The Rich Young Ruler 
Luke 18:18-23

Three of the four gospels contain an account of the young man who asked Jesus a very important question: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (v. 18). A ruler with great wealth, he considered himself a moral man because he had kept God's commandments.

However, he was operating under the false assumption that good works bring salvation. He seemed to be asking Jesus what else he had to do to secure his place in heaven—besides all the good things he'd already accomplished.

This is what I refer to as the "great deception"—the false belief that eternal life can be earned through our own efforts. If we give credence to this lie, then we do not understand the problem of our sin and how it separates us from God. Scripture tells us that we have inherited a sinful nature from the first man (Rom. 5:12). Ever since that time, humanity has been in rebellion against the Lord and under His judgment. There is nothing we can do to pay for our sin. If this were the end of the story, we would be a people without hope for today or the future. But the good news is that the heavenly Father recognized our plight and mercifully provided the way to heaven (John 14:6).

When God made us in His image, He created us to live forever. So, though our earthly body will perish, our spirit will never die. The question about eternal life is important, as we'll spend eternity either with God in heaven or in an insufferable state, separated permanently from Him (Matt. 25:34, 41).

The Apostle Paul wrote to show the superiority of Christ over all-over all human philosophies, traditions, personalities, and accomplishments. He wrote to remind Christians of what they already possess in Christ. He wants us to understand that everything we need, in Christ, we have—everything! All the freedom, security, acceptance, affection, approval, validation, protection, cleansing, righteousness and rescue we crave, in Christ, we already own. This frees us to live a life of radical generosity, risk, sacrifice, courage and loss. Because our identity, worth,  and value doesn't depend on our success, but Christ's success for us, we can live life going to the back not getting to the front.  We're free, in other words, to become small.

Paul's goal is to help us see the infinite supremacy and beauty of Jesus so we would be able to resist looking to anything smaller for the freedom and fullness we long for.

The lines below are from Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)- Muggeridge was a British journalist who, later in life, became a winsome defender of the Christian faith (if you have never heard his debate from the 1960's with the atheist Charles Templeton, track it down somehow-it is wildly entertaining). Muggeridge's unique journalistic perspective on 20th century world history (he lived it and wrote about it) and the preeminence of Christ is both true and poetic.

He wrote this in the 1970's. Enjoy…

We look back upon history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon.

I look back upon my own fellow countrymen (Great Britain), once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that ‘the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.'

I've heard a crazed, cracked Austrian (Hitler) announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown (Mussolini) say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I've heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin (Stalin), acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as being wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.

I have seen America wealthier and, in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together-so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone! Gone with the wind!

England, now part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixote's of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone! Gone with the wind!

Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of One: because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace-the person of Jesus Christ.

I present him as the way, the truth, and the life. Do you know Him?