Right Being > Right Doing

Right Being > Right Doing

I read a line from an author commenting about Jesus this morning that really surprised me. 

"Jesus Christ never gives us rules and regulations. Try, for instance, to use the sermon on the Mount as a series of rules and regulations and you find you cannot do it. They are truths that can only be interpreted by a new spirit that Jesus Christ puts in us." Oswald Chambers, Studies From The Sermon On The Mount

The world is much bigger on the inside than on the outside, which is why Jesus is about giving us a new heart, not rules and regulations. If we think Jesus is about rules and regulations, then we haven't really met him yet. Jesus doesn't confront us with a list of rules and regulations to guide our doing. Jesus confronts us only with truth, truth that we can choose to either accept or reject, into or from, our being. Jesus wants us to know that having the right heart is more fundamental than doing the right things. 

At the end of the day, before reflecting on whether or not on if we did the right things, we must reflect on if we lived with the right heart. Or, at the very least, use what we did or did not as a way to trace our motives back to the root of our problems--our heart. Our actions are the stalk, stem, flower and fruit; our heart is the root from which everything grows. Through enough effort and sweat equity, we may be able to have a modicum of success in our right doing; but, it is only through accepting into our hearts the truths that Jesus presents us with that will ever affect our capacity for right being.

We cannot be who we were created to be without first letting Jesus confront us with his truth, and then very quickly asking him for his help to incorporate that truth into the deepest fiber of our being. On our own we do not have the power to get to the "root" of who we are, where our actions originate and flow out of that deepest part of ourselves. The only way to "be right" (or, to be in a state of right-heartedness), is, as Chambers also said, to "let Jesus have his way with you, letting him give you his Spirit, by letting him alter you from the inside."