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Reading Luke 18:18-23 where Jesus has a conversation with a rich young ruler, who believes he is righteous by his wealth and his works, but Jesus exposes him to the truth. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
Jesus has a conversation with a rich young ruler who asks Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life. This man is trying to get into the kingdom by his wealth and his works, but Jesus shows him that's not enough when we understand the text.
This is when we understand the text studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Find all our videos online at www .wutt .com as well as links to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe Hughes.
Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Gospel of Luke, we continue in chapter 18, and we are up to the conversation that Jesus has with the rich young ruler. I'm going to begin reading here in verse 18 and go through verse 30.
Hear the word of the Lord. And a ruler asked Jesus, 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 commit adultery. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. And he said, All these I have kept from my youth. When Jesus heard this, he said to him, One thing you still lack.
Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.
For 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. Those who heard it said, Then who can be saved? But he said, What is impossible with man is possible with God.
And Peter said, See, we have left our homes and followed you. And he said to them, Truly I say to you, There is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come eternal life.
Now, as we had considered yesterday, this exchange is right next to where Jesus tells the disciples not to hinder the children. Let the children come to me, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. And then he says in verse 17, the point of that whole interaction, Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God, like a child shall not enter it.
Now you might be surprised to learn. I didn't mention this yesterday, but you might be surprised that the phrase faith like a child. You've heard that said before, right? We say it a lot. There was a jars of clay song like 30 years ago or something that was called faith like a child.
That expression itself never occurs in the Bible, not in Matthew's account marks or Luke's. As I said yesterday, all three of the synoptic gospels share this exchange and put these accounts back to back with Jesus saying, let the children come to me and then having the rich young ruler come to him and then go away sad because he loved his wealth.
The rich young ruler was not willing to receive the kingdom of God like a child. And yet in all three of those accounts, it's never said faith like a child. That's an expression that we use to summarize or even explain that interaction that Jesus had with his disciples about children, even using those children as an illustration for the kind of childlike faith we should have, or rather the childlike dependency upon God.
We must have recognizing, realizing that we cannot get into the kingdom of God by anything we do nothing that we do. And then this rich young ruler is provided as an example of that. This man was incredibly wealthy and he was incredibly moral.
He had kept the 10 commandments and the wealth, according to Jews at that time.
I mean,.
We kind of view it the same way today, even wealth was a sign that God had blessed this man. When the Jews saw a wealthy person, they thought,.
Well,.
God's favor is truly upon him. So the disciples are astonished to find that this man, despite his wealth and his law keeping, it was not enough to enter the kingdom of God. It was still impossible for him to enter the kingdom.
But again,.
In verse 27, what is impossible with man is possible with God. And that's the lesson that we draw from the account of the rich young ruler. There was a video that I saw just the other day. There was something that came to mind here about having faith and depending upon God in order to enter the kingdom of God.
I saw this exchange with a multimillionaire entrepreneur. Felt like this was fitting in our account with the rich young ruler. His name is Alex Hormozy. And he actually shared on a podcast recently that he was once a Christian.
Pretty interesting words that he shared here. Let me play this. He uses foul language, so I'm going to make sure to try to bleep this out. You might hear some funny gaps.
I probably cut a cuss word out of there, but let me go ahead and play this and I'll interrupt as we go, kind of summarize what he's saying and what he's missing. Here's Alex.
When I was like 19 or 20, I became a born again Christian. And then I ended up falling away from that because I was like, I don't know if this is true.
And,.
And then I spent the next five years dedicated to apologetics, which is defensive faith of the Christian faith. So just learning the arguments around like why Christianity like is true.
Right.
I ended up not believing in it and I can give a variety of reasons, but I'll give you the simplest one. Hopefully I'm not insulting anyone. This is just my belief that I'm sharing, which is a lot of one of the biggest, one of the strongest arguments for Christianity against other world religions is that other world religions say like, if you go to the good place, so if you do a good job, you go to the good place.
And fundamentally that's, it's a, it's a hard paradigm because it means like at what point are you 51 good versus 49 Should I have just held one more door open and I would have gone to the good place forever.
And so if you can draw that line, then it makes it, it kind of makes it ridiculous.
It's like kind of breaks down on the like, be a good person system.
And so that's all worldviews with the exception of Buddhism and Christianity with Christianity. They're like, you don't have to be good. You just have to have faith. If you have faith in Jesus and you go to the good place.
So he's on to something like in his years of studying apologetics, he came to recognize it's not by good works. Even when he's looking at other world religions, he sees there's no way that you could even quantify the number of good works that you're doing.
How do you know that you've done 51 good work? So now I have more good works and bad and karma would dictate, then I get to go to the good place. So even through logical reasoning, as he's looking through the different world religions, he's he's seeing there's no way to attain the, the best possible level of good based on their metric of what's good and what's bad.
You would never even know that you got there. So that's intuitive. It's interesting that he was able to notice that. And with Christianity, Christianity was outright saying you can't do enough good things in order to enter the kingdom of God.
You must believe. It's by having faith in Jesus that our sins are forgiven and we have everlasting life with God. He didn't put it that way. I don't even know that he really understood that, but at least that's what he was able to glean from the Christian message.
So let's go on.
And so the, the reason that for me, fundamentally, I didn't believe in that was because you actually create another false binary, which is believe or not believe when in reality is to what extent you believe it's how hard you believe.
And again, you create another 50 line, which is should I believe 1 more and then I would go into the good place.
Forever.
So he's using the same sort of measurement that he was using with good works, but now he's applying it to faith. So with good works, where's 51 When do I cross the 50 threshold and I now have more good works than bad.
And that was the way that he was able to weed out all the other religions in.
The world.
They can't possibly be true because there's no way that you would even know that you've done more good works than bad, but then on the faith side of things. So he comes to see Christianity is about faith.
It's not about works, but at one point do you have 51 faith so that you get to go to the good place? He's completely missed the teachings of Jesus on this. As a matter of fact, we just read about this in the chapter right before.
Remember that the disciples said to Jesus, this is Luke 17, five increase our faith. And what was Jesus response? The Lord said, if you had faith, like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea.
And it would obey you. And the point, as we had considered that a few weeks ago, the point is not how much faith you have, but that you have faith, because how can you even quantify faith? You would never be able to measure it out so that, you know, I have 60 faith, increase it God, so that I have 80 faith and on and on it goes.
You would never, you would never be able to know when you were finally filled up with all the faith that you can possibly get. So Jesus doesn't respond to the request to increase their faith. He certainly does increase it.
That's something that should happen in the growth of a believer. As we are being sanctified, we grow in our faith again, can't quantify it, but you would certainly be able to say of yourself today that I have more faith than I had years ago.
When I first became a Christian, I'm growing in this faith and my understanding of who God is, who I am sin and what holiness is, what God has called me to what the, what the Christian life is supposed to look like.
We call this maturity. So you've grown up in these things. It's not that your faith has increased in quantity, but it is increased in maturity. And so Jesus response to the disciples there was not. Yeah.
As soon as you get up to like 51 faith, then you're saved. No, it's just that you have the presence of faith at all. If there is any faith at all faith, like a grain of mustard seed, The impossible happens.
A dead man is raised to life. A sinner is forgiven. His sins. One who is separated from God is brought back into fellowship with God again, because it's not about how much faith you have. It's about whom you put your faith in Jesus Christ who saves us from judgment and reconciles us to God.
What is impossible if it depends on man is possible with God. And we'll consider that as we look at this account between today and tomorrow, we won't get all the way through it today, but, but anyway, coming back to that exchange there with Alex, a multimillionaire who has made millions and millions of dollars buying businesses, selling them, investing in other things, making more and more money.
At one point, he was an invested Christian, not just invested in money, but was invested in God according to his testimony, but failed to understand the teachings of Jesus really kind of had the same sort of heart as the rich young ruler.
He decided that it was better for him to have this stuff rather than have God. Let's go on because there's still a little bit more of this clip to go. And then we'll get back to our text here. Here's Alex once again, right?
So anyways, the point is, is that I studied apologetics for a long period of time. And then I was really sad. And I was like, I'm just going to do stuff that I think is cool. And that was like, that was like the first break in the chain for me.
That was wildly freeing because I stopped judging myself for not being happy. And then I was just like, Oh, I'm like, I am unhappy. I'm like, cool, whatever. And I just kept going. And all of a sudden, just like, stop mattering to me.
Like, I don't think about it. I genuinely, like, I don't think like, does this make me happy? Does not like, I don't think about it.
It's really fascinating that he's kind of admitting there. He walked away sad. And he just stopped thinking about it anymore. He wasn't even going to pursue anything. Whatever he felt like doing, he was going to do.
Happiness and sadness didn't even really matter to him, which is not true. It really does. He's an empty man now. And the wealth is not enough. It's not filling him up. It's not satisfying him. He walked away from the truth, which he failed to understand.
And he put his hope and trust in stuff that isn't really filling him up at all. I mean, his eyes look dead, even in that interview. He doesn't have any joy at all in what he's expressing there. Doesn't even say, man, once I put faith away, suddenly I was free.
Nothing like that. It's just nothing. Because he was always in pursuit of himself, never in pursuit of God. And that's just a dog chasing his tail. That gets you nowhere. If we are willing to give up everything for Christ, then we gain everything.
Let's come back again to this exchange with the rich young ruler that Jesus talks to in Luke 18. So it says at the start of this account, a ruler asked him, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Now, with regards to this ruler, it would have to be that this man was himself a teacher in the synagogue. These were referred to as rulers. In Luke 8 41, there came a man named Jairus, who was a ruler of the synagogue.
And falling at Jesus' feet, he implored him to come to his house and heal his daughter.
Do you remember that?
A little bit later on, Luke 12 11, Jesus said to his disciples, when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious about how you should defend yourself or what you should say.
Luke 13 14. But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, there are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those days and be healed and not on the Sabbath day.
In Luke 14 1, one Sabbath, Jesus went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, and they were watching him carefully. And now here we are in Luke chapter 18, when a ruler comes to him and says, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
So whoever this man was, he was actually a great teacher in Israel. We're not told what his identity is. You've probably heard some people speculate that this could be the apostle Paul. That would only be speculation.
We have no evidence that affirms that to us. Some have said, you know, it could be Saul. We've seen how advanced he was as a Pharisee, which he talks about in his biography in Philippians chapter three.
So maybe it could be Paul. This is the one interaction that Paul has with Jesus. And then later on, he does get saved and he becomes an apostle to the Gentiles. But again, we have nothing in the text that really leads us to be able to conclude that this is just an unnamed man.
And all accounts seem to indicate that he walks away and never comes back to the Lord. That appears to be the lesson. This man's still trying to attain eternal life by his own good works and by what he possesses.
And if that's the way that he's going to go about it, then attaining the kingdom of God is impossible. There's no way that he will get there. So we know this man was a teacher. Somebody who was great in knowledge.
Somebody who knew and who taught other people. And he comes to Jesus and says to him, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He's wanting to get confirmation that all his good works and all of his wealth have been enough for him to inherit the kingdom of God.
Eternal life in the gospels, often synonymous with kingdom of God. So when this ruler is asking this of Jesus, he's asking him, do I get to get into the kingdom? Do I have entrance? Do I gain eternal life?
That's what he's asking for. Now, calling him good teacher, Jesus challenges. Jesus says to him, why do you call me good? Now, the fact that Jesus responds to the ruler in that way and goes on to say no one is good except God alone.
There are some skeptics who have taken Jesus response and they have said Jesus never actually admits that he's God. In fact, he challenges the idea that other people would say of him that he is God, because here you have the ruler who calls him good teacher.
And Jesus questions that and even says no one is good except God alone. I'm not good. God is good. That's the way the skeptics would try to summarize Jesus response here. But that's not what Jesus is doing.
He's not denying that he is God in this response. Rather, he's challenging the Pharisee or the ruler. Let me be specific. He's challenging this ruler and saying, do you really know who I am? Are you prepared to know that I am, in fact, the good teacher?
Do you know what you are saying when you call me good? So he's challenging this man's heart from the very from the very moment that this man comes to Jesus and asks him this question and therefore saying, why do you call me good?
Have you really thought through who you're talking to and what you are asking? Because there is no one good except God alone. Now, that response also is a challenge to this ruler because he's going to show this ruler that he's not good either.
Not as good as he thinks he is. He thinks he is this moral man who has kept the law. He's been a teacher of the law. He is a ruler of the synagogue. And yet Jesus is going to show him you have not kept the commandments as well as you think you have.
So even you are not good. And this is the proper use of the law here with Jesus showing him the commandments. You know, the commandments do not commit adultery. And again, this is another clue we have that this man was himself a teacher in the synagogue because Jesus says to him, you know, the commandments.
Most Jews did, of course. But this man, especially because he taught them. And so Jesus reminds him of the Ten Commandments, those especially having to do with man's relationship with man. You know, we understand the Ten Commandments to be two tables of the law.
You have the first table, which is our relationship with God, and the second table, which is our relationship with one another. The first table consists of commands like you will love the Lord your God and have no other gods before me.
You'll not raise up a graven image. You will not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. And you will honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Those commandments, those four, are what we might call vertical commandments addressing our relationship with God.
The next six are horizontal commands having to do with the way that we relate to one another or in fulfillment of those commands, the way that we love each other. First and second table of the law. Love God, love people, love others.
And so Jesus gives these commandments, not in any particular order, in fact, because the first of the horizontal commands would be honor your father and mother. And he ends with that one rather than begins with it.
So he says, do not commit adultery. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. And the ruler says, all these I have kept from my youth. But Jesus says to him, one thing you still lack.
He still loves his stuff. And he's not willing to give it up in part with it. And in showing this man this, Jesus is also saying to him, you don't truly love God. You love your stuff. You're not seeking after God.
Because once again, challenging the man by saying, why do you call me good? Because no one is good but God alone. He's not in pursuit of God. He's in pursuit of himself. He just wants some assurance that he has done well enough and that he has enough that he will get into the kingdom of God by his works.
But Jesus is going to show and say, no matter how much you've done, it's not enough to enter the kingdom of God. And showing him, there's still things you haven't done. You love your stuff more than you love God.
As much as you are trying to be a good person, it will never be good enough. And this even astonishes the disciples to say, then who can be saved? And once again, verse 27, what is impossible with man is possible with God.
We cannot save ourselves. It is God who saves us. Nothing by our work or our will is enough to enter the kingdom of God. It is only by faith in Jesus Christ who has accomplished all of that for us. He is the entrance into the eternal kingdom.
And no one comes to the father but by him, as we read in John 14, 6. It is impossible for man to be saved. But with God, all things are possible. With faith like a child, all things are possible. With faith like a mustard seed, we are saved because of what Jesus Christ has done for us.
We're going to continue to talk more about this with the rest of this exchange. The rich young ruler's reaction, the disciples' reaction, and then Jesus' promise of their inheritance, which he gives at the end of this conversation.
So let's finish there. We'll pray and then we'll come back to it again tomorrow. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for what we've read here in Luke 18. And I pray that we would consider our condition, our need, and we look to Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith, to be forgiven our sins and to enter the kingdom of God.
It is not by any work that we can do that we enter into this kingdom. But it's because of what Christ has done for us. And so, like a child, we put all of our faith and trust in God. Depending on ourselves, not at all.
Just like a child cannot depend on himself in order to survive, but looks to his parents, so we look to our Father who is in heaven to save us and bring us into his kingdom. Lord, I pray also that we would have the courage and the enthusiasm to share the message of the kingdom with somebody else so that they too will hear the good news of Jesus Christ and be saved.
It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
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