Romans 10:9
If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
To those who think that belief in God is a purely “spiritual” thing, Paul’s odd statement that we must “confess with our lips” is always strange. Shouldn’t believing in our hearts be enough? Why the peculiar demand for some sort of outward expression and not more of a focus on spirit within? Why baptize, or have communion, or do various other rites and rituals? Are these not just hangovers from a more primitive age when religion was bound up with certain superstitious practices, charms, and other such crude physical gestures? Are we not free of this now? Is it not enough to believe in the privacy of one’s heart? No. It’s not. Just as it’s not enough to merely love in the privacy of one’s heart. The demand that believers confess with their lips is pretty much like the demand that lovers kiss with their lips. It is a demand that comes, ultimately, from within rather than being pressed down on us from without. Try telling newlyweds that you want to “free” them from “having to” express their love for one another physically. They will thank you politely and then go on expressing their love for each other with their whole beings. It is the same with St. Paul’s words here. Our love for and faith in Jesus demands expression. That is why Jesus gave us the sacraments. That is why, in each of the sacraments, we confess with our mouth (and the rest of our bodies) that Jesus is Lord. He did not make us to be bodiless intelligences. He made us human. And he became human himself so that we could love him in a human way and praise him with our lips as well as our hearts. Find a way to confess your faith and speak his praise today.
