The Price is Right: Come on Down!
Mark 10:17-27
Connect:
Share how you have seen God in the Highs and Lows of your week.
Prayer:
Pray that God would lead your discussion time and bring fresh insight, conviction, and hope through your time together.
Review:
This series, “The Price is Right, we are looking at honoring God with the resources we are entrusted with as He provides for our own needs and gives us the capacity to “be blessed and be a blessing”. We will look at tithes and offerings as God’s intended way of reducing the hold that our ‘stuff’ has on our hopes, confidence and security. This week we looked at the connection Jesus talks of when He said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”…
The Grand Tour of the message: Thinking back on what you heard this Sunday…
o What did you learn about God?
o What did you learn about people?
o What did you learn about yourself?
o What do you want to commit to putting into practice?
Reflection:
Personal Experience:
Share about one of your critical financial decisions that made sense only in the long term, or because of your personal priorities or values— a decision that would seem ridiculous if the only criteria was “How does this benefit/enrich me?” Maybe it was sacrificing to put a spouse or child through college, maybe it was leaving work to care for a loved one, maybe it was blowing the whistle at work (risking your job to highlight unjust or illegal practices)… what is your story of prioritizing the “treasure” you are after?
Group Discussion:
Read Mark 10:17-20
Just from reading this person’s testimony about his own religiuos observance, what do you discern about his heart— what is he after here and how has he been pursuing it?
If you were to enter into a business deal with this person, based on what you see here, would you consider this a trustworthy person? Why or why not?
Just looking through the list that Jesus cites in v19-20, can you yourself say, “All these I have kept since I was a child”?
This passage speaks to the source of confidence the Jewish people had found in obedience to the written code of the Mosaic law. Read some the of following Scriptures and discuss the role of the OT in the NT: (Matt 5:17, James 2:10, Rom 3:20-24, Heb 7:18-19)
Read Mark 10:21-22
Why did Jesus give this good person an “all or nothing” invitation to follow Him on the condition that he give up everything he had? Was it a burning sense of justice and equality (rich vs poor), was it a contempt for wealth…? Why do that?
The greatly wealthy man went away sad. Compare what he was thinking when he ran up to Jesus vs. what he may have been thinking in that moment as he walked away from Jesus (Who had just invited him to follow).
Read Matt 6:24 and spend 60 seconds silently in personal meditation thinking about that verse. Ask God to teach you and share what you see here. For example:
Why can we not serve 2 masters?
Why is it necessary to hate one in order to love the other?
Why is devotion set in contrast to contempt— what’s the difference Jesus is bringing out here?
What does it mean to serve money, and why would that contradict serving God?
Read Matt 10:23-27
Discuss the quote Scott shared from St Augustine: “Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure; Where your treasure is, there is your heart; Where your heart is, there is your happiness.”
Read the following scriptures and discuss how this helps us to put our God and our money in the appropriate priorities: Ps 62:5-8, Prov 11:26, 1 Tim 6:17, Hab 3:17-19)
Application:
What does our checkbook and calendar say we have been serving in the past year, and how might we hold this accountable to the fact that serving God and serving money are incompatible?
Prayer:
Spend some time in prayer asking that the Lord would search our hearts and open our eyes to ways that we have placed our aspirations, confidence or hope in money instead of in Him. Let’s commit ourselves to making God the One we serve when we have to choose.
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