Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jeff Parrott.

Few things are as cut rate today as the idea of commitment.

The infamous fear of better options makes it difficult to commit to things

with our time, our money, and our attention. In an era of cheap commitment, perhaps the most

difficult thing to commit to isn't a thing at all, but other people. We exchange commitment

to a local community, a personal relationship,

or a church community for the cheap consumeristic freedom of shopping for better offers.

And when that lens of consumeristic freedom dominates our view of relationships, we end up with

very few of them, at least very few that ask anything of us

and grow us beyond the realm of personal comfort and convenience. Now, it would be easy to say that

our commitment problem is a modern phenomenon. And in some ways, with society changing as quickly

as it is these days, that's certainly true at a certain level.

And yet at the same time, people have always wrestled with that notion of cheap, consumeristic freedom.

It's modern enough to notice it in the headlines, yet ancient enough to see it in the heart of humanity.

Our passage today in the first 16 verses of Mark chapter 10 gets at the heart of commitment in two different planes. First, we'll see

Jesus engage with a kind of horizontal commitment between people and the relationship of marriage,

but then we'll learn from Jesus as he displays a kind of vertical commitment between people

and their Creator God.

And these two sections together will see how God's design for commitment points to a kind

of connection that doesn't restrict us, but freeze us into the life we're made for.

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