My friend and colleague Morgan Murray is giving us much food for thought about Rich Young Rulers and their relevance today. Thanks for Guest Blogging for me, Morgan. 
While people have been reading this, I have been visiting my brother and Beth's sister in Oregon. Hopefully, I am catching some fish, too!
I’ve been sharing an extended meditation on the story of the Rich Young Ruler in the gospel of Mark. I started this series of blog entries by suggesting that the RYR is a powerful metaphor for considering the spiritual condition of young affluent professionals in Orange County. But I think it’s safe to say that the issues the young ruler has around money, status, and identity are common to all of us. When the man comes to Jesus asking how he can inherit eternal life – how he can have a life that matters - Jesus says, “You lack one thing.” What is that one thing? It is the thing nearly all of us lack. With the exception of Mother Teresa and other saintly souls, we lack complete confidence in God’s goodness. Even Henrietta Mears, a famous Bible teacher and profoundly influential figure in evangelical circles, when asked what she would do differently if she could live her life over again replied, “I would trust God more.”
This world teaches us is that if we give up the identities we have built around our titles, our academic degrees, our zip codes and our social/political affiliations, then we will have no identity at all. Not only will we believe that we will become nothing, but we will stay that way forever. This is our greatest fear – the fear that drives us to work as hard as we can, earn as much as we can, control whatever we can, and impress as many people as we can. The fear of being nothing drives nearly everything we do unless we can trust God’s love, acceptance, and provision over our own efforts.
We fear that we if lose our stamina, status and stuff then we become nothing. But Jesus knows firsthand that this not true. Because of his experience in the wilderness Jesus can offer us, so Dallas Willard asserts, “the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be.” In order to receive this assurance, we must begin by trusting that Jesus knows what he is talking about. The form this trust takes looks different for every person. For a paralyzed man it was to obey Jesus’ instruction to “stand up, take your mat and walk” (John 5:2ff). For Peter the fisherman, it meant leaving the only life he’d ever known to follow Jesus around the countryside. For you, it may mean sitting in a parking lot with your head on the steering wheel, asking Jesus to take charge of your life and really meaning it. In the case of this young man, it meant relinquishing the wealth of his life and all the identity he had bound up with it. Regardless of how it looks to someone else, for each of us it is a moment of complete surrender to Jesus’ authority. Regardless of how it might feel to another person, for each of us it feels like the biggest gamble of our lives.
Monday: Putting the Camel On A Diet
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