By Quinlan Motley
“He mistook God’s providence for proof of his own power.”
One of the most difficult spiritual questions is not whether success is good or bad. It is whether the things we are allowed to build can become so important to us that we no longer know where stewardship ends and control begins.
The Gospel encounter with the rich ruler has always held that tension for me. He does not approach Jesus as a villain. He comes with urgency. He asks about eternal life. He has tried to live uprightly. He has possessions, but the text also gives us something easy to overlook: Jesus looks at him with love before giving him the instruction he cannot yet accept.
That detail matters.
The story is not simply about a bad man who loved money. It is about a sincere man who had built a life around things he believed mattered, then discovered that obedience could require him to release the very structure that made him feel responsible, useful, and secure.
That tension became the spiritual heart of my novel, THE PROVIDENCE. In imagining the years before the Gospel moment, I kept returning to a harder question. What if his wealth did not come from cruelty? What if it came from discipline, work, judgment, generosity, and a genuine desire to protect the people he loved? What if his resources fed households, created work, and allowed him to help others?
Would surrender be easier then?
I think it might be harder.
Success can become evidence we stop questioning
Most of us are taught to recognize obvious forms of pride. Boasting is pride. Arrogance is pride. Looking down on others is pride. But there is another form that can grow quietly inside responsibility.
It sounds like this: I have handled this before. I know what must be done. People depend on me. I cannot afford to let go.
Those statements can be true. They can also slowly become a spiritual trap.
When our work succeeds, we naturally begin to trust the habits, relationships, instincts, and systems that helped us succeed. That is not wrong. Wisdom should be remembered. Experience matters. Planning matters. Responsibility matters.
But repeated success can create a dangerous confusion. We can begin to treat God’s provision as evidence of our own control.
A door opened, and we remember how hard we knocked. A business survived, and we remember the decisions we made. A family endured a difficult season, and we remember the sacrifices that carried everyone through it. Over time, gratitude can be replaced by a quieter conclusion: I kept this together.
That is where providence can be mistaken for power.
The desire to protect can become the desire to control
The need for control does not always begin in selfishness. Sometimes it begins in love.
A parent wants children to be safe. A spouse wants the household to be secure. A leader wants employees to be paid. A pastor wants a congregation to remain strong. A business owner wants the people depending on the company to keep their livelihoods. These are not shallow concerns.
But love can become fear when we start believing that everything depends on our ability to prevent every loss.
This is one of the ideas I wanted to explore in THE PROVIDENCE. The ruler’s deepest attachment is not merely to comfort. It is to the belief that if he has enough, the people he loves will be safe. Wealth becomes more than possession. It becomes protection. Influence becomes more than status. It becomes insurance against uncertainty.
That belief is powerful because it feels noble.
Yet no human being can become the final safeguard against every form of suffering. No amount of money can remove uncertainty. No network of relationships can guarantee that tragedy will never enter a home. No careful plan can make tomorrow obey us.
At some point, the desire to protect becomes a demand that life remain controllable.
Faith begins where that demand ends.
Stewardship asks a different question
Ownership asks, “What can I keep?”
Fear asks, “What can I secure?”
Control asks, “How can I make certain this never changes?”
Stewardship asks something different: “What has been entrusted to me, and what is it for?”
That question changes the meaning of success.
If money is entrusted, then money is not merely proof that we are capable. If influence is entrusted, then influence is not merely evidence that we are important. If opportunity is entrusted, then opportunity is not merely a reward for our effort.
What we hold becomes a responsibility rather than an identity.
This does not mean that wise people should become careless. Surrender is not negligence. Faith is not poor planning. Generosity does not require pretending that obligations do not exist. The biblical call to surrender is more demanding than irresponsibility because it asks us to remain faithful while admitting that we are not sovereign.
We can save without worshiping security. We can lead without believing that no one else can carry the work. We can provide without making provision the source of our identity. We can build without believing that what we built belongs to us in an ultimate sense.
Surrender is not the rejection of responsibility
One reason surrender is difficult is that we often imagine it as abandonment.
We hear the word and picture walking away from duty, ambition, excellence, or care. But spiritual surrender is not passive. It is the decision to stop confusing responsibility with ownership of the outcome.
We are still called to act. We are still called to work. We are still called to love people concretely. The difference is that our obedience is no longer conditioned on our ability to guarantee what happens next.
That may be why the rich ruler’s encounter with Jesus remains so unsettling. His problem cannot be reduced to having too much. The deeper issue is that the life he has built has become inseparable from the person he believes he must be.
To release it would mean facing a terrifying possibility: perhaps God can care for the people he loves without him being the final answer to every danger.
That is a hard truth for anyone who has spent years becoming dependable.
Providence means we are not the final safeguard
The word providence is often used to describe God’s care, guidance, and provision. But there is a difficult side to believing in providence. If God is truly the provider, then I am not.
I may be an instrument of provision. I may be responsible for what has been placed in my hands. I may be called to work with everything I have. But I am not the source.
That distinction can feel comforting when we have little. It can feel threatening when we have much.
The more capable we become, the easier it is to believe that surrender is something for people with fewer options. Yet the Gospel repeatedly challenges the illusion that spiritual dependence decreases as human capacity increases.
Sometimes abundance makes dependence harder to see.
The rich ruler leaves the encounter sorrowful. I find that sorrow important. Sorrow suggests that he understands enough to feel the cost. He is not indifferent. He is divided.
Many of us know that division.
We want God, but we also want guarantees. We want faith, but we also want control. We want to say that everything belongs to God while quietly reserving one part of life that must remain under our command.
The spiritual question is not whether we have possessions, influence, responsibility, or success. The deeper question is whether we can receive them as gifts without turning them into proof that we no longer need to depend on the One who gave them.
A question worth carrying
I do not think the story of the rich ruler is meant to make successful people ashamed of success. I think it is meant to make all of us examine what success has taught us to trust.
What have I been entrusted with?
What am I trying to protect?
What have I begun to believe only I can hold together?
What would obedience look like if I could not control the outcome?
Those questions are uncomfortable because they move beyond money. They reach into family, work, reputation, relationships, leadership, and identity.
They ask whether we truly believe that providence is greater than possession.
The ruler’s tragedy is not that he built something. It is that, when the moment came, what he built had become something he could not imagine releasing.
That is why his story still matters.
Sometimes the final thing faith asks us to surrender is not what we love least. It is what we have spent years believing we must never lose.
Author Bio
Quinlan Motley is a U.S. Army Veteran, Sunday School Teacher, Food Bank Volunteer, Entrepreneur, and GoodNovels.org Author. His novel THE PROVIDENCE is biblical historical fiction inspired by the Gospel encounter between Jesus and the rich ruler in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18. His writing explores faith, stewardship, responsibility, success, love, control, and surrender.
Learn more: www.GoodNovels.org
THE PROVIDENCE on Amazon: Amazon book page
