And as you are taking your seat, if you could turn in your copy of the scriptures to Mark chapter 10, we're going to be in verse 17 through 31. We saw in the last few weeks before this, Jesus taught on divorce, naturally moves on from the family for the marriage, at least to the children. And we see that the children receive the kingdom as a gift. We're going to see how this can get missed in this passage by this rich young ruler. So this is the word of the Lord, starting in verse 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. Well, 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 for my youth. And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, You lack one thing. Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you'll have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me. And disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked around him and said to his disciples, how difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. 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 is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. And they were exceedingly astonished and said to him, then who can be saved? Jesus looked at them and said, With man it is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God. And Peter began to say to him, See, we have left everything and followed you. And Jesus said, Truly I say to you, there is 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 and this time, houses, and brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last in the last verse. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Let's ask for his blessing on it this morning. Heavenly Father, your word is truth. Lord, sometimes your word stings and the truth stings. Lord, I pray that you would see that these rather stinging words in this passage are full of love for us that we do not deserve. So Lord, I pray that You would speak to us through Your Word and by Your Spirit that You may be glorified. Lord, I pray that You would shepherd us. Let the words of my mouth, O Lord, and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight. O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer, in whose name I pray. Amen. This rich young ruler was a good guy. In fact, this wretched young ruler was the kind of guy that we hope parents our sons grow up to be. He was probably good-looking. He was well-dressed. He had good manners. He seemed to be a very good steward at this point of his wealth. He was a guy who was a by-the-book kind of guy, but not a by-the-book kind of guy that was so annoying in his being by-the-book, but a guy that you just like, wow, I just love that guy. He's just so good, he's so cool. He's got everything going for him except he got one thing twisted. He thought he could make God love him by what he did. He thought he could make God love him by what he did. Now, if you get one thing twisted, it's not just a matter of, oh, that thing is, it's not a big deal if you get that one thing twisted. Sometimes one thing is the difference between great success and great failure. Back in the old Cold War days, The CIA figured out that the Russians were stealing technology from us left and right. This is about the 70s or so. And so they came up with a counterintelligence program to start, you know, knowing, trying to figure out where the Russians are stealing stuff and begin to feed them bad tech. and two major incidents of this are worth recording. The first was this thing called the, you know, we have this plane, we still fly it, called the B-1 bomber, supersonic bomber. Those who drive the bomber, they call it the Bone. And so, The Russians stole this design from us in the late 70s, and the CIA lovingly called it the Bone Ski. You know, because the Russians like to have skis at the end of things, in their words. So the Bone Ski, though they did end up figuring out how to make it fly properly, for years and years there's intelligence footage of the Bone Ski blowing up randomly, or blowing up on takeoff, or blowing up on landing. Disintegrating. And why? Because in the plans that the CIA leaked to the Russians, all they did was turn around one screw about this big, which is a big screw, but an airplane is pretty small. They just turned it around like this. And it made the design completely flawed and destructive. That's one incident. The other incident was just a little bit of code in these Russian pipelines in Siberia, a little bit of software that they had stolen from the Americans in the 80s, just a little bit of corrupted code, and you could see a pipeline explosion from space in Siberia, crippling the Russian energy sector. One little bit of corrupted code, one turn screw, one little bit of thinking I can make God love me, And the whole thing doesn't work. We're going to see four ways it doesn't work in our texts, where the big, the four ways point to us that for us to take the warning, well, we know we can't save ourselves, but church, you can't make God love you. You can't make yourself decent enough for him to love you. He just loves you if he loves you, but you can't make God love you. You just can't. So we see right off the bat, this man comes, as Jesus is setting out, he runs up and kneels before Jesus and asks Jesus, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He's being respectful, this outstanding young man. He's even humbling himself before Jesus. He's kneeling before him and calls him a good teacher. What must I do to inherit eternal life? We see it right there, the turned screw of trying to make God love us. So Jesus here is going to correct him of his ignorance. Jesus says, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. We're gonna see here that we can't make God love us because we just don't know enough. In this statement, Jesus shows this young man just exactly what he doesn't know, and that is Jesus himself. He says, you know, Jesus is God, so it's not that Jesus is saying he's not God, no one is good except God alone, but he knows this man's heart. He knows this man does not think that he is, in fact, God. And so he was saying, you who do not think that I am God, why are you calling me good? Do you think that I have achieved something that has made God love me, young man? So in fact, he's missed both the way that Jesus has life, which is not by works, but having life in himself as God. And so he's misassigned where goodness comes from and the good, the definition of good standing before him. He doesn't see that salvation starts by knowing who Jesus is. John will tell us in his gospel, this is eternal life, to know Jesus Christ, to know you, Lord, and the Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Excuse me. To know Jesus is the beginning, and this man does not see, he doesn't see the rock for who he is among many mountains before him. this eternal rock, this Savior. And so he thinks that this Jesus is a guide, a guru that can lead the way for him, and not seeing that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life before him. And so from the very start, we can't make God love us. Especially, we can't make God love us even if it were possible if we don't even know who Jesus is. We just don't know enough. In ourselves, we don't know enough. We must have God reveal to us the glories and the beauties and the truth of Jesus. Not that just the mind truth that we can know, but the truth of the heart. Matthew 11, we see Jesus praying. He says, you have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to little children. Such is your grace and your good pleasure, O Lord. We don't know enough. We need Christ to know us. Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Correcting that right off the bat. Do you see me as God, young man? Church, do you see Jesus as God and as the good God? Not good because He just shows us the way to salvation where we can earn it, but good simply because He gives it because we can't make Him love us. We can't make ourselves decent enough for Him to love us. He just loves us. And so Jesus goes on. He says, you know the commandments. Do not murder, 6th commandment. Do not commit adultery, 7th commandment. Do not steal, 8th commandment. Do not bear false witness, 9th commandment. Do not defraud, a combination of the 8th and the 9th commandment together. And on your father and mother, 5th commandment. We see 6 commandments here representing commandments 5 through 9. Jesus lays them before him and we see as he lays them before him he leaves off an interesting one that we'll talk about here in a second. But in one sense Jesus lays the trap. for this man, not a trap to hurt him, but a trap to help him see himself for who he is. Do these things, and you will live." And we see that principle in Scripture. You know, we see in Leviticus 18, it says, whoever does these commandments will live by them. In fact, that was how Adam was to be earned salvation in the garden. He had one commandment, to avoid the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and had he passed the test, presumably he would have gone on to inherit life. But as it is, he plunged the human race into darkness. But he lays, Jesus lays before a biblical works principle. Do you do these commandments? But he leaves off a critical one. And then this man, young man, takes the bait. Teacher, all these I have kept for my youth. As far as he knew, outwardly speaking, this rich young ruler, this outstanding young man, the kind of man that we want our daughters to marry, the man we wish our sons would hang out with, so a little bit of that good politeness and decency would rub off on them. All these I have done for my youth. He was good as far as he knew. not seeing, not knowing the laws. Those laws themselves go much deeper, not just to the outward performance, but to the heart. And Jesus, he doesn't, again, does not do this maliciously. It says, Jesus, looking at him, loved him, not because he was good. He just loved him and said to him, you lack one thing. Go sell all that you have and give to the poor. and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me. Jesus is not laying down a broad principle that we need to all become poor monks, give away everything we have to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he was telling this guy to do it. Don't get that twisted. And here's why. We have commandments five through nine. We call it the second table of the law. The first table, one through four about God. Second table, five through 10, love your neighbor as yourself, except he missed, Jesus didn't miss it. Jesus left off one at the end. Do not covet. Do not covet. And by saying this, he reveals this man's heart. It says, disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. This man had everything, but he didn't have Christ, and therefore had nothing. And because he had nothing, Jesus sees him for what he is and says, look, to have everything in me, these things gotta go. This man, he was being kept out of the kingdom of heaven by this great sin of covetousness, not of other people's things, but of the thing that he had. His great possessions, Sean O'Donnell says, he had great possessions or rather his great possessions had him. They had a death grip on his heart. They were the thing that was actively eating him from the inside out and was going to kill his soul. Jesus sees it and loves him and tells him the truth. This is exactly the problem, young man. You love stuff. You love stuff. Yeah, you have, as far as anyone can tell, everything is all peachy keen otherwise, but you love your stuff. And you don't love me. Church, when we covet things, even the things that we have and we exalt what we have as possessions or as personality traits or our own righteousness, when we love these things and we covet them for ourselves, we're not just breaking the tenth commandment, we're breaking the first. Have no other gods before us. The first commandment and the tenth commandment stand as two pillars on a gate of the law. One points us to God and one points us to our heart, but both of them agree that God must be enthroned on the center of the heart, and this man loved himself, and he loved what he had, and it was killing him. He loved his soul, we see, by walking away more than he loved Christ. Sorry, he loved his riches more than his own soul and more than he loved Christ. So we see, as well, that not only was he ignorant, we don't know enough along with him, we also aren't good enough. We don't have enough. to make God love us. In this society, people thought, and we're not all that dissimilar, that if you are rich, that God must love you. They're not too much different from our prosperity preachers nowadays, that if you are rich, God must love you. And sure, God gives blessings, but He gives blessings to the rich and to the poor, spiritual, to say both of them. But in this society, it was a one-for-one. The more money you had, You must be doing something right. God must love you. And Jesus is saying the exact opposite here. It was not this man's great morality that gave him all this wealth, even though that's maybe what he thought. He did not see that the great wealth was corrupting his morality and slowly killing him. But we are so similar when we think we have something to show for before God. We say, look, God, how good I am. Look, God, how rich I am. Look, God, I've done all these things for you. Or even if we're not overachievers, and mind you, the weirdest thing about living in the Delta these last two plus years is there's not a whole lot of overachievers among us every now and then there are. Now, what kind of overachiever am I talking about? I'm talking about people who like to stand out in general for whatever. The advantage of that is people like to be together. They like to be part of the team. They like to be part of the family, as it were. But to be part of the family, to remain in good standing in the family, the social fabric of this delta, you've got to be a decent person. You've got to do the right things. You've got to do this, do that, and say this and say that, show up to these things, show up to those things. And then you're decent, and then you're in. Your reputation is stable. But even so, we cannot make ourselves decent enough for God to love us. We can't even go max, you know, full throttle in our works and in our service to others to make God love us. We can't even make ourselves so disgusting to God to make Him love us, thinking, okay, if that's not going to work, maybe the opposite will work. There is nothing that we can do to make God love us. We don't know enough. We aren't good enough, even to ourselves and not to each other. This man did not see that. He thought that his wealth and the morality that came with it made him good enough. That's not it. Instead, those things, because he held on to those things, made him abhorrent to God. But even so, Jesus says he loved him. This man had nothing, again, nothing to make Jesus love him. Not because he was a decent guy did Jesus say this to him. Jesus loved him simply because he just did. This is the only account of the three of this story which says Jesus loved him and told him. Church, I'm telling you out of love for you, you cannot make God love you. He just does, if he does. We don't know enough, we aren't good enough, and we aren't strong enough. After this man leaves, it says, Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, how difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. Disciples are amazed, and then he repeats, children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." Now, this means one of two things. Some commentators think that there was a gate in Jerusalem that was called the needle gate, a very skinny, small gate that a camel could not pass through unless you unloaded the camel and really jammed it in there. A camel could not go if it was loaded down with possessions. have to drop all of them and then go through. Kind of makes sense. The other option is that it's an actual camel and an actual eye of a needle where you stick a thread in. In any case, the point stands, it's impossible for this to happen. For people that have things to commend themselves to God, whether it's their wealth or their morality or their social connections and social standing, in themselves to enter the kingdom of God. The problem is, is not wealth. Wealth is not evil in and of itself. It's not wrong to be rich. It's not wrong to have stuff. It's not wrong to do good in your community. It's not wrong to be a non-overachiever who just loves being part of the team. Those things are not wrong. It's wrong to take those things, lay them before God as if on an altar and say, God, you have to accept me now. That's wrong. But Jesus, at this point, has turned over everything in the disciples' worldview and value system. It says they were exceedingly astonished. Imagine their world basically caving in on them. You know, everything that I've been taught in society and by my parents is wrong, like, and you're just losing it. You can't come to grips with it. Exceedingly astonished. And he said to him, They said to him, who can be saved? If that guy can't get in, what about me? I am done for. I'm lost. If that guy can't get in, then no one's getting in. That's the message. Jesus is like, you're right. You got it. Who can be saved? Exactly. With man it is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God. Now we use that verse to comfort ourselves that God really can do anything. That's a true principle in this, and you're not wrong to use it that way. But the way Jesus uses this verse is in terms of salvation. He says, yes, you're right. You can't make God love you. You can't save yourself. You got it. You are lost. You are completely unable. And that's just it, because man will not get glory from salvation. It will be God and God alone who gets glory when He's the one who does it. With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God. This impossibility of man saving himself, this impossibility of this man making God love him, or being decent enough to be savable in God's eyes. Ooh, it is impossible to make God love you, to be saved, to walk through under your own power and strength, but with God it is. It is God who saves from first to last. It is God, I believe, this is my personal opinion, that when Jesus said that He loved, that when He said that Jesus loved Him and told Him the truth, told Him to sell everything He had and give to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven, and now come follow Me, this call to discipleship, my personal opinion is that this rich young ruler did do that. because Jesus loved him and was willing to tell him the truth and give him a call to discipleship. I do believe, in my personal opinion, that this man saw that these things were impossible, that he saw the truth of himself. And even if he didn't, even if I'm wrong, do you see the truth in yourself? Even if you have gone through that eye of the needle and God has saved you and you have embraced Christ for yourself, you have rested and received and embraced him alone as Savior, I want you to look back on the road of your own salvation in your life and see that it was God who did it the whole time. He was the one from start to finish who gets glory for saving me. Who can be saved? No one in themselves, only God. It is God alone who has done these things for me because I can't make God love me. It is impossible for Him to make me love me, but He has. And he brings forth the fruits of that love and salvation. So we don't know enough. We aren't good enough. We aren't strong enough. We can't jam ourselves through the eye of the needle. I know that when we're working on stuff and we just need the screw to go through or the nail to go through, you can just whack it in there as hard as you can. We can make it fit. It doesn't fit, make it fit. It doesn't matter. It just needs to hold. It is impossible. It doesn't work that way. But God can change the nature of that screw, as it were, to make it fit. God can take the square peg and fit it into the round hole by changing the heart of man so that it becomes soft to fit that round hole, as it were. That's why Ezekiel promises to us through God's Word that God says, I will sprinkle you clean. I will cleanse you with your idols. I will give you a new heart and new spirit. I'll give you new life to come to me. With man it is impossible, but with God it is. God is a God of the possible because God is a God of salvation. We aren't strong enough, don't know enough, we aren't good enough, and then once we're through we have to look back and see that we didn't give enough, can't give enough. Peter begins to get half the message as Peter often does. It says, Peter began to say to him, so Jesus cut him off, you kind of suppose. Peter began to say to him, see, we have left everything and followed you. Look, Jesus, we did what that rich young ruler couldn't do. Look, Jesus, we did it. We gave up everything to follow you. We're in. But Jesus says, yes, you're in. Truly I say to you, though, there is no one who has left house or brothers, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, sacrificing your whole livelihood and social standing." In other words, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now, and this time, in the now time, houses, and brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands with persecutions And in the age to come, eternal life. So Jesus is showing Peter, look Peter, yes, you gave up father and mother, brother, sister, lands, relations, your good fishing business, you gave it all up. It's true. But guess what? Yes, you gave it up, but God's grace is so great. His love for you is so much that it gives you far more than you can ever give up. Have you thought about that? When we give up our sins, our very own selves to God so that He can heal us and make us new, we're not just doing that so God can go, check, great, the impossible's been accomplished, now move on. That's not what He's doing. God lavishes far more grace than the sins we could ever commit. God lavishes far more grace than the things we could give up. Why? Because He is showing us and lavishing on us these things of this life, and in the time to come eternal life to show us that. He's showing you, Christian, there's nothing you could have done to make Him do that. There's nothing you could have done to make Him love you more. Now what does it mean, though, just quickly, to receive in this life all these things and a hundredfold? Well, think about it like this. Not that you would do this, but if you walked into an evangelical church in Russia, in the biting cold of Siberia, and you did not speak Russian, but you happened to be there, and you're like, well, I need to go to church, it's Sunday, and I know this is an evangelical church in the middle of Siberia, Russia. You go in, no, people greet you, but you can't understand them. Maybe one guy knows a few words like, ah, Coca-Cola, and you're like, yeah. Yeah, thanks, or they say hello and they know a few things. But then you sit down and you, they begin to worship with them. You recognize the tune, even though they're singing Amazing Grace in Russian, you're like, I know that. And then the pastor's preaching and you can't understand a lick of what he's saying, but you sense the Spirit of God. And you get a sense, okay, Ivan is John in Russian, and you know you're in John, you know the right chapter and verse, and you hear him preaching, you can't understand a word he's saying, but you see the Spirit working on you anyway. Do you not realize that you've walked into your mothers and brothers and children and lands? You can walk into any church that worships Jesus Christ and there you are at home. Don't kick up your feet on these pews, but you can kick up the feet of your heart and be comfortable in those places. God has given you, even with persecutions and hardships, a great family and an even greater family waiting for you in heaven. Jesus grants all these things simply because He loves us, not because we've made Him love us. And Jesus closes with this. He says, "...many who are first will be last, and the last first." In other words, those who thought they had something to offer to God, who were great in their own eyes and maybe in the eyes of their peers and their peons alike. Jesus says those people are last because they thought that they could force my hand. They thought they could play cards before me, lay down a straight flush, and get into the kingdom of heaven. That's not the way this works. You have nothing in your hands to bring, simply to my cross you must cling, to use the words of our hymn. So those who are last, who recognize they have nothing to offer, nothing to give, recognize that they receive the kingdom of God, they receive the blessings of the sacrifice of the cross for free, no works to be added to it. Nothing to commend ourselves to God who just say, God have mercy on me, a sinner. Those who recognize that they are last, they will be first. They'll be the ones who recognize the love of the Father through the Son by the Spirit poured out on them. Those are the ones that will see they have peace with God because what Christ has done and who He is in heaven praying for them now. You can't make God love you. If He loves you, He just loves you because you are His child. And if He's your child, there's nothing you can do to break His love for you. Now, presumably speaking, we are sinners, we parents. Presumably speaking, our children could so hurt us or we are so twisted in our own sin that we stop properly loving our children. That is possible. But God and the prophets, the location escapes me at this very moment. He says, though a mother may forget, I will never forget you, my people. Though a nursing mother may stop loving her baby, he will never stop loving his people. You can't make him, because he already does. If he never started loving you, he will never, ever stop. Receive with an open hand, by faith, that free gift of salvation. Receive it. Just take it. It's free to you, bought and paid for by the blood of Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come before you with nothing in our hands. There is nothing, oh Lord, that we can do to make you love us. There is nothing we have to offer. We have nothing in our lives for you to bless us, nothing in our lives for you to keep us safe, nothing in our lives for us to prosper and live a long life. Lord, when you grant those things, those physical blessings, they are just signs of your goodness and grace. And Lord, I pray that when You do bless us with those things, we would see the greater spiritual blessings in Christ, lying behind those things, whether we are very rich, O Lord, and blessed by You in this life, or very poor, and have to work with our hands, and by the sweat of our brow, I pray that we would see that You have finished the work in Your Son. Lord, we ask all these things in Jesus' name, amen.