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“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
will enter the Kingdom of heaven,
but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
It is possible to profess Jesus Christ without possessing him. It is possible to say "We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets" and yet not be in real relationship with him (see Luke 13:26). For all of that we still risk hearing the words "I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!" (see Luke 13:27).
And everyone who listens to these words of mine
but does not act on them
will be like a fool who built his house on sand.
To be in relationship with Jesus means that we do not hear his words and then set them aside. For Jesus does not say one thing and do another. He has perfect integrity and his life has perfect conformity with his message. If we find fault, for example, with the Sermon on the Mount, we are also and at once finding fault with the one who preached it. When we turn aside from acting on it we are implicitly rejecting the one who perfectly lived it out. The words of Jesus are at once his self-definition and the terms on which we accept him. A Jesus made in our own image to suit our own preferences will not provide the rock solid refuge we need in times of storm and tribulation.
It is nevertheless true, properly understand, "that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (see Acts 2:21), and that "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). The Spirit motivates us to call out to Jesus as Lord in a way that is not thin or imaginary, but is instead a cry of surrender from the depths of our hearts. It is a cry that allows Jesus to dictate all terms henceforth. It is in this sense that no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirt (see First Corinthians 12:3).
Let us come to the Lord and call on his name sincerely, treasuring every word he gives us, and using them as the foundations upon which to build our lives. When we do this we may still fail from time to time in the eyes of the world. We may even fail to carry out our desire to keep his word. But when his word is the foundation we will fall back, not upon our own resources, but upon his mercy. When we begin to live this out our hearts attain a confidence which is not a function of our abilities or our successes or failures. We find ourselves in a a city which the Lord himself has built.
A strong city have we;
he sets up walls and ramparts to protect us.
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