---
title: Matthew 19:29
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/matthew-19-29/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/matthew-19-29.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Matthew 19:29
testament: NT
section: Gospels
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Matthew 19:29

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for the sake of My name will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.

## NWT Wording of the Key Phrase

- NWT (1984 edition): "And everyone that has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive many times more and will inherit everlasting life."
- NWT (2013 revision): "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit everlasting life."

## JW Usage

JWs apply Matthew 19:29 to those who sacrifice for the work of the organisation — leaving secular careers for pioneering, leaving countries for assignments, declining family pressure to stay worldly. The Watchtower frames the verse pastorally as Jehovah's acknowledgement of the costs Witnesses bear for the truth, with reimbursement promised in the spiritual family of the brotherhood now and everlasting life on a paradise earth in the future. The same verse is rarely turned the other way to consider what happens when a Witness loses family because they have left the organisation in order to follow Christ.

## Protestant Usage

Matthew 19:29 is the load-bearing promise to the disciple who has been cut off from family for Christ. Read the verse carefully: "everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit everlasting life." The criterion is "for the sake of my name" — for Christ himself, not for any organisation. A JW who leaves family because they have come to follow Jesus — even if that means leaving the Kingdom Hall — is exactly the person Jesus describes. The verse cannot be reread to mean "for the sake of Watchtower membership." Pair this verse with Mark 10:29-30 (the parallel synoptic scene with the hundredfold reward named "now in this period of time") and Luke 12:51 (Jesus' own statement that he came to bring division). On the doorstep, this is the gospel for the moment of greatest grief in a JW's exit: the lost family is real, Christ named it would happen, and the promised reimbursement is concrete in this life and eternal in the next.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- [Christ's Promise to Those Their Family Cuts Off](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/matthew19-leave-father-mother.md) — Matthew 19:29 / Mark 8:36 / Mark 10:29-30 [Practice]