“How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” I wonder how we active church people, especially church workers, process that. The first disciples “were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, ‘Then who can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God’” (Mark 10: 23, 26-27).
My suspicion is many of us dodge Jesus’ words. For one thing, we Americans easily forget we are a wealthy people. No, you’re not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but compared to billions of people around the world, average Americans are very well off. Is Jesus saying, “How hard it will be for most Americans to enter the kingdom of God!”
For another thing, we active church people can default to “All things are possible with God.” Like a kid who comes up with the correct answer to a math problem but doesn’t know how to reach that answer, we church people know the correct answer, but do we understand salvation by grace? Might our church activity actually be an expression of our self-righteousness? “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
Oswald Chambers to his students: “It is not the practical activities that are the strength of this Bible Training college, its whole strength lies in the fact that here you are put into soak before God. You have no idea of where God is going to engineer your circumstances, no knowledge of what strain is going to be put on you either at home or abroad, and if you waste your time in overactive energies instead of getting into soak on the great fundamental truths of God’s Redemption, you will snap when the strain comes; but if this time of soaking before God is being spent in getting rooted and grounded in God on the unpractical line, you will remain true to Him whatever happens.” (“My Utmost for His Highest”)
A man told me Sunday that his recent retirement allows him to spend several hours each day in Bible study and meditation. Work, especially church work, has a way of robbing us of time to, as Chambers said, “soak” in our salvation. “If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner” (1 Peter 4:18).
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