Go Back In · Week 3 · Tuesday
He has a record, and it is a good one. Ask anyone. Decades of showing up, doing it right, being the man you could count on. When he is honest, the record is where he keeps his sense of being okay with God. He has kept the rules, and he has the receipts.
“Teacher,” he replied, “all these I have kept from my youth.”Mark 10:20 (BSB)
That is not a lie the man in Mark tells. Jesus does not correct him. He really had kept them, from his youth. And it was not enough, and Jesus tells him so with love.
Jesus looked at him, loved him, and said to him, “There is one thing you lack: Go, sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”Mark 10:21 (BSB)
The record was real, and the record was clean, and there was still one thing it could not buy. That is the part a careful man does not want to hear, because the record is the thing he has been quietly trusting.
The thing that never counted
There is a small thing this man used to do. Every week he sat with an old man from church who has outlived everyone and has no one. It earned nothing. It showed up on no list. And a while ago he let it go, because he was needed on things that mattered more — things people could see.
He traded the thing that counted for nothing for the things that count for something.
What he is protecting is not his time. It is the record. That living room does not add a line to it. Following Jesus back into it means an afternoon that will never be visible to anyone keeping score — including the scorekeeper he has slowly become for himself.
The move
So on Tuesday he goes back. He knocks on the door of the apartment he stopped visiting, sits down for an afternoon that will not count for anything, and lets that be enough.
The man in Mark could not follow, because he could not be without his security — and his security was not only money. It was a life he had built and could point to. “All these I have kept.” A record is a fine thing to have and a terrible thing to stand on. It gets you all the way to the door and no further.
Who the kingdom belongs to
A few verses earlier, Jesus said who does get in.
Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”Mark 10:15 (BSB)
A child cannot point to anything. No record, no receipts, nothing filed away as evidence of being worth letting in. That is exactly why a child can come in — and exactly what the man with the good record has to be willing to become.
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