Sunday message · Jesus’ Most Confounding series
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Message Summary
In the second message of the series on Jesus’ most confounding statements, Danielle Allen turns to Mark 10:17–31. She admits she likes to jump straight to practical application, and says we often live by life equations: good work plus being a team player equals a promotion, or church attendance plus serving plus prayer equals a meaningful faith. When the equations fail, life and faith can feel broken. Her big idea is that we find we are enough when we allow God to be enough.
In the passage, a man kneels before Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus lists commandments the man says he has kept since youth, then, looking at him with genuine love, tells him to sell his possessions, give to the poor and follow him. The man leaves sad, and Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom, though everything is possible with God. Danielle once believed being good would get her to heaven, until college friends asked how she knew she had done enough and pointed her to what Jesus did on the cross.
Even believers slip back into performing, she says. J.D. Greear’s book Gospel describes how his faith became drudgery as he kept adding rules, mission trips and sponsored children, and Martin Luther warned that our hearts fall back into works righteousness unless we preach the gospel to ourselves daily. The rich young man, Danielle suggests, sensed something was missing. Jesus gave him an impossible task, not because selling everything earns salvation, but to show that nothing done in our own strength will ever be enough, a point she also draws from Jennie Allen’s book Nothing to Prove.
So should we sell our stuff? Yes and no. Jesus cares about the poor and our hearts, but elsewhere he leaves rich people alone. Nor is he shutting out the rich, since by the world’s standards we are all rich. Rather, the rich tend to trust the security of their possessions and achievements instead of Jesus, and few will risk letting go to trust him with an unknown future. God becomes enough when we admit we are not enough, and eternal life is about what Jesus does for us, not what we do for ourselves.
As for the camel, most commentaries Danielle studied take the needle to be a small gate in Jerusalem’s wall that a camel could pass through only by kneeling and shedding its load. That is how we come to Jesus. Newcomers can shed the idea of earning eternal life, and longtime believers can shed the idea of earning more favor and rest in Jesus’ payment. He did not need to die for something we could do with a to-do list. A life coach by trade, Danielle closes with a question: where is God asking you to be the camel, kneeling and letting go of what you carry to prove yourself? She then leads in prayer.