It is not enough if you claim to be a devotee of the Lord. The Lord must recognise you as a devotee. Only then does one's devotion acquire value. Bhagavatam and other scriptures demonstrate how this kind of dedicated life can be led by any person who wishes to be devoted to the Lord. No one should feel that it is beyond his or her capacity to surrender themselves completely to the Lord. If there is firm determination, this can be accomplished. It is only through earnest endeavour that Divine wisdom can be got (Shraddhavan Labhate Jnanam). Today the world is afflicted with the epidemic of egoism (Ahamkara). There is really no basis for this kind of self-conceit. It is born of ignorance. It has to be totally eradicated. If everyone realises that the body has been given for the pursuit of righteousness and acts on that basis, they will most certainly realise the Divine.
What to do if it is not enough to be a devotee of the Lord? It can bring up some other questions and we ask ourselves, what is a devotee really and how do we know if we are one or not? It can feel heavy to face those questions and maybe we just don't feel like it.
Why should we always think about it?
We don't even understand his words and what about asking always questions? Knowing myself I would just like to think sometimes, not again, I don't feel like it just now. We don't even know why we went to him what about being that?
In our countries people are not convinced that there is something like a Lord and what about being a devotee of that Lord, nobody asks that question really, but we have to because we try to listen to his words.
All that is present in the first sentence only and we have not yet even started the second one.
It is not enough if you claim to be a devotee of the Lord. The Lord must recognise you as a devotee.
In the second sentence we get to the point.
He has to recognize us as devotees, who - the Lord. After I went beyond the first obstacle in my mind that I don't want to think about it or that we live on a place where people question the reality of the Lord and now how to be a devotee or even how to be recongized by him as one and we don't want to be bothered about it, now we have to face another reality, he has to recognize us as devotees.
If we don't want to think of the first sentence, how do we take care of the second one? We either just read it anyhow maybe we will get it somehow or later or we don't think about it at all and forget it on the spot again or the mind gets in a blackout and we find a lot of excuses why we don't listen.
Only then does one's devotion acquire value.
