Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
will enter the Kingdom of heaven
We can confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and still be missing something essential. This may not just be a facade that we project for others. We ourselves may be deluded by our own words. It is a risk because there is a part of all of us that wants to be deluded. We want the comfort of a Christian self-image without the need for conversion that makes a real Christian life possible. This sort of hypocrisy is simply the New Testament version of what Jesus often condemned in the Pharisees. Did the Pharisees believe their own hype? Had they convinced themselves that God was pleased with them because of their words and their public personas? Probably. But their inner lives remained unaddressed. Putting on the costume of religiosity without conversion not does not result in a heart being changed but rather in its being hardened.
because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (see Romans 10:9).
Saving faith is more than a confession. It is a fundamental change at the level of the heart, which here refers to the free and rational center of our being. It is not something that can be demonstrated with mere words as though it were merely an opinion or an emotion. It is instead something which can only be demonstrated by living lives that rely upon the truth of it.
But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds (see James 2:18).
When we hear the words of Jesus we are not meant to do so as spectators. Instead, we are invited to make a response. This response cannot be merely to feel something or to say something, but rather to do something, or even more accurately, to become something new. Jesus represents for us a new option on which we can build our lives instead of continuing in the futility of trying to build upon the sands that the world can offer. Jesus himself provides the foundation, the raw materials, and the strength with which to build.
Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
We live in a world where the weather is constantly destroying the edifices that are built by merely human effort. And yet we often continue to prefer to repeat this struggle rather than to try the new foundation offered to us by Jesus. It is true that his option for us is rock, which sometimes looks frighteningly solid, like something against which we ourselves might be smashed by building. There is something that is indeed concrete and definite in the structures and doctrines of the Church, in the historicity and uniqueness of the person of Jesus himself. But when we start with this as the basis and build slowly from the ground up we will find that he himself shields and protects us from any storms that come. They may still lash against us. We may still feel exposed and at risk. But rooted in him we will hold firm.
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house.
But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.
We don't build alone, neither do we build for ourselves alone. We are building and being built into a living temple, the manifestation of the Kingdom on earth. This temple has to be strong and solid to welcome the nations into its gates, to afford them the peace that can only be found within its walls.
You keep him in perfect peace,
whose mind is stayed on you,
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