In the show “Fiddler on the Roof”, the husband and head of the house Tevya reaches the point of pondering whether his marriage, which had been arranged 25 years previously, has love. He therefore asks his wife Golda to tell him if she loves him.

Her reaction is to go through a long rigmarole before bringing herself eventually to answer that Yes, she supposes she does. What kind of a question is that? she fumes. Twenty-five years of sharing his house, washing his clothes, cooking his food and bearing him children, and he asks her if she loves him! Yet her husband persisted until he got the answer, because he had come to see that it was important. After 25 years, he said, it’s good to know.

In a variety of ways the Scriptures show us that the Lord is not unlike that husband in relation to our souls. The relationship between a woman and a man in marriage has the potential for expressing to us the relationship that we have or might have with God. According to Matthew 7: 21-23, it is possible to do all sorts of things in the name of Christ and still not really to be in touch with Him in any adequate or true way. Interestingly, the kinds of things that are described here are not things like having a sale for the church, but things that seem on the face of it to be extremely spiritual, such as prophesying and casting out demons in Christ’s name. Even things like this we can do, and yet at the end of the day be found not to have known Him, and told to depart from Him as evildoers. How can this be?

In verse 21 Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven.” It is clear that God looks into our souls and asks something deeper from us, just as Tevya looked at his busy and faithful wife and asked whether she really loved him. Indeed, God does ask if we really love Him.

St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 that Yes the gifts of the Spirit are all wonderful and God-given, and yet if we have them to the nth degree, such as having the faith to move mountains, but yet do not have love, we really end up with nothing at all.

So we must judge that when Jesus speaks of the one “who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven”, He is referring to the person who does the Father’s will out of an true and close knowledge of Him, and therefore, response to Him, rather than merely doing even the sorts of things that look as if they are the things that God wants done.

Perhaps Tevya would have wanted Golda to stop being so busy around the house sometimes and sit down with him and be companiable. Golda perhaps was not doing some of the “busy” things out of her knowledge of her husband, but rather to measure up in her own eyes to the general expectation - and her own expectation - of what being a good wife meant.

So the issue for us is whether what we do as Christians is done out of an informed and true personal knowledge of our heavenly Father, and as our response to Him, or whether it is done only to satisfy what we expect and what others expect is the way Christian people ought to behave. If that is the basis of what we do and it hasn’t led us to the knowledge of God and to the promptings of His Spirit, then ultimately, we are being told, we are in danger of getting things very wrong indeed.

Deuteronomy 11: 18-21 too expresses something about the intimacy of the knowledge of God, in the way that His directions were to placed upon the hand, the forehead and the doorpost. One’s personal space was to be steeped in them. His words were to be on the heart. To do the will of God involves not merely external knowledge, but heart-knowledge of Him and what He wants from us.

Our challenge as Christians, therefore, is the challenge to grow in the knowledge of God. The way we can meet that challenge is the Way that was revealed by the Son of God, and is revealed to us in our days by the Holy Spirit.

As Jesus says, we must do the will of the Father in Heaven if we ourselves wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. As He says in the Gospel according to St. John, to do the will of God is to believe in the One whom He sent. When you believe in someone, you do everything you can to know him better, and you get to do what He wants by understanding his intentions.

Through Christ, and even through what Christ instituted when He left the earth - His Church, and through the bestowal of the blessed Holy Spirit, God has declared Himself, and granted the means by which we may grow in His intimate knowledge, and so perform the will of His divine heart.

For commentary, information and devotional material see www.churchofenglandcayman.com and www.anglicansatprayer.org