Years ago, my wife and I were blessed to meet two very good Christian people, Andy and Mary. They were from England and had come to their relationships with God after they had reached adulthood. They have amazing testimonies.
We were talking once to them about a recent visit they had made home to Birmingham. Mary related a conversation she had with her parents regarding their relationship with God. Mary asked her parents if they were Christians. Their response, to paraphrase, was, “Of course we are. We don’t live in grass huts.” To them, being Christian referred to being “civilized” in the Western cultural sense of the word.
The phrase “I’m a Christian” is an ambiguous one at best. Does it refer to having been raised in a Christian church, even if my own participation in that church ended when I moved out of my parents’ house? Does it simply refer to a way of living, such as in a traditional home with traditional clothing and trappings of “being civilized?” Does it mean something more?
When Jesus preached His Sermon on the Mount, He gave a series of lessons on what it meant to be His disciples. He ended His introductory remarks with the statement, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). The Pharisees were the conservative branch of Judaism at the time, the keepers of God’s law, the protector of the commands given to Moses. For Jesus to make such a bold statement to His listeners must have sent shockwaves through the crowd.
At the end of the Sermon, Jesus makes this statement: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from Me, you evildoers’.” (Matthew 7:21-23).
According to this passage, there are many in the world who profess to be Christian who are unknown to Christ. Many people who do good things—preach and teach in His name, perform acts of kindness and intervention in Jesus’ name—who have no part of the kingdom of God. In fact, Jesus refers to these mistaken people as evildoers. In John 10:27, Jesus says, “My sheep listen to My voice. I know them, and they follow Me.” “I never knew you” seems to me a singularly chilling phrase to hear from the lips of Jesus Himself.
So, from reading this passage in Matthew 7, there are a few things that jump out at us. The first is that Jesus’ standard of being a Christian is tied intimately into doing the will of the Father. Isn’t prophesying and driving out demons and performing many miracles in the name of Jesus doing God’s will? If not, then what does it mean to do God’s will? What does it mean to be a Christian?
Jesus was asked a similar question in John 6:28—“What must we do to do the works God requires?” Jesus’ response is, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent” (v. 29). As Jesus introduced the passage we looked at in Matthew 7, Jesus stated that we only enter the kingdom of heaven if we do the will of the Father who is in heaven.
So it seems that the key to being a Christian is to first believe in Jesus, then do the Father’s will. So what does it mean to believe?
Belief in this sense is to put one’s faith in something or someone. Specifically, as Jesus relates the words, to become a Christian one must place our absolute faith in Jesus—faith that He is Who He says He is, faith that His words are the “words of eternal life” (cf. John 6:68f). Our faith is in Jesus’ teachings and His life, death and resurrection. Our faith is founded on God’s revelation of Himself to us through the Holy Spirit (cf. Matthew 16:17). Our faith is derived from the Holy Spirit who leads us into truth and reminds us Jesus’ teachings (cf. John 14:26; 16:13).
Being Christian means living out that faith as demonstrating our love for God as we put into practice the teachings of Jesus, walking in obedience (John 14:23f). It means that we earnestly seek His will as we lay down our lives for Him (Romans 12:1-2) and make ourselves daily available to Him that He can work in us and through us (Philippians 2:12f). The “working out of our faith” as Paul states in Philippians 2:12 is similar to the working out of muscles in weightlifting. It is not a faith justified by works, but a faith that expressed through God’s working through us.
So, going back to Jesus’ words in Matthew 7, those who did things in Jesus’ name may have acted out what they assumed to be God’s will, but in fact were not doing as God had instructed them. It is possible to “do things in Jesus’ name” without knowing Him. In Acts 19:13-16, the Bible tells of a group of men who did not know Jesus but tried to do things in Jesus’ name. One day it backfired on them. It is possible, then, to act in a way that seems to be pleasing to God, that seems to be consistent with His will, but if there is no intimate, personal knowledge, if there is no relationship with God through Jesus, then there is works without faith, and works without faith are nothing. The relationship is critical to being a Christian, hence Jesus’ words, “Depart from Me, because I never knew you.” If we do not know Jesus, if we have not confessed with our mouths and believed in our hearts that Jesus is Lord (Romans 10:9f), then we can act like Christians, but we won’t be Christians. And acting like a Christian will never be a substitute for being one.