NOTES for Mat 19:29
If these words are perceived directly, so to speak with mathematical strictness, they become impossibly difficult. Where is the selflessness here? To give in order to receive a hundred times more is simply an unimaginably successful investment of capital. In reality something completely different is here. When doubts of this kind overcome one, one recalls a certain text. The man who wrote it came to faith while awaiting the highest sentence for murder. This man had no education, and that is why the text itself is perceived simply as a miracle. He writes: yes, I accepted faith in mortal danger, when it was unknown whether I would be pardoned or not, but even in childhood, when dogs attacked in the yard or neighborhood boys threatened to beat me, I ran to my parents, so what is strange about now running to my heavenly Father? Here there is a very important distinction. Did he accept faith because in his position it was the best way out and nothing else remained to him, because it was advantageous for him to think that God exists and that immortality exists? Advantage, a clever and cold atheist will think. But if one looks at how much sincerity there is in these words, how much childlike trust. Not with the mind, no, in no case, only with the heart can one feel that here is the pure truth. And then one understands that this is not calculation, not a search for advantage, but simply, like a child with eyes squeezed shut, clinging to God as to a mother who has come to pick you up from kindergarten; and then... only then is it given.