Skip to main content

Declaring With Our Mouths

             If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. (Romans 10:9-10)

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. (James 2:19)

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. (Mark12:30)

Usually, I avoid this passage because I don’t understand it. Anyone can say “Jesus is Lord” but not actually believe it. And anyone can believe that God raised Him from the dead without turning to God to be saved. We can lie to ourselves and lie to each other. We can lie to God, but He’s not deceived. After all, the demons believe there is one God, and I venture to add that they understand the gospel message. That doesn’t make them born again.

But, this was the passage of the day online, and (probably thanks to Dallas Willard) I propose a different understanding. Jesus taught us how we’re to love God: with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Those are four of the five “parts” of a person. But is the point that we’re to evaluate each part and make sure they’re loving God? Or is the point that we’re to love God with all of our being?

In the same way, when Paul writes about our declarations and our hearts, is the focus on the just your heart (will) and your body (mouth)? Or is the focus on all that is within us, and all that what is within us causes us to say or do? This fits with memes I sometimes see that suggest that it doesn’t matter what we believe. What matters is what we do. I tend to argue that what we believe produces what we do, so they aren’t separate. Both matter equally. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Virgin?

           Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)           This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 1:18)           But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”            “How will this be,” Mary asked the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Higher Thoughts

  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the  Lord . “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)           The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments,   for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord      so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (I Corinthians 2:15-16) If you read about the ancient gods of the various peoples, you’ll find that they think just like people. In fact, they think just like the sort of people we really wouldn’t want to be around. They think like the most corrupt Hollywood producer or, like hormone overloaded teens with no upbringing.   It’s embarrassing to read. I have a friend who argues that because God is not just like us, He is so vastly dif...
2 comments
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more