Luke 18:18-30 And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?… When Jesus tells us that we cannot be His disciples so long as we lack one thing, does He mean that we must have supplied every moral defect, must have attained every grace, must have vanquished every spiritual enemy, and, in fact, have ceased to sin, before we can be His disciples? That would be simply saying that none of us can hope to be a Christian unless he is morally perfect; and that of course involves the converse, that every true Christian is thus morally perfect, The shock this statement gives to our common sense, and its manifest contradiction of the whole drift of the New Testament, at once drives us from any such interpretation. We find a consistent meaning, I suppose, if we understand Him as declaring that no heart is really Christianized, or converted, so long as there is any one conscious, deliberate, or intentional reservation from entire obedience to the Divine will. So that if I say, Here is one particular sin which I must continue to practise; all the rest of my conduct I freely conform to God's law, but this known wrong I must continue to do — then I am no Christian. If you single out some one chosen indulgence, however secret — a dubious custom in business, a fault of the tongue or temper — and, placing y our hand over that, reply to the all-searching commandment of the Most High, "This I cannot let go; this is too sweet to me, or too profitable to me, or too tightly inter. woven with my constitutional predilections, or too hard to be put off" — then the quality of a disciple is not in you. There is a portion of your being which you do not mean, or try, to consecrate to heaven. And that single persistent offence vitiates the whole character. It keeps you, as a man, as a whole man, on the self. side or world-side, and away from Christ's side. For it not only shuts off righteousness from one district of your nature, and so abridges the quantity of your life, but it inflicts the much more radical damage of denying the supremacy of the law of righteousness, and thus corrupts the quality. It practically rejects the heavenly rule when that rule crosses the private inclination. And that is the essence of rebellion. (Bishop F. D. Huntington.) Parallel Verses KJV: And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?WEB: A certain ruler asked him, saying, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" |
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