Giving It Up

My reading in Mark this morning made me think of a few stories:

1. The young girl at our church who kept asking her parents if she could be baptized. Her parents encouraged her to wait until she could understand more of what she was doing but then finally relented to her wishes.

2. A niece who at a very young age asked her mother about how to receive the Holy Spirit since she had heard about Him at church at home. She invited Jesus into her heart when she was six or seven.

3. The "surfer dude" to whom my brother and I witnessed about Christ back in the mid-70's. He told us that he wasn't ready to accept Jesus because he didn't want to give up having sex with women.

4. The times I feared the Holy Spirit and was reluctant to surrender my life to Him because of what I'd need to give up and risk losing.

You might read this whole passage: Mark 10:13-26.

But here are a few phrases from these encounters people had with Jesus:

Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I assure you, anyone who doesn’t have their kind of faith will never get into the Kingdom of God.”

“How hard it is for rich people to get into the Kingdom of God!”

And Jesus replied, “I assure you that everyone who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or property, for my sake and for the Good News, will receive now in return, a hundred times over, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and property—with persecutions. And in the world to come they will have eternal life.

Bloggers, why is it that children tend to be more open to Christ and adults often are less likely to accept the forgiveness of Christ and let Him be their king?

The word that came to mind while I was showering and pondering this verse was: ATTACHMENTS.

Don't you think that our attachments to things of this world, including close family and friends, can get in the way of us giving our full allegiance to Jesus?

As I talked to Susan about this a few minutes before leaving the house, she gave me a suggestion: what if we started paying our cleaning lady more for her twice-a-month work? My first reaction was, "I dont' want to give up more money." Then it immediately hit me -- attachments! "Give it up, Jim. Isn't God enough?"

I've been reading a fascinating autobiography of Phil Vischer called Me, Myself and Bob. He's the guy that invented the wildly successful Veggie Tales videos. He tells of how his Big Idea company skyrocketed into fame and fortune -- and then blew up after a lawsuit in Dallas. It was in the aftermath of his lost dream that He began "hearing" the Lord wake him up to the fact that his dream had become an idol. And that God plus nothing is enough. He is enough.

And giving up for Jesus whatever we've attached to or let others attach to us is worth it all. He promises us so in vss. 29-30.

O, what those young children have to teach us about being open to Jesus! Teach us more, Lord, and give us hearts more yielded to You each day.

Jim