True faithfulness starts on the inside

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One of life’s lessons that most of us learn the hard way is that when it comes to people, the outside and the inside do not always match.

And, of course, this is not limited to people. It can be true of food, movies, a best-selling book — not everything lives up to what it appears to be from the outside.

The same can be true of each of us in our spiritual lives. Jesus certainly was well aware of that. He noticed that some Pharisees were all about the externals — making sure that everyone did everything in a precise, consistent, unchanging way — in their minds, this was really all that mattered. But Jesus also knew what was precisely in their “hardened hearts” — and he knew that there was often a difference between what the scribes and Pharisees did and what they were thinking and feeling on the inside. They may have been fulfilling the letter of the Law, but the spirit of the Law? Not so much.

No matter what we may confess or acknowledge as sinfulness or unhealthy behavior, we are usually naming things that are really just symptoms of something else that is going on, something that is taking place in our hearts.

The real “sin” or reason behind our behavior is often an attitude or faulty way of seeing a particular situation or person. The truth is, the best way to change the behavior, the best way to start traveling down a different path, is to allow God to change us on the inside. Once our inside is aligned and in tune with God — God’s vision, God’s motivation, God’s attitude, God’s priorities — then the things on our outside, our actions, will usually take care of themselves.

God, it seems, wants the inside and the outside to match. Living a life of faith is difficult enough, even when we have good motives and sincere hearts. But if we are not striving to continually align our hearts and minds to God, then living a life of true faithfulness becomes incredibly difficult, perhaps even impossible.

When that happens — when our heart is not in the right place — then doing the right thing, the holy thing, the faithful thing day in and day out can simply become a burden to overcome, or an obstacle in our path, something that we do only begrudgingly. But if our heart is in the right place, if we are truly trying to see as God sees, if we are truly trying to conform our very being to that of Jesus, then doing the loving thing will come naturally. That is simply how God has made us.

So whether you are someone who seems at least on the outside to be doing all the right things — praying, helping those in need, going to church — or whether you find yourself messing up time and time again, or maybe even if you are somewhere in between these two points, let us be sure that we all try to take an honest look at our motives and attitudes. True faithfulness starts on the inside.