Calculated Risk
I once worked in property and casualty insurance. Annually it was mandated that Continuing Education Courses were taken in order to maintain the appropriate license for the state. One of the courses taken was risk management. It was a course designed to help you determine if a person was worthy enough to risk insuring them. I was often astonished at the factors that were scrutinized to determine if a person was worthy enough to insure. As people we are the sum total of moments that happen in our life.
Every moment of your life someone is scrutinizing and/ or criticizing a moment that does not even define you as a whole. The leverage given to people via the internet is the ability to gauge the worthiness of your life moments by a moment that has happened in the world that possibly mirrors or resembles your moment. Even though they can only see things from their 60 second window provided through the frame of the internet, you can be scrutinized and/ or criticized for a moment that has nothing to do with the scope of your entire life. Then as a person you have to determine rather to buy into that scrutiny and/or criticism and risk the entirety of your life being captured in that one moment.
The scripture teaches us there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The Bible teaches of a story in Luke 18 of young man who did not see taking the risk in selling everything he had and giving it to the poor was worth following Jesus. Jesus gave him a moment to rewrite history, and doing something so phenomenal that he would have treasure in heaven. Jesus would even go on to state later in that same story that if you sell out all for God, that God would return it not just in the everlasting life but in the present time also. The young man just had to take the faith risk.
Faith is taking a calculated risk in one moment to trust God with your entire life. Just like in insurance you look over all the factors in your life, and it is only through your perspective will you be able to see in its entirety the goodness of God or the moments of bad times. You can become so entrapped in the bad moments, the bad moments can spill out into the entirety of your perspective. Now you scrutinize every moment, person, or activity in your life through a bad moment. The man could only see Jesus through his money, and without the money he saw no other value in his life. Jesus saw beyond the money and saw a greater future for the man outside of his money. He saw that the sum total of the young man could not be capsulated in money amount. Jesus was willing to take the risk on him, but the young man was not willing to take the risk for Jesus.
Jesus asked the man to sell out all, because he knew that the money was the closest thing to the man’s heart. God could not fill his heart, because his money had filled that void. If God was to ask you to let go of your bitterness, unforgiveness, hatred, jealous, envious, pettiness, deceitful, lustful, or any of your destructive bad habits to follow him would you see risk through the perspective of that which he asked you to give up? Based on the entirety of God’s track record in my life I would you say Jesus if you would help me through the process, I will surrender it all, because you are worth the risk.
Jude 1: 24-25; “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.”