The Trap

This week I would like to talk about a chapter from the book the guys are reading for their Bible study. The book is called Jesus The King by Timothy Keller. In it he walks through the book of Mark, breaking down much of it verse by verse. Reading this book has greatly increased my understanding of Jesus and what he came to do. The chapter I will talk about is entitled “The Trap” and it breaks down the story of the Rich Young Ruler in Mark chapter 10. Keller starts off the chapter stating how a historian named Andrew Wells noticed that the core of all main religions other than Christianity have stayed in the same location. Islam started at Mecca and is still there today. Buddhism started in the Far East and that is where it remains. Hinduism started in India and remains a mainly Indian religion. But Christianity is different. Its core is always moving. The original center was Jerusalem. It then moved to Rome. A few centuries later it moved to Europe and through immigration to the North America. Why does Christianity do this? Wells believes “that when Christianity is in a place of power and wealth for a long period, the radical message of sin and grace and the cross can become muted or even lost. Then Christianity starts to transmute into a nice, safe religion, one that’s for respectable people who try to be good. And eventually it becomes virtually dormant in those places and the center moves somewhere else” So the problem for Christianity is wealth – that is “the trap” that Keller is talking about in this chapter. Not that wealth is bad, but when its put in a place of being our savior, there is a problem. How do we know if money is our savior? Here is what Keller says Jesus inferred in his conversation with the Rich Young Ruler: “Right now God is your boss; but God is not your Savior, and here’s how you can see it: I want you to imagine life without money. I want you to imagine all of it gone. No inheritance, no inventory, no servants, no mansions – all of that is gone. All you have is me. Can you live like that?” I thought the way Keller put that was so powerful. I have read this story so many times but never thought about it like that before. Can I live without the comfort that wealth brings? Will Jesus truly be enough for me? I would like to say yes but its much easier said than done. I love what Keller says a little later: “If you want to be a Christian, of course you’ll repent of your sins. But after you’ve repented of your sins you’ll have to repent of how you have used the good things in your life to fill the place where God should be.” So how do we avoid the trap that wealth places in our lives? In America especially, we are surround by wealth everywhere we look. Is it even possible for us to be 100% free from its grasp? Here is what Keller says about that: “Does it move you to think of what Jesus did for you? When that begins to really move you, amaze you, make you weep, you’ll have a fighting chance of avoiding the trap. Letting Jesus’ sacrifice melt you will drain money of its importance for you.” In other words, we need to make the Gospel real. We need to remind ourselves of it daily. If we are able to do that, then money will lose its hold on us and we will have, as Keller puts it, a fighting chance of avoiding the trap.

Thanks for reading!