Archive for January, 2010
Hundredfold Project #1: How to hundredfold your life
What would it be like to “hundredfold” your life?
This question comes out of the passage in Mark where Jesus promises you can receive “a hundred times over, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and property.” This particular parable, in different verbiage, is repeated in three out of the four books of Gospel. So there’s definitely some weightiness and importance to this. Given the nearly outlandish claim and its repetition, the meaning of this concept deserves some examination.
The first question I’d ask would be: “Is the hundredfold-life that He’s talking about actually a good thing?” Do I really want to have a hundredfold number of children? Or do you really want to have a hundred-times the number of mothers? Because for most people, one is way more than enough. The property and houses sounds pretty good, but seriously, what is the real meaning of this promise?
When we step away from a literal interpretation that we get hundred-times clones of our family members, we can start to see that this hard-to-fathom promise is really meant to be a good thing. A fantastic thing.
But not for the reasons you may be thinking.
The first thought someone may have is, “Sure, when I get to heaven, I’ll be with all these people I love. That’s what this means.” The parable could only be talking about eternity. For Christians, that is an expected and unsurprising promise.
But it’s not the promise in this particular Scripture.
The passage says, “And in the world to come they will have eternal life.” So the promise of having a hundredfold life isn’t about eternal life (although eternal life is still important part of the promise). It’s the super-bonus, so to speak.
Okay, so then we can interpret this massive extended family as just that: it’s the extended family of fellow Christian brothers and sisters. For many of you, that’s probably a pretty underwhelming promise. If you’ve been jaded by the reference to your fellow Christians as “brother” or “sister,” this idea is both totally believable and also totally boring.
I actually believe that if the meaning of this passage stopped at that point, it would still have some deep and significant implications. Not fully grasping and living into the idea that you are part of an actual family by accepting Christ, you’re missing joy and fullness of life. But that’s actually a topic for another time.
I believe that the meaning of having a “hundredfold” of these things which are meant to be of immense value — relationships and tangible resources — becomes much more awesome amazing if we look at it this way: that a hundredfold life is beyond our ability to imagine and envision, yet is entirely in the realm of personal experience in our present life.
This promise of the hundredfold life is meant to be of such a magnitude that we cannot really get our arms around what it looks like and, more importantly, how we could on our own achieve it. But it’s meant to be totally tangible. It’s not a promise of cotton-candy and cloud-floating visions and desires. It’s a promise for stuff like homes and property. It’s a promise of close relationships just like a family.
It’s a promise of receive back a hundred-times what we already have and value. That’s a 100x return. Even outside of the spiritual realm, in pure financial terms, that is an incredibly return.
The cost? The cost to achieve not just eternal life, but this incredible return in this present age is so simple we should already be doing it as Christians. Yet, it’s so phenomenally hard for many people.
The cost is to give up grasping and gripping the very things we love and cherish to get back the same elements a hundred-fold. It’s no surprise what the cost is, right? It’s to give up everything we cherish — home, family, property — in Jesus’ name and spread the Gospel.
See, what’s totally insane about this is that, contrary to the way many people think, He’s not asking us to live as homeless, impoverished hermits. If He did, why would He promise a hundred-fold family and homes? But if you think about it, He’d totally have the right to ask for such complete and total commitment and sacrifice.
In light of this, what I find amazing (even though I struggle with this myself), is why we bother to try to multiply what we have using our own feeble means. How many strive for a bigger house through working longer hours? Getting more education? Making more investments? How many try to build a truly robust social fabric through networking and parties?
Why do we try to get leverage when our own multiplier is so much less than the promise of a hundredfold that Jesus makes? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration. I don’t think it’s just an illustration.
But the only way to really know what that is is through complete faith and commitment. It’s repeated three times in the Gospels in some form. It’s consistent with the rest of God’s Word.
So why aren’t more Christians able to completely detach themselves from their wants and needs in order to have them met by a significant order-of-magnitude than they could possibly experience in this lifetime on their own?
This is the question I explore through “The Hundredfold Project.” I share my thoughts on how the Bible provides the guidelines and encouragement to make this leap that can change your life.
It flies in the face of nearly everything else that the rest of the world leads you to believe.
