“Not everybody who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will get into the kingdom of heaven. Only those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter.” — Matthew 7:21
Many Christians don’t take Jesus seriously enough. If we did, we wouldn’t live as if he never preached the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7, where he said that EVERYTHING is secondary to the kingdom of God.
Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr, in a daily meditation, got right to the point:
I think what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven or the reign of God is when we live inside of the Big Picture and not inside of the small pictures that we create and seem to prefer. Most of us live inside of our own small, self-created kingdoms: the kingdom of being American or the kingdom of being Catholic or the kingdom of being white. That’s all going to pass away. Those are not the kingdom of God. The reign of God will not pass away. It’s the eternal state of things, how things finally and fully and freely are. To live in the reign of God is to live with that kind of big perspective, where we move beyond the tiny human-made boundaries that we all create. Most of us are afraid to venture out of our little comfort zone of “people just like me.”
I get exasperated when “Christians” christen politics and politicians as God’s anointed. That’s small-picture stuff pretending to be big.
The big picture stuff is imagining a world beautifully diverse in all aspects, bound by the people-and-justice-focused love of Jesus. It’s living with hearts open to others because our own hearts have been opened by Jesus.
And so, we who follow Christ must constantly ask ourselves a core question: How can my attitudes, beliefs, and lifestyle reflect that I’m living large?
This is deep stuff, but I think I understand most of it. Thank you.
Easier said than done if we are honest!!