Mark 10:29-30 - "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 fields, 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 fields, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.'"
I left a whole field yesterday.
Well, actually, it was a whole flower bed.
Well, actually, it was one flower.
Ya see, I had this beautiful, jumbo, white iris blooming in my yard, and some kid ripped it right off its stem and literally left it wadded up in my yard so that it looked like a wadded up paper towel until I bent over to pick it up out of my grass and realized "Hey, this is not a paper towel; it's my precious, jumbo, white iris that some kid has destroyed." So I threw it back down in my yard, mad as an hornet at the neighbor kids, and stomped away.
Juuuuuuskiddin'.
I didn't get upset at anybody nor throw anything down nor stomp away. My goodness, at any one time, I have hundreds of beautiful flowers blooming, literally. What is one little, jumbo flower?
People have given so many kinds of flowers to me through the years that I have literally only spent ten dollars on two weigela plants to have my beautiful yard, or should I say "field," of flowers.
So, why did I tell you I got upset and threw stuff down and stomped away? Because that's, at least, in part what Jesus is talking about in today's verse when he talks about losing fields and houses and relationships.
Ya see, because of sin, we tend to have an unhealthy death grip on the things and people in our lives so that whenever we lose possession of a thing or control over a person, then we get so emotionally bent out of shape about it that we wind up forgetting about our many other blessings, in addition to usually hurting some people in our lives with our sour, stay-away-from-me attitude.
But God wants us to say, "Ok, so I lost a flower, but not only do I have the blessing of hundreds of other flowers, but I'm also blessed to have a neighborhood full of kids who love to play wiffle ball in my yard and climb my trees and jump on my trampoline and swing on my swing and slide on my slide. I'm so blessed that they know they're welcome and their parents trust me for their kids to be here." So now all of a sudden, I have hundreds of fields and nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters and houses where I'm welcome in my land, er, I mean, neighborhood.
But I totally miss out on those hundreds and hundreds of blessings when I protect and hold onto my things and my life with a death grip.
We gotta let go, friends. We gotta let go.
This is what Jesus is talking about. He, who died for us and has been raised, has restored all things to himself and entrusted them anew to us. The question is this? Are we gonna share them, as if they're the Lord's anyway, and therefore enjoy them all as a gift? Or are we going to possess them, as if they're ours to keep, and wind up losing them all not just in the end but right now too?
We are rich, friends. We are rich. Because Jesus is alive and reigns over all and has entrusted the treasure of his kingdom to us, then we are rich, rich, rich, rich, rich, immeasurably rich!
Let us share and gladly lose our bounty because, in so doing, God promises to multiply it a hundred times over. Wow!
Praise God!
Pastor Chris
"The gospel is the story of Jesus [what God's only Son has done for us that we can't do for ourselves], spoken as a promise." - Robert Jenson
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