I’m a little confused by this passage.
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 who is in heaven.
What is Matthew 7:21 telling us?
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Jesus is calling out people whose faith is words, you can say “Lord, Lord” and sound sincere and still never submit to God.
John 6:40, the will of the Father includes believing in the Son.
It’s about doing what the Father wants. Look at the next few verses, people who prophesied and cast out demons in his name still get told “I never knew you.”
Jesus has spent 3 chapters spelling it out in the Sermon on the Mount. Forgive people, don’t judge harshly, love your enemies, trust God instead of worrying.
Read Matthew 5 through 7 in one sitting this week, then pick one thing from it to practice.
The 2 houses right after. The one still standing belongs to the person who heard his words and did them before the rain showed up, so doing the will of the Father means acting on it.
I hadn’t put that together with John 6:40 before.
Matthew 7:21 can sound like a list of things to perform well enough, and ‘doing the will of the Father’ turns into scorekeeping. If the will of the Father is first to believe in the Son, then the doing comes out of a trust that’s already there. The people saying ‘Lord, Lord’ seem to mean it in the moment. The words never settled into anything underneath. I know that gap in myself. Saying the right things at church, then holding the reins pretty tightly the rest of the week. So the belief in John 6 has to be the kind that submits, like trusting a doctor enough to take the medicine.
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John 6:40. The Father wants us believing in Jesus for real, saying Lord Lord is easy peasy
A miracle worker can still be living in a cardboard house. The rain shows which house was built properly but that was settled long before, by hearing and obeying
So ‘acting on it’ means years of discipleship.