Lord, Transform The Desires of My Heart

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that He has come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. What does this mean in our own lives?

The Old Testament law is good and just, but it “does not of itself give the strength, the grace of the Spirit, to fulfill it” (Catechism 1963). In other words, the law convicts us of sin, but it does not liberate us from its power. “The Law of the Gospel,” however, “proceeds to reform the heart, the root of human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure” (Catechism 1968). To the degree that we allow Christ to reform our hearts, we experience “freedom from the law” (see Rom 7; Gal 5)—not freedom to break the law, but freedom to fulfill it because we no longer desire to break it.

Here’s an example: Do you have any desire to murder your best friend? Assuming you do not, then you do not need the commandment “Thou shalt not murder thy best friend,” because you have no desire to break it. To this extent you are free from the law. In other words, you do not experience this law as a burden because your heart already conforms to it.

Before sin, the human heart conformed totally to God’s will. For example, the first married couple did not need a law forbidding adultery. They had no desire to commit adultery (and not only because there was no one else around). Only with original sin do we experience a rupture between our desires and God’s will for us. Here is where the law serves its essential purpose. It’s given to convict us of sin (see Rom 7:7). However, when Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard the commandment … but I tell you …,” He indicates that we need something more than mere precepts can offer.

Here’s an important question to ask ourselves: What laws do we still need? What teachings of the Church feel like a burden? Perhaps the problem is not with the law or with the Church, but with our own hardness of heart. If this is where we find ourselves, perhaps the solution is not to toss off the law. Perhaps the solution is to surrender our disordered desires to Christ and let Him transform them.

Trying to follow the rules without a change of heart will either turn us into self-righteous Pharisees or into those who abandon God’s law for a rationalized, watered-down version of the Gospel. Either way, it’s a “gospel” without the good news; it’s Christianity without Christ. Both the self-righteous and the lawless have yet to pass over from the bondage of the law to its fulfillment. Lord, help us make this pass over!

Christopher West is The President and Founder of The Cor Project, an international outreach devoted to spreading the Theology of the Body and empowering others to learn, live, and share it. Find out more here.