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"The Offer"

One of the remarkable aspects of Christian faith is that this relationship with Jesus is always an offer. It is never forced.

Once a young man ran up to Jesus, asking what he needed to “do” to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17–22). As Jesus often did, He led the conversation to allow this man to see himself clearly.

So Jesus didn’t even ask this earnest guy a question. He just began listing out Jewish commandments, and the young man interjected, “Yes, yes, I’ve kept all of those!” But what happens next is most interesting. Mark 10:21 says, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”

Jesus looked. He didn’t preach a sermon. He didn’t point fingers. Instead, He looked directly at this young man and turned the full attention of His heart and mind upon this person, inviting him to engage in a relationship.

Jesus loved. It was in the looking that love developed. It wasn’t in the young man’s stringent keeping of the rules or in the amazing deeds. Jesus looked and loved him just for being himself.

It’s clear that the young man really liked the idea of Jesus and wanted to make a good choice. But when Jesus made the offer for relationship, He did so in the context of full commitment: “Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21).

When Jesus looked and loved this man, He knew exactly what He needed to ask him to reveal his true heart. By pressing the issue of possessions, Jesus cut right to the heart of the matter for this particular individual.

So Jesus looked at him, loved him, and laid before him a choice for relationship. Yet the young man walked away. This is the surprise of God. God holds all the power in a relationship with each of us, but surprisingly, He gives us the freedom to say yes or no to Him.

Sometimes people say, “If God wants all of us to have a relationship with Him, why didn’t He just preprogram us so we would?” But love cannot be preprogrammed. If we were forced to say yes to Jesus, forced to become Christians, this would go against the grain of God’s character and the central theme of Christianity—mainly that Jesus’s offer is based on love, the purest form of love.