Mark 10:21,22 - Sell everything you have and give to the poor

10:21

Being Jesus, He knew exactly where the weak spot was in the man’s life. Note that it says that “Jesus loved him”. Now Jesus is going to say something that is really going to hurt the man, even drive him away. The love of God towards us is not sentimental mush. Jesus tells him to sell all that he ahs and give it to the poor, then he would have treasure in heaven and should come and follow Jesus. In arguments about tithing people sometimes argue that tithing is Old Testament, well there are two incidents where Jesus does talk about the amount we give, they both talk about giving 100% (He commends the poor woman who gave “all that she had”), so using Jesus as an excuse for giving less is not a very logical route to take, on many levels!

10:22

We can argue that Jesus does not mean all of us should sell everything we have, and that is right and consistent with the whole of New Testament teaching, but that is not the point here. The man was sad and went away, because he had many possessions. There can be things that we hold onto, be they material, or status or whatever, things that we hold on to as a source of security. They become part of our identity. There is nothing that we have that Jesus may not at some point in our lives command us to give up. If He does, He does this out of love, a far deeper love for us than we can ever realise. It will be so that we will have treasure in heaven, and so that we can truly follow Him. We cannot do this in our own strength, but need the Holy Spirit to work within us, to help us, but we need to understand the path the Spirit might lead us down. We all have areas in our life that we do not want to lose.