Did Jesus promise me an abundant life of comfort and money?
I think sometimes we forget, or maybe we get thoughts that infiltrate us from Western Christianity, when we hear the gospel today where Christ says, I came to give them life and to give it to them more abundantly. We often take the words of Christ and we begin to project onto them what we think that they mean, or how they should be interpreted in our life. In our society, in our culture, this idea of an abundant life is so closely tied to financial wealth and standing in society. This idea that our life would be more abundant because we had better possessions, or we had a bigger bank account, or we had a better car or a nicer home. The idea that Christ came to give us a life that inevitably ended up looking more like the world than it did the saints. In fact, I was thinking about this this week when I was looking around my own house and how messy it was, and I was thinking of the words of Saint Paisios. Saint Paisios, because he lived on Mount Athos, would sometimes travel into the world, would sometimes travel into Thessaloniki, into Athens, and go visit pious people, and people would have him come visit their houses. And he said something along the lines of, blessed children, they turn everything upside down, they keep houses messy, and they keep parents from fulfilling their wish of having everything orderly and in place. This is truly a blessing from God. And that changed my whole perspective on it when I first read that quote, because I thought, oh, how do you get to the point where everything is clean and put together and systematic. And then I read Saint Paisios and he says, no, no, no, the children are bringing in the kingdom of heaven by keeping everything kind of disorganized and not exactly how you want it. You don't get to taste the perfection of a clean house in this lifetime. And then we forget that that is actually the abundance that the Lord is talking about. I was thinking about this: what does this abundance mean? Well, we could say the abundance of children. But we could also go along with that and say the abundance of disorganization. And what else? Well, the abundance of stress that comes along with that, and the abundance of anxiety that comes along with that as well. The feeling of always running behind, and never having things in place, and never having things orderly, or the temptation to feel that you're always one step behind financially in all these different areas.
Edited from his answer on camera. The clip has the full thing.
John 10:10
From “Sermon, 1.22.23, Life More Abundantly”
Questions like this are what the Brotherhood is for.
Join the Brotherhood