn more about you. I just pray that you would take away any words I said today that were confusing or disheartening or a heresy, and that you would um, as I know you are, responsible for everyone's spiritual growth, and that you would be using what is good and right to bring us closer to you. In Jesus' name. Speaker: Amen. Thank you for joining us at Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. We hope you have enjoyed our study together and grown closer to the Lord. Please let us know if you have any questions about this study. 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