Day 839 – As a Child! – Meditation Monday

Published: April 9, 2018, 7:03 a.m.

Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 839 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
As a Child! – Meditation Monday


Thank you for joining us for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 839 of our trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy.

For some, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. Some may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and praying. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and make sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you too will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind. 

We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. As I grow older, although it is hard to accept, I realize I am not a child, or a teenager, or a young adult anymore. Even with the advances in medical technology and understanding of human physiology, I am still aging.  The Apostle Paul instructs us in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.”Yet Jesus said there is one area where we should not be. In today’s meditation let us explore…
As a Child


When we read the verses below, I want you to notice Jesus’s interactions with His disciples regarding a rich public official who turned away from following Him. Jesus challenged His disciples to think through His rejection of His call to focus their attention on those who are worthy of their emulation. Religion gets far off track when the focus becomes a question of who is most important, most religious, and most deserving of the Father's love.

Jesus came to us as God. The rich public official in the story that I will read today missed this truth. He called Jesus "good," and only God is truly good. So Jesus challenged him to listen to Him as God. Jesus told him that he needed to drop his religious game of trying to earn the Father's love.

He needed to quit trying to outdo all the others around him in his religious practices. He needed to look deep into his own heart and see that there was an idol he held as more important than obeying the voice of the Father. However, he dismissed what Jesus said. He refused to give up his idol — his great wealth — for two reasons:

He didn't think of Jesus as God. He dismissed what Jesus said as just more religious teaching. He didn't accept what Jesus said as the very commands of God.
He was rich and his idol — his real god — was his money. Unfortunately, he thought he could earn the Father's favor just like he had earned his money.

Sadly, he walked away from Jesus and from the joy of His kingdom because he couldn't give up what was false. Just before the description of this rich public official's visit with Jesus, you meet children who are the model for the kind of heart that receives His kingdom. Just after this official, you meet Jesus’s disciples. In childlike amazement, they wonder how anyone can be saved if someone who has lived a good life, like this rich public official, couldn't find his way into His kingdom.

Jesus reminded them that they were thinking in human terms. In human terms, it is impossible. But the Father, Son, and Spirit — make the impossible, possible. All that Jesus’s disciples had to do was look at themselves and what they had given up.

You see, nothing is impossible for the heart totally yielded to Jesus. You cannot give up more for Him than you will receive many times over in the age to come.