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 isn't enough to profess to be Christians if we don't actually mean it. If Jesus is truly our Lord won't we want to not only listen to his words, but act upon them, building our lives on the solid rock foundation that he himself is?
Who are we trying to fool by being Christians in name and appearance only? Others? Ourselves? Jesus? In what way is a Christian facade any more useful than the false piety of the Pharisees? Is it something we attempt precisely because the words of Jesus have authority, and because we sense we have some obligation to obey, but are unwilling to actually do so? Is it a way to bury our heads in the sand so we don't have to confront the disparity between who we are now and who we are meant to be? But this motive must be common to all who look deeply into their own hearts. And it is probably not typically expressed as a binary option. Most of us probably act on the words of Jesus to some extent while, are aware of the progress we still need to some extent, while also still ignoring certain areas where growth is still necessary.
Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults (see Psalm 19:12).
We need the Lord's help to put his words into practice, since otherwise we tend to fool ourselves. We look for the noisy and spectacular to vindicate our status as Christians, prophecy, exorcism, mighty deeds, and the like. And we often fail to give due credence to the small acts of fidelity to his words that matter more. The thing about the loud exterior displays, like miracles, is that they are exterior. They don't really say anything about the state of our hearts. They may well be an important part of the plan of Jesus for the world. But they are not reliable indicators of our own level of conversion or sanctity. We probably turn to miracles because they seem concrete while the heart is "deceitful above all things" (see Jeremiah 17:9). But there is a better way to make sure we are on the right track.
Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
There is a risk of getting lost in too much introspection about how well we are doing. But a better approach is to focus on the words of Jesus himself, and on what he commands. If we keep his words at the forefront of our minds we won't have to reverse engineer a sense of our level of faithfulness or a list of our faults by guessing at our own motivations. Rather, each day and each moment will give us opportunities to make the choice to be faithful. The more often we make the choice to act on the words of Jesus the more solidity and stability our own lives will attain, since they will be more and more built upon the him, the one true foundation.
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