Sermon Tone Analysis

Luke 18:18-30

Introduction

This morning we are going to continue our series on discipleship by looking at the connection between wealth and the cost of following Christ.

Before I begin, I want to throw out a caveat for the non-Christians and visitors to our church.

We have been going through a series of messages aimed mainly at believers to understand the true demands that Jesus places on his followers.

It may seem a little bit tense, like going to a friends house when there are getting yelled at by their parents.

But I want you to understand that this is the reality of doing life together as a family in Christ.

There are a couple of reasons that churches should go through some hard hitting sermons on occasion.

1) It reminds us that we are witnesses to the world.

Gandhi once stated, “I like your Christ but I don’t like you Christians.”

I think if we took Jesus’ demands more seriously, Christians would look more like Christ and become a more credible example to the world.

When Pastor Andy and I were designing this series together, he turned to me and said, “It sounds like you want to make real followers of Jesus.”

That is exactly what I want to do!

2) This presents a realistic expectation of what it means to be a Christian.

If you set a standard, it’s true that some will fall short.

If you don’t set any standard, you’ll ensure that everyone falls short.

Jesus clearly set a standard and if you remember from last week, I ended with His challenge for all believers to renounce our rights and then come follow Him.

This has implications to every area of life but none more practical than they way we handle our wealth.

Now some us might mistakenly think that the most sacrificial thing you can do is give up your careers and your pursuit of riches and become a missionary or a pastor but actually that is the last thing I want you to think (because who is going to pay my salary if you all quit your jobs).

All kidding aside, renouncing your rights to wealth is far more of a posture of your heart than selling everything and becoming a missionary.

I know enough pastors and missionaries who are as greedy and driven by selfish ambition as any crooked businessman and just because you are serving God in some official capacity is no guarantee that you have renounced your rights to wealth.

But why should we renounce our rights to the money that we have worked so hard to gain?

It’s because nothing has greater power to enslave us and change us for the worse than wealth.

For this very reason Jesus says, “You cannot serve two master, you’ll love one and despise the other.

Therefore, you cannot serve both God and money.”

I recently read an article in the New York Times about Steve Job’s relationships with his daughter and it paints such an ugly picture of the person behind all of the success.

At a family therapy session, his daughter confessed that she was lonely and wanted her parents to come and say good night and the response she received from her stepmother was “Your dad and I are just cold people.”

2,000 years Jesus told us the same thing without wasting 7 years of his life on needless research.

We sometimes forget the mind-blowing brilliance of Jesus because not only was he the most loving man to walk the earth, he is also the smartest man who has ever lived.

Every day, with every new bit of research on human behavior, I’m coming to terms with that fact.

There is no one who has uncovered the human heart like Christ because only he understands completely what is found deep within us and he understood that one of the major obstacles in our relationship with God, if not the greatest barrier, would be our love of money.

On the whole the rich are more likely to want nothing to do with religion but the interaction between wealth and God is much more subtle than that.

Money makes you act like you despise everything else in proportion to the way you chase after wealth and success.

For example, a person who works 80-90 hours a week will have little or no energy for their marriage and their children.

In time, when their marriage is falling apart and their children rebel against them, they will wonder what happened.

And hopefully it will dawn on that person that the messaging of their life for years and years has been “I didn’t care about anything to the same degree that I cared about the pursuit of money and because of that I treated everything and everyone else as if they were not as important as the pursuit of money.”

For those of us who are wealthy and have found religion, it is easy to make God a distant second in our priorities.

We tell our selves that we love God and that we want to live for Him, but the way we prioritize our lives tell a completely different story.

And in this encounter with the rich young ruler, we see three reasons why the rich fall into this trap:

And in this encounter with the rich young ruler, we can see:

We overestimate our moral goodness.

We underestimate our need for God.

We overlook the impossible grace needed for our salvation.

Moral Goodness

Now hopefully you’ve noticed that I’m including myself in the category of the wealthy.

A couple months ago, an uber driver picked me up at my condominium, which happens to be a below market rate unit in the Avalon apartments and he started the conversation by saying, “Wow, you must be rich to live here.”

At first, I was tempted to say, “Yeah, that’s right, you better recognize.”

(They say perception precedes reality.)

Then, I started to feel embarrassed because that isn’t the way that I want to see myself but for an uber driver barely making ends meet, I could see why he would make that type of assessment.

The fact of the matter is, the average salary of our church places almost all of us well with in the top 1% of wages in the world.

And so this account of the rich young ruler is highly relevant for those of us in this room.

The traps that he falls into are the same traps that we fall into.

The first trap is that we overestimate our moral goodness.

At the beginning of the interaction, the wealthy, young man asks Jesus, “Good teacher, what do I need to do to inherit eternal life?”

And Jesus, as he often does, replies with his own trap and says, “Why do you call me good?

No one is good except God alone.

So you are acknowledging my divinity.

Now back to your question, have you kept these commandments given to Moses.”

And without blinking an eye, the young man says, “I have kept them since my youth.”

I could only imagine what must have been going through Jesus mind, “Really, you’ve kept them all perfectly.

You’ve never disrespected your parents, or lied, or stolen.”

This highlights the fact that wealth causes us to moralize away our sin and justify our behavior.

I found this fascinating Ted talk on this very subject and and the research of social psychologists prove the warnings that Jesus gives to the rich.

Before I show you a short clip, this research is based on the game of Monopoly, which has probably caused many, many fights between friends and family.

But this particular game for research purposes was rigged so that whoever won the flip of the coin would be given the advantage of starting with twice the amount of money, they would also be paid double when they passed go, and allowed to roll two dice while their opponent could only roll one.

It is a completely unfair set of rules and here’s the results.

I found this fascinating Ted talk on this very subject and and the research of social psychologists prove the warnings that Jesus gives to the rich.

Before I show you a short clip, this research is based on the game of Monopoly, which has probably caused many, many fights between friends and family.

But this particular game for research purposes was rigged so that whoever won the flip of the coin would be given the advantage of starting with twice the amount of money, they would also be paid double when they passed go, and allowed to roll two dice while their opponent could only roll one.

It is a completely unfair set of rules and here’s the results.

(Show video)

2,000 years Jesus told us the same thing without wasting 7 years of his life on needless research.

We sometimes forget the mind-blowing brilliance of Jesus because not only was he the most loving man to walk the earth, he is also the smartest man who has ever lived.

Every day, with every new bit of research on human behavior, I’m coming to a greater appreciation of that fact.

There is no one who has uncovered the human heart like Christ because only he understands completely what is found deep within us and he warns that one of the major obstacles in our relationship with God and other would be our love of money.

In a limited sense money does help us become a bit more moral that than those in poverty.

We don’t have to steal, we covet things less because we can go out and buy what we want and on the whole money reinforces this false idea that we are good people, otherwise why we be so rich?

Surely God has blessed me!

This leads to us moralizing away sins like greed, our lack of compassion, our self-centeredness, our arrogance, and our coldness towards others.

Out of the 10 commandments, Jesus picks the 5 that relate to our relationship to other people.

The interaction between wealth and our relationship to others is complex.

Money makes you act like you despise everything else in comparison to the way you chase after wealth and success.

For example, a person who works 80-90 hours a week will have little or no energy for their marriage and their children.

In time, when their marriage is falling apart and their children rebel against them, they will wonder what happened.

And hopefully it will dawn on that person that the messaging of their life for years and years has been “I didn’t care about anything to the same degree that I cared about the pursuit of money and because of that I treated everyone else as if they were not as important as my personal success.”

The real hidden danger of overestimating our moral goodness is that we begin to underestimate our need for God.

I recently read an article in the New York Times about Steve Job’s relationships with his daughter and it paints such an ugly picture of the person behind all of the success.

At a family therapy session, his daughter confessed that she was lonely and wanted her parents to come and say good night and the response she received from her stepmother was “Your dad and I are just cold people.”

Need for God

The real hidden danger of overestimating our moral goodness is that we begin to underestimate our need for God.

Good people especially good people with money sense no real need for God.

If you remember, Jesus sets up this entire conversation by asking the rich young ruler, “Why do you call me good?

Only God alone is good.”

If you read between the lines, it is a thinly veiled declaration of his own deity.

Jesus is telling this man, “You are asking me about eternal life and you recognize my goodness because I am God!”

Then, Jesus juxtaposes His own moral perfection and attempts to cast light onto the reality of the man’s spiritual state.

And Jesus goes down the list of God’s commandments and again let’s remember what Jesus just said, “Only God alone is good.

Are you this good?”

There is a certain obtuseness to this man, and he says, “I’ve kept all those commandments since my youth.”

Do you see what is happening?