THE RICH YOUNG MAN – AUGUST 16TH MONDAY (Mt 19: 16-22)

1. This man is known as the rich young ruler. He is so called because of the composite picture gleaned from three gospels

• He was rich (Mt 19:22; Mk 10: 22; Lk 18:23)
• He was young (Mt 19:20)
• He was a ruler (Lk 18:18)

He was rare young man among the young people of his time. He was conscientious, responsible and dependable. This is quite obvious from the fact that he had been already placed in a responsible position and made a ruler.

2. Christ has a special love for young people. It is obvious that the rich young man of today’s gospel was drawn to Jesus and felt at ease with him. He trusted Jesus enough to ask him a fundamental question.

3. The young man rejected Christ for three reasons.

1. Unbelief: he was not willing to entrust his life to Christ. There was some lack of belief that Jesus was really God’s very own son standing before him.
2. Self-righteousness and pride: his concept of religion was keeping laws and doing good in order to secure God’s acceptance.
3. Love of the world: he was rich and was unwilling to give up the comfort and possessions he had obtained.

4. If sometimes we think that God does not exist or God is not present in our life, we must ask ourselves the question whether we are observing his commandments. The loss of faith is not so much an intellectual problem but as a question of one’s behaviour.

5. Jesus demanded from the young man, commitment of his whole life to him. Jesus wants that this be done freely and deliberately for man is able to accept or reject the gift Christ offers.

Christ struck at the man’s real problem. The man was failing to love his neighbour as himself, so Christ quoted five of the Ten Commandments, which deals with our relationship with the neighbours. Often times we too make the same mistakes. We give importance to prayer moments but when it comes to the taking care of the needy, we have our apprehensions. We are not given the task to find the way to inherit eternal life; perhaps we all know the way to inherit the eternal life. But when it comes to the question of sacrifice, discipline, and self-denial we take the back seat. Jesus expects more from us let us not stop with the minimum.

Courtesy

The Preacher’s Outline and Sermon Bible

Words of Eternal Life