[Note: This sermon expounds Mark 10:21–31 with Matthew 19:16–30. Delivered 21 December 1980, Montreal.]
We continue in the Word of God at Mark 10:21. For the past weeks we have been studying the case of the rich young man and the Lord's teaching on money. Last Sunday we identified eight things concerning the character of riches. Riches stands in antagonism to the kingdom, as the flesh stands against the spirit. Money competes for the love of our heart — where your treasure is, there your heart will be. It competes for the lordship of our lives — you cannot serve God and mammon. It competes for the faith and allegiance of our heart — the very word mammon means "that in which one puts one's trust." It is addictive, leading to covetousness, always wanting more. It is called "mammon of unrighteousness" because it leads us into unrighteousness, as the addict steals to feed his habit. It is described as dishonest — untrustworthy — for those who put their faith in money will be painfully disappointed. And finally, it is transient: money simply passes through your hands, and only what becomes part of your character can truly become your own.
Now the question we face today is this: seeing that money is such a spiritual enemy, how are we to deal with it? We cannot simply do without money — without it you would not be here today, you could not eat, you cannot function. Yet we have seen how dangerous it is. The analogy I would suggest is fat in the body. Fat is necessary; your body cannot survive without it; even the most virtuous food contains some fat. Yet if the body stores up fat in excess, it clogs the blood vessels and becomes lethal. The solution is not to eliminate fat entirely but to burn it up through exercise so that there is no dangerous accumulation. Money is exactly the same: we cannot live without it, but the Lord's warning is against storing it up. You become rich only by storing more than you spend. Even a porter who earns modest wages can accumulate thirty thousand pounds, as was once reported in the newspaper, simply by setting aside every small coin. The accumulation is the danger.
The rich young man in our passage had accumulated greatly — Luke says he was very rich. He had reached a state of spiritual obesity. And the Lord's verdict was that such a condition, left unchanged, will keep a person from entering the kingdom just as certainly as a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle. This is a general statement about all who accumulate riches, as Mark 10:23 makes clear: "How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God." It is confirmed by Luke 12:33, where the Lord says to all his disciples — not just one rich man — "Sell your possessions and give alms." And by Peter's statement in Mark 10:28: "Lo, we have left everything and followed you." This is not a private instruction to one unusual person; it is the Lord's general teaching.
Now notice how beautifully apt the Lord's image of the camel is. The camel is the one creature in the animal world that specialises in storing up. In those great humps it stores fat, water, nourishment — enough to cross the desert for days without eating or drinking. It is the hoarder of the animal kingdom. But the camel has another quality equally remarkable: it is the most bad-tempered animal in the world. It never ceases to grumble, moan, and protest. To make a camel kneel you must yank it, whip it, push it — and throughout the entire process it screeches, snarls, and mumbles without stopping. When you ask it to stand up again, the whole performance repeats. It is a beast of burden on which heavy loads are laid, yet it murmurs continuously whether burdened or unburdened. The camel is a perfect picture of the natural man in his fallen condition: storing up, self-centred, bad-tempered, never satisfied.
I am compelled at this point to apply this picture to the church. Within the sheepfold there are sometimes camels: people who complain, criticize, and mutter against fellow members, against the training team, against the church leadership. I say plainly and publicly that this kind of conduct must stop. No church is perfect, and if you are looking for things to criticize, you will never lack material. But if your concern is genuinely constructive — for the building up of the body — there are proper channels: speak directly to those concerned, not behind their backs. To speak behind the backs of brothers and sisters is slander, and it damages the unity and harmony of the church. Those who persist in this camel-like behavior must understand that it will call for disciplinary action. Sheep have no horns; they do not attack one another; they mix together peaceably. Camels, by contrast, can bite off the hand that feeds them. We must decide which kind of creature we are.
But here is the hope. The Lord says in verse 27: "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God." God can transform the camel-like nature. He can turn the grumbling, storing, self-centred natural man into the kind of person who is genuinely at home in the green pastures of God's kingdom, not in the spiritual desert. A person who is spiritually far out and does not even feel disturbed by their condition is behaving like a camel — camels are perfectly at home in the wilderness. But a sheep cannot survive in the wilderness; it dies there. Do you feel at home in your current spiritual state, or does it trouble you? The sheep seeks the shepherd; the camel wanders.
[Continues in Part B]
# "Go, Sell What You Have and Come, Follow Me" — Matthew 19:16–30; Mark 10:21–31 (Part B) — The Common Fund; Go and Come
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Mark 10:21–31 with Matthew 19:16–30, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 21 December 1980, Montreal.]
Now we must consider, in the light of all we have said about the rich young man, what action the Lord's instruction actually requires. The command in verse 21 has two parts: go and come. First, go and sell what you have and give to the poor; then come and follow me. The sequence matters. You cannot come before you go. This is the same principle as Matthew 5:23–24, where a person who comes to make an offering and remembers that his brother has something against him is told: leave your gift, first go and be reconciled, then come and offer. There are things that must be put right before you can come to the Lord. The rich young man could not come because he had not gone. He went — but he kept going, and never came.
Now let us deal very carefully and accurately with the question of what the Lord's command to sell possessions actually means in practice. Shall we say that every person with savings should immediately liquidate them? I fear that would be a misinterpretation, and I want to show you why from the scripture itself. What would have happened if the rich young man had done exactly what the Lord said — sold his possessions, given the proceeds to the poor, and come to follow Jesus? He would have joined the group of disciples who had a common fund. The disciples, including the Lord Jesus himself, shared a common purse. If this young man had joined them, he would have put his resources into that common fund and lived from it like all the others. This is the vital context without which the command is misunderstood.
This pattern of a common fund runs all the way through the early church. In Acts 2, the believers had all things in common — they shared their possessions. In Acts 6, widows were provided with daily food out of this common fund. In the Pauline churches, provision for widows and the needy is described in detail in 1 Timothy 5:3–16, which presupposes a common fund from which these needs were met. Moreover, household churches supported one another across cities and even across countries: when the household churches in Jerusalem were in famine, the churches in Macedonia sent contributions — as we read in Romans 15:26, Galatians 2:10, and 1 Corinthians 16:1. The entire early church operated on this basis of shared and mutually supporting resources.
Given this understanding, to tell a person today to sell all their possessions without providing a common fund for them to join would be deeply irresponsible. If a member of your family suddenly falls seriously ill and needs an expensive operation, and you have given away all your reserves, you have no means to meet that need and go into debt — which itself violates Paul's instruction in Romans 13:8, "Owe no one anything, except to love each other." Or if your roof is found to have wood rot and must be replaced at several thousand dollars' cost, and you have given everything away, your family is left without shelter. Paul says in 1 Timothy 5:8 that a Christian who does not provide for his family "has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." These are not hypothetical edge cases; they are the real situations that any responsible exposition of this text must address.
The right course of action, therefore, is not for isolated individuals to immediately liquidate their savings, but for the church itself to move — by the Spirit's prompting, voluntarily, not by any legislation — toward implementing the Lord's intended pattern. When a number of people within the church are so moved by the Spirit that they begin to pool their resources, to function as a community of goods, then the individual no longer needs to store up alone for retirement or medical emergencies, because the common fund takes care of those needs. At that point, what is in excess of genuine needs can flow freely to the poor and to the Lord's work. The individual cannot implement this teaching properly while the church as a whole has not moved in this direction. To place on the individual what properly belongs to the community is to make the individual bear a burden that only the community can bear rightly.
The Lord's words about the hundredfold in verses 29–30 are the foundation passage for exactly this: "There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this present time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life." How can one who has given up everything have a hundredfold of houses and lands? Only through a community of goods: when everything is held in common, your brother's house is your house, your sister's land is your land, and a community of a hundred people gives you a hundredfold of everything. It is also significant that the Lord said a hundredfold rather than a thousand-fold or more, though he could have. This seems to indicate that the natural unit of such a community is around a hundred people — roughly ten to twenty families — a size that is genuinely manageable without needing financial experts to administer it.
This is God's vision for his church: not a formal institution with individual members each looking after their own affairs in isolation, but a community where no one needs to accumulate out of fear, where the retired servant of God is not left alone and forsaken in a state institution, where the faithful are cared for by one another throughout their lives. That a faithful lifetime servant of the Lord should end their days neglected in a government old people's home is a disgrace to the name of Christ. We are called to love one another enough to lay down our lives for one another; surely that includes laying down our possessions for one another. Let us pray that the Lord will move in his church to bring us, step by step and without fanaticism, toward this beautiful life together — the life the early church knew, and the life Christ intended for us from the beginning.
Let us be quiet before God in prayer. Amen.