Sand & Rock

Matthew 7:24-27

July 2, 2023 • Mount Pleasant UMC

One of the stories Ravi Zacharias often told was about a time he went to lecture at Ohio State University. After he arrived, his driver took him by the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts. It is, the driver said, America’s first postmodern building. Zacharias asked, “What is a postmodern building?” Well, the driver explained, the architect, who believed that life has no meaning, designed it with no design in mind. There are pillars that have no purpose, stairways that go nowhere, and no meaning behind any of it. “He had a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it,” the driver concluded. Zacharias then asked, “So his argument is that if life has no purpose and no design, why should the building have any design?” The driver agreed, and then Zacharias asked, “Did he do the same with the foundation?” And there was silence. We can change the structure and the design of most anything, but if we mess with the foundations, we will be undone in pretty short order (http://www.preachingpoints.com/2010/03/quoted-ravi-zacharias-on-foundations/).

This morning, we start one of the best times of the year as we dive into the themes of this year’s Vacation Bible School. We’ve done this for the last several years, where all of us get to experience what the kids will be learning during the last week of this month. VBS has always very been important to me because, as a lot of you know, I gave my life to Jesus at VBS. I’d always been a part of the church, but it was in a basement VBS class where I first asked Jesus to life in my life. Everything changed for me because of a VBS teacher who cared enough to share about Jesus. This year’s VBS theme, as you probably already know if you’ve been, well, anywhere, in the building is “Ready, Set, Move: Follow Jesus Here, There and Everywhere.” Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore the various Bible stories and their bottom lines, like “Believe who Jesus is,” “Love who Jesus loves,” and “Share what Jesus did.” But this morning, we’re going to start with the first theme, which is this: “Do what Jesus says.”

Now when you read the Gospels, Jesus says a lot of things, but perhaps the most concentrated collection of his teaching is found in Matthew 5-7, what is commonly called the “Sermon on the Mount.” If you follow the daily Scripture readings, you’ll read the whole thing this week, but this morning I want to zero in on the very ending. Preaching professors tell you to save your best for the end because that’s what people remember. So at the end of this sermon, Jesus tells a parable that is meant to make a lasting impression and, maybe, begin to build a community of faith.

The parable itself is probably familiar to many of you. I remember singing it when I was a kid in Sunday School. “The wise man built his house upon the rock…” Anyone else remember that? Jesus’ story has two men, both of whom are building a house. They don’t have names, just descriptions. One is a wise man; the other is a foolish man. Now, we hear those labels and we think of them in terms of intellectual capability, maybe degrees or courses of study, things they might have learned in a school somewhere. But that’s not what Jesus means because that’s not what the Hebrew people understood. Those categories go back to ancient wisdom literature, where the difference depends on what they do with what they have and what they know. Being wise is not about accumulating knowledge; it’s about knowing the right thing to do in the situation. It’s knowing the godly thing to do in the situation. The foolish is the one who is always acting against what God would want. The difference between the wise man and the foolish man is found in who they are listening to and, even more, what they are doing with what they hear, how they live out what they know.

That understanding is at the heart of the story Jesus tells here. As we hear again this story, let’s keep in mind that Jesus himself was a builder. His father, Joseph, was a builder (not technically a carpenter as we usually think but more of a general contractor) and Jesus would have learned from him. Jesus is known as the son of a builder (cf. Matthew 13:55). So he’s telling a story in a realm he is very familiar with (cf. Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 72). The story goes like this: the wise man sets out to build his house, and like a good builder, he finds a solid piece of property. Jesus says the wise man builds his house on “rock,” bedrock, something that will not move. Interestingly, the word there is petra, which is the name Jesus will eventually give to his disciple Simon: The Rock. Yes, there was someone before Dwayne Johnson who had that name. At the same time, the wise man’s neighbor, the foolish man, goes to build a house as well, only he chooses a nice piece of beachfront property. Rather than digging down to find bedrock, he instructs his builders to just put it right there on the beach. The view is great, the breezes are nice, the sun is gentle on the screen porch, and he won’t have to go far to swim. Build it on the sand. To the casual observer, there probably would have been very little difference between the homes (cf. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, pg. 208). They look alike, the floor plans are similar, the construction materials were bought at the same Lowe’s. There’s very little difference—until the storms come. And not just any storm. This is a bad storm, a destructive storm. Jesus says, “The rains came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house,” or rather, both houses (7:25, 27). As the storm came, everything was threatened. Everything might be destroyed.

Have you faced a storm like that? Some in our area have faced physical storms like that in the last few months, but more likely you have faced storms in your life—a storm that swirls around and threatens everything you hold dear. Our world has just come through a storm like that, a global pandemic that turned our lives upside down. I never would have imagined we would spend so many weeks not meeting in worship, not gathering as the church. I never imagined we would spend so much time at home. And I never imagined that a tiny little microscopic organism could change so much about the way we live life. But it did. And still does. Covid was a storm of epic proportions. Maybe you’ve faced other storms in your life: economic storms, where there is too much month at the end of your money; religious storms, where doubts just don’t whisper, they roar in your heart and mind; work storms, where you suddenly find that you are no longer necessary at the place you’ve been employed for so long. Maybe right now you’re in the midst of a personal storm where the health you have enjoyed can no longer be counted on. The words of the doctor were unexpected and turbulent. The tests came back differently than you had hoped. Our country continues to be in a political storm, one that has even infected the church, where you simply cannot talk to “the other side” because they are just so wrong. So instead of seeking understanding, we hurl insults and accusations. “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house” (7:25, 27).

Storms tell us a lot about ourselves. Storms always reveal the truth: they tell us what we are made of and what we are standing on (cf. Stott 209). After the storm in Jesus’ story, there is only one house standing. The foolish man’s house “fell with a great crash” (7:27) but the wise man’s house “did not fall” (7:25). If they’re basically identical houses, what made the difference? It wasn’t in the walls, the windows, the trusses or the flooring. The difference was and is in something you can’t see: the foundation. The foundation of a house is not something you tend to think about unless you are a builder. When we were in Mayfield, Kentucky last November, a few of us on our team got pulled off the house we were working on to go work on another house. Actually, we got pulled to work on a hole in the ground. We were told to clear things out of the hole, and then to put down rebar for the footings, and then to help as concrete was poured into the hole. Everything we did, every step, was important because we were laying the foundation for the rest of the house. If the foundation was faulty or weak, the house would not stand. The foolish man in Jesus’ parable certainly found that out when everything he had built fell down around him.

So we know this is a parable, and things in parables often represent something else. What is the foundation Jesus is talking about? He says it clearly: we build a solid foundation for the “house” of our life by the way we interact with the “words” he has shared with us. The word for “word” there is logos, which is the same word used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe who Jesus is. He is the Word made flesh, the Word who was with God from the beginning (cf. John 1:1, 14). Jesus is everything God wanted to say to us.

So the first part of building a solid foundation for our lives, according to Jesus, is to “hear” his words. To hear is to “give audience to,” which means you’re paying attention. We all know the difference between someone who is taking in the sound of our voice and someone who is really locked in and listening. There may be both kinds of things going on right now! If you have kids or grandkids, you learn pretty quickly what it takes to get them to really hear what you are saying. Today, there are all sorts of distractions that get between the words that have been spoken and our ears and, more importantly, our hearts. Probably the worst one, and I’m extremely guilty of this one, is texting. Those texts just pop up and your phone buzzes or dings, and it’s incredibly hard for me to not at least glance down to see who it is and what they’ve said. They even pop up on my watch, which makes it even harder to ignore! And you’ve probably had the experience where you’re telling someone something important and they’re busy texting. Increasingly it’s hard for us to hear the words others are speaking to us, and even harder to hear the words of a Jewish rabbi who spoke two thousand years ago. His words are written down, but it takes great attention to hear them, which we do by reading the Scripture. I’ve said it before from this pulpit that it scares me that for some of us, the only time we ever hear any Scripture is here on Sunday morning. We need to hear more than that to build a solid foundation, which is why we provide at least a short Scripture passage for you to read every day. That’s a way to get us hearing the words of Jesus a bit more. Imagine if, when we were pouring those foundations on Mayfield, we had filled just one small portion of the hole, then quit. “It’ll be fine,” we could have said. And it would have been fine, until the house fell. The foundation for our lives depends upon hearing Jesus’ words. So if we claim to build our life on those words, why do we think we can survive with only a tidbit of his words?

But it’s not just enough to hear the words. Jesus said we need to not only hear but put the words into practice. Several years ago I was talking to a woman who was looking for a Bible study group, but as we talked she began telling me about the Monday study group she went to, and the Wednesday group, and the Thursday morning group. So I asked her why she needed another study group and tried to gently suggest that maybe what she actually needed was to do something with all that she was learning. Don’t get me wrong; I love Bible study. There’s not much I enjoy more than sitting with a group of people and talking about the word. But if all we get is intellectual knowledge, that same word has no chance of changing our lives, let alone the world. John Stott puts it this way: “The question is not whether we say nice, polite, orthodox, enthusiastic things to or about Jesus; nor whether we hear his words, listening, studying, pondering and memorizing until our minds are stuffed with his teaching; but whether we do what we say and do what we know, in other words whether the lordship of Jesus which we profess is one of our life’s major realities” (209). Do we do what Jesus says?

Near the end of Matthew’s Gospel, in a passage that is probably familiar to many of you, Jesus gives a picture of the final judgment. It’s the parable of the sheep and the goats, the righteous and the unrighteous. And in the parable, Jesus describes many of the things he has told his followers to do: feed the hungry, give the thirsty something to drink, inviting in the strangers, clothing the naked, looking after the sick, and visiting the prisoners. And the way he tells the story is fascinating, because the sheep (the righteous) have done all these things but don’t realize they were doing them for Jesus, while the goats (the unrighteous) claim they never knew they were supposed to be doing the things. The implication seems to be that both of these folks claimed to be followers of Jesus, but the difference between them is that one group (the sheep) did what Jesus said and the other (the goats) only heard the word but did nothing about it (cf. Matthew 25:31-46). It is not true that the things we do lead to our salvation or to our relationship with Jesus. We are not saved by our works. “What Jesus is stressing…is that those who truly hear the gospel and profess faith will always obey him, expressing their faith in their works” (Stott 209). That’s why James can say, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:26). Or, going back to Jesus: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (7:24). That house will stand because its foundation is firm.

The “bottom line” in week one of our VBS journey is simply this: “Do what Jesus says.” You know, that sounds simple, but I can’t help but wonder if we had been doing what Jesus says for the last two thousand years, wouldn’t the world look more like Jesus than it currently does? A hundred years ago, Indian philosopher Bara Dada once said, “Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians, you are not like him.” What if we were more like Jesus, doing what he said? Just taking Matthew 25 at face value, one simple example would be that the hungry would be fed. Today, one in eight people in the world goes to bed hungry. Add to that the fact that one-third of all food produced is never consumed; that amounts to 1.3 billion tons of food thrown away every year. A couple of years ago when we were in Birmingham, one of the places we worked was a food reclamation ministry, where several local businesses and farmers would bring in food that would have otherwise been wasted so that it could be distributed to those in need. I was amazed at how much food we moved, how much came in all day long, and that it was all redistributed by Friday. Monday morning they started all over again. What if that model were replicated in our own town, or in other places? Or what if we reorganized our priorities? The United Nations says that for $7 billion, we could feed everyone who is on the brink of famine. Seven billion sounds like a lot, but in 2021, we spent $11 billion on Cyber Monday. For a dollar a day, we could feed two hungry people. And that’s just one area that Jesus speaks about. What would it look like to do what Jesus says in the areas of those who are sick, those who are thirsty, those who are in prison? If we want to build a solid foundation for our lives, we will do what Jesus says.

This morning, we’re going to practice one of the things Jesus says to do, and that is to share the sacrament of holy communion. You may remember that Jesus gathered those who were closest to him, his disciples, his friends, for a final meal together the night before he was crucified. And as he shared the bread that represents his body and the wine that represents his blood, he told them, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). But I want you think about the context of this meal. It was, to be sure, a meal meant to bring them some measure of comfort, to remind them of what was about to happen the next day, his death on the cross. But this meal, this practice, was also meant to move them forward, to follow Jesus here, there and everywhere, to share what they had learned, to live out what Jesus said to do. It should move us to do that to. Every time we take part in this meal, we should be shaped more in the image of Jesus, and as we become more like him, we are moved to do what he says. So as you come forward this morning, as you receive the bread and the juice, I pray you will sense his Spirit moving you out into the world, following his lead here, there and everywhere, and putting his words into practice. Only then will your house stand.

Let’s prepare our hearts for the celebration of holy communion.