Wednesday, April 13, PM

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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beginning in verse 18, reading through verse 34. Now a certain ruler asked him,

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What shall I do to inherit eternal life? No one is good but one, that is,

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God. You know the commandments. Do not commit adultery.

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Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness.

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Honor your father and your mother. And he said, all these things

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I have kept from my youth. So still lack one thing.

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Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me.

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But when he heard this, he became very sorrowful for he was very rich. And when

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Jesus saw that he became very sorrowful, he said, how hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God.

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For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for. And those who heard it said, who then can be saved?

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But he said, the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.

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Then Peter said, see, we have left all and followed you. So he said to them, also parents or brothers or wife or children for this times more eternal life.

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Said to them, all things that are will be accomplished for he will be delivered to the

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Gentiles, scourge him and kill him.

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And the third day, none of these things, the saying was hidden from them, which were spoken.

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Theme of chapter 18 and second half of chapter 17, the theme has been synonymous with the expression, the kingdom of heaven, not of this world.

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Jesus' followers are in this, has an authority sourced, not model prayer that Jesus gives to his followers.

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Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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And when we pray for God's kingdom to come, most immediately for each one of us, it means robust amen in our hearts.

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That we want to see in our ability to influence things in our respect.

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So the concern has been how to enter the kingdom of man who is coming to judge the covenant breaker.

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How is it that someone saved? Well, Jesus tells a story about the

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Pharisee and the tax collector. And the Pharisee stands in the middle of the temple and he, and the tax collector stands over in the corner.

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And he says, there's nothing good to list about myself. Thank you

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God that you have, and the tax collector says, technical word,

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I need you to be propitious to me. I need you to atone for my sins.

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I need you to atone. He went down to his house, justified, right on the ground, as well as with nothing to offer.

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It says good teacher. What, now when we engage with, we want to follow

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Jesus in the way that he answers questions. As he doesn't answer the question straight.

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Because it may be that some question, and when you ask somebody your question and they don't answer you straight, well,

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I did to come up with this question. But you see Jesus what he's doing. And so the question he asks is, is what?

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What does he ask? Okay, well, what's at stake is to inherit eternal life.

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Jesus, the doing, does he talk about, what's the very first thing that he does?

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Yeah, right, that was, that was part of the question.

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So he said, good teacher, a problem with this word.

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Though, of course, we could have spent some time talking about how he's more than. And Jesus is going to, in a roundabout way, of the doing, which he's just talked about with the

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Pharisees, that's gonna be an issue, right?

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That he has to deal with. This conception of eternal life, right?

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What do you mean by that in eternal life? And so, to be unraveled and untangled.

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So Jesus just starts with the first thing. So, why do you call me good?

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And he says, that he is God. That Jesus didn't think of himself as God.

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The unfortunate position to take, given everything else that, doesn't think that Jesus is

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God. But what Jesus is doing is he's using the opportunity to get at this man's presuppositions.

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And that's where Jesus wants to have the, about the man's presuppositions.

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Maybe he hasn't really thought about it a great deal. That he believes in without realizing he does.

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Jesus is a good man, he sees. He heals people, he helps people. He's patient.

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He's an excellent, says good teacher, what must

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I do to inherit eternal life? And I think it's apparent from the inter, that this ruler believes, right?

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Because he just called Jesus good. When Jesus does an examination and his character and his following of the law, this man, what must

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I do to inherit? Jesus says, there's no one good.

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He says, you are identifying someone you believe to be good. So Jesus is saying, here's the first problem.

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You're looking around at people around you for the standard. Standard.

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Now what's the problem with that? So what's the problem with looking at man, at people around you for the standard?

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Somebody else has a different word for it, I'm sure. None of us is worthy, okay.

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We all fall short. Of course, military dark humor.

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Military dark humor, instant connection. So that's the thing, is that you can always find people that are faster than you, right?

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More able than you. And you can always find people that are slower than you. This makes your standard very subjective relative to your own experience, what you've heard of, perhaps.

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And so this places you in a terrible, maybe to self -condemnation.

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And you can always find people who are better off than you. Or your proclivity may be, okay,

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Brian. May be that you think very well the people around you that are worse off.

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Well, you know, I may have difficulty with this problem, and I may have failed in that.

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And wasn't the Pharisee doing that? You know, I thank you that you didn't make me like that standard, which the ruler is doing.

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I see that, you know, I'm seeing a standard. Now, Jesus corrects him and says, no, no one good but God.

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Now, how do we know how good God is? Through our senses, through our emotions.

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We know how good he is through his word. His word, his eternal word.

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His word that is profitable, meaning

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God's word tells us what is true. And about his word, so that when we look around and we see his, and the true and the beautiful, we know how to interpret, and that gives us the standard so that when we encounter the bad, we have an objective standard to call them those things.

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So that truth, goodness, and beauty are not actually in the eye of the beholder.

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So we live in an objective world because we have God. So there's no one good but God. So Jesus is correcting, because that presupposition about the standard of good relates to his question of what must, okay?

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Well, obviously, if God is the standard, and to be welcomed, to be accepted by him, if he's the standard, you have to be good like God.

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And since God's word gives us, law is the expression of God's character, how good

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God is by listing some commandments. God is by expressing the law.

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Verse 20, you know the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, honor your father and your mother.

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Now, what do you observe about any of Jesus' lists?

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All right, so second table of the law, love one another righteously and humbly.

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Second table of the law, love others. Dealing with that first, okay?

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To the, you have heard it said, do not commit adultery, but I say to you, which obviously is still that.

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Heart matter, when, after the man says all these things, drills down until he strikes the, and what does he find there?

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What does the law of God expose in the life of this rich ruler? There is greed going on, isn't there?

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Now, we have to be clear as the Bible is that greed, which

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Paul later on identifies as, it's connected to covetousness, and covetousness is idolatry.

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So that would be a breaking of the 10th commandment and the first commandment combined, right?

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There'd be two different manifestations. A man loves more than God. Yeah, loving more than you love

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God. So he drills down about what goes on in the heart. He exposes this man's idolatry by challenging him, by challenging him.

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He says, okay, you still lack one thing. You lack one thing.

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Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me. When he heard this, he became very sorrowful for he was very rich.

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Now in verse 22, Jesus says the man lacks, the man lacks one thing.

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Okay, so let's identify the one thing that the man lacks.

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What is it? Yeah, following Christ.

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He says, you lack one thing. You don't lack wealth, you don't lack self -confidence, but there's one thing you don't have.

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What is it? You don't have me. All right, you see that?

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And Jesus knew the man's heart that the money was his

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God, the money was his security. Remember in Proverbs, a man's wealth is like a high wall in his imagination.

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Proverbs is one of the best, I think it is the best cartoon strip ever created. You can just see it in your mind, can't you?

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Right? There's the man who's standing back and looking at the wall he's built out of his, out of his, let's put it into our own context, his paper dollar bills.

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Yeah, there's my security. And there's a big wind and in the wind that's starting to blow the paper dollars away.

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You can see written there, you know, inflation and theft and taxes and death and everything else that will just blow that all away.

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But the man thinks he has great security in this wall of wealth. Well, Jesus identifies that folly in a man's heart.

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And he wants him to turn it around. Turn away from finding his security and his worshiping of wealth and turn and worship

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God. So he's calling for repentance is what he's doing. Remember the basic message of Jesus.

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The kingdom of heaven is at hand. This is from Mark chapter one, verse 15, but we see it, that's the summary of what we see here.

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The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.

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All right, so he's been talking about the kingdom of heaven. And now he's telling this man to repent and believe in the gospel, the person and work of Jesus.

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So that's the encounter with the rich young ruler. We're gonna pick this up at our next opportunity and talk about Jesus' further use of this encounter as a lesson for his disciples and everybody who was there.

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As he clarifies the nature of salvation, how it is that anyone can be saved.

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Any questions or thoughts before we turn our attention to some prayer? Yes, Bill. I think that subtext could be there.

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That Jesus had not yet been, see Paul says that Jesus was manifested as the son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.

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So until Jesus rose from the dead, the fullness of God's revelation that Jesus Christ was indeed

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God, the son and human flesh was not completed. So now there was, of course, gracious revelations prior to the resurrection, but how much this man would have been able to pick up on that,

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I don't know. But he certainly needs to know that God is the standard of good, not mankind or the year 2022.