Where are You Building Your House?
Matthew 7:24-7:27 Pentecost 3 Year A

INTRODUCTION:• I want to speak to you today about something that is very important. What God’s
word has to say to us today can help keep us from doing something that we will regret.
• How many of you here today have been involved in building a house?
• What is one thing that you do not want to do when you build the house or chose the location on which to build? • You do not want to build your house on a weak foundation. Why? • Because if you do it does not matter how expensive or what quality of materials you use on the rest of the house because if you have foundation problems, the whole house will have problems.
• Jesus is wrapping up the Sermon on the Mount. In this seventh chapter Jesus has spoken to us about the narrow and wide gate, the good and the bad tree and now Jesus is going to focus our attention on the wise and foolish builder.
• Jesus is going to use the illustration of the builder and his house as an example of our lives and what will happen to them depending on what we chose to build our lives upon.
• As you listen today, I want you to think about the foundation you are building your life upon. Will you be one of the houses that Jesus looks at and rejects because it had foundation problems? Today, let us look at the two builders Jesus speaks of. Which one are you?
SERMON: I. THE WISE BUILDER (V 24-25) A. What makes a builder wise? (v24)
• Notice what Jesus says:
• Jesus tells us that the person who HEARS His words AND ACTS upon them can be compared to a wise builder.
• How many times have we heard people talk about what they are going to do, and then never do it?
• We look at what people’s intentions are. We think that if our intent is to do something, it is as good as doing it!
• Jesus wants people who not only hear the word, and applaud the word, but instead, he wants people who will do what the Word says.
• James speaks on the subject of being a “doer” of the word verses being a “hearer” of the word.
There is little point in going to a doctor, unless we are prepared to do the things we hear him say to us.
There is little point in going to an expert, unless we are prepared to act upon his advice.
And yet there are thousands of people who listen to the teaching of Jesus Christ every Sunday, and who have a very good knowledge of what Jesus taught, and who yet make little or no deliberate attempt to put it into practice.
If we are to be in any sense followers of Jesus we must hear and do.”
• Hearing and doing can be summed up with the word obedience!
• Jesus says that the wise builder is the one who builds his house upon the rock.
• The word for “rock” does not mean a stone or even a boulder, but a great outcropping of rock, a large expanse of bedrock.
It is solid, stable, and unmovable.
Sand, by contrast, is loose, unstable, and extremely movable.
The land agents selling lots on the sand are the false prophets Jesus has just warned about (vv. 15-20).
• Building on the rock is equivalent to obeying God’s Word.
• What is the rock that we are to build upon if we are going to be a wise builder?
It is the Word of God.
If we are building our lives upon the Word of God, then we are also building our lives on the rock of Jesus.
• This thought fits right in with what Jesus has already told us in this sermon.
Remember when He said that not all who call “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of God?
That was going to happen to those who did not build their lives upon the Word of God.
B. What effect does the wise builder have on his house? (v25)
• The picture that Jesus paints is a very graphic picture for those who were listening to Him that day.
• In Palestine there were many sudden violent storms that would arise.
The Jordan River would swell along with other Mountain streams.
The building materials of the day were not too good either.
One storm could wipe out a poorly constructed house.
• It takes a lot of effort to build on the right foundation.
In the Palestinian desert it is much easier to build on the sandy surface than to dig down to bedrock (Lk 6:48).
Likewise it is easier to listen to Jesus’ words (v. 26) and profess a relationship with him (vv. 21-22), than it is to obey him (v. 24).
But that is the only way to lay a lasting foundation.
• In the parallel passage in Luke 6:47 Jesus says, “he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.
The builder had to dig deep past the sand to get to the rock foundation.
• In Luke Jesus tells us that the builder dug deep to lay the foundation.
• Jesus tells us that because of the effort of the wise builder to build their house on the rock, whenever the storms of life come, the house will stand.
• The key word is “foundation”. The crises of life will show the real nature of one’s relationship to Jesus.
• Will that relationship withstand the trials and storms of life? A many relationships fall as soon as something bad happens.
• The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was given the challenge of building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, one of the most earthquake prone cities in the world.
Wright’s investigation showed that a solid foundation could be “floated” on a sixty-foot layer of soft mud underlying the hotel, which would provide a shock-absorbing but solid support for the immense building.
Shortly after the hotel was completed it withstood the worst earthquake in fifty-two years, while lesser buildings fell in ruins around it.
• Jesus is PROMISING us that if we will take the time to build our lives upon the rock of His word, that not matter what life does to us, we will come out of it intact.
• The wise builder takes the time to read God’s word and takes the time to meditate upon it. The wise builder looks for ways to apply God’s Word into his life and the life of his or her children.
• Wise parents will start their children out on the right track by trying to instill God’s word into their lives in every way possible.
Your bible is not just some book written over 2,000 plus years ago.
It is the word of God, it is the word of Life!
• In John’s Gospel Jesus was preaching to the people and many of the people did not like what they were hearing so many of those who were following Him quit.
II. THE FOOLISH BUILDER (26-27)
A. What makes a builder foolish? (v26)
• Notice that the one who is called the foolish builder is the one who hears the word of God and DOES NOT ACT upon them.
• Jesus says that person is building their house upon the sand.
• Building on the sand is like listening to heavenly instruction and going back to
earthly pursuits.
• A person is building their life on the sand when they build it upon the sands of human opinion instead of the Word of God.
• The sand is composed of human opinions, attitudes, and wills, which are always shifting and always unstable. To build on sand is to build on self-will, self-fulfillment, self-purpose, self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction, and self-righteousness.
To build on sand is to be un-teachable, to be “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).
• The foolish builder is short-sighted.
They don’t give a thought for tomorrow.
• Like the Three little pigs.
Straw, sticks and brick.
• The foolish builder is trying to do what is easy and quick.
• To profess knowledge of God and His truth but not follow God obediently and live His truth is to be deceived.
It is to have entered by the wide gate and to be walking on the broad way that leads to destruction.
It is to have a house built upon the sand.
The only validation we can ever have of salvation is a life of obedience.
That is the only proof Scripture mentions of our being under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
B. What effect does a foolish builder have on his house? (v27)
• In a parallel passage in LUKE 6:49 Jesus said, "But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great."
• On Oct. 17, 1989 a massive earthquake struck the San Francisco area and the people there gave a lot of thought to the foundation they were built on.
Buildings built on solid ground sustained much less damage than those built on "filled in" areas.
The south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge sits directly on top of the San Andreas fault!
Yet it was undamaged in that quake because the weight of the bridge rests on the two towers deeply embedded into the rock beneath the sea.
A double-decker freeway in Oakland collapsed.
It was built on land that had been filled in. It all looked the same until the time of testing!
• When we build our house on the sand, when the time of testing comes, it will fall, and Jesus says, “Great was its fall”.
• Every area of our lives that we do not build upon the rock of God’s word will fall. If we try to build a marriage in the sand, it will fall, it we try to raise our children on the sands of human opinion we will fail. If we build our financial empire on the sands it will fall and great will be the fall.
• The sad thing is these two houses will look the same to the passerby.
But the difference will be obvious enough in the storm.
Likewise, two professing Christians may both go to church, pray, read their Bibles, and have a Jesus bumper sticker on their car.
The storm will tell the difference. We use this metaphor primarily as “the storms of life.”
There is truth in that.
Times of tribulation often reveal the genuineness of a person’s faith.
• There are no long term benefits of building your house on the sand, so why do it.
• There must be a hunger for the word of God.
If there is no hunger, how can we build our house on a foundation in which we do not read the blue prints?
Do we really long to build our lives upon the solid rock of Jesus or do we just want to know a lot about God?
Do we want to really have Jesus as the Lord of our lives or do we just want to come to church so we can feel that we fulfilled our duty?
Will our house stand or fall in the Day of Judgment?
Will our house stand or fall when the tough times of life come?
CONCLUSION:
• In 1174 the Italian architect Bonnano Pisano began work on what would become his most famous project:
A separately standing bell tower for the Cathedral of the city of Pisa.
The tower was to be eight-stories and 185-foot-tall.
There was just one "little" problem: builders quickly discovered that the soil was much softer than they had anticipated, (the soil consisted of sand, shells and clay) and the foundation was far too shallow (5 feet deep) to adequately hold the structure!
And sure enough, before long the whole structure had begun to tilt... and it continued to tilt... until finally the architect and the builders realized that nothing could be done to make the Leaning Tower of Pisa straight again.
It took 176 years to build the Tower of Pisa and during that time many things were done to try and compensate for the "tilt."
Foundation was shored up; the upper levels were even built at an angle to try to make the top of the tower look straight. Nothing worked.
The tower has stood for over 800 years, but it leans 18 feet away from where it should be.
One day, experts say, it will fall.
All because it wasn’t built on the right foundation.
• The Leaning tower of Pisa was and is a beautiful structure, but one day it is going to fall because it was not built on a solid foundation.
• How many of our lives, after years and years of trying to build them will look beautiful on the outside, but because they are not built on the foundation of Jesus and Hs word, in the end, when tested, will fall.
• There has been a great amount of work and money put into trying to get the Leaning Tower back to being straight.
As the tower demonstrates, if the foundation is neglected, it is very hard to fix it.
If only the foundation had been given more attention, think of all the time and money that could have been saved.
• Think about your own life, how much smoother would it have been had you submitted your life to Jesus and built your life on the foundation of God’s word?
• The word of God demands radical submission to the EXCLUSIVE lordship of Jesus.
• I believe that as Jesus delivered the end of this great sermon that He looked out among the crowd with a heavy heart over the ones who lives will fall apart in the end because they chose to build their lives on the shifting sand of human opinion instead of the solid rock of Jesus Christ and His word.
• Where are you building your house? Are you laying a shallow foundation for your life or are you digging deep to make sure that your foundation is anchored to the Rock?
 

Don’t Worry Be Thankful

Pentecost 2 Year A

Our gospel  reading is from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has just said that it is impossible to serve two masters: one cannot love both. Accumulation of wealth and providing for times of difficulty can cause people such anxiety that they fail to put God first in their lives. 

Jesus wants them to get their priorities in order.  Anxiety will prevail if we fail to put God first in our lives. 

           The order should be this: God first, family second, everything else, third.

Don’t Worry, Be Thankful.

         Jesus’ teaching grew out of his own experience.  When he told his followers not to worry about tomorrow, we must assume he led them by example.  He wasn’t always looking ahead anxiously, making only the present moment count only because of what might happen next.               No: He seemed to have the skill of living totally in the present, giving attention totally to the present task, celebrating the goodness of God here and now.  Now, there’s a recipe for happiness.  And he wanted his followers to do the same.  When he urged them to make God their priority, it’s important to realize which God he is talking about.

           He’s not talking about a God who is distant from the world, who doesn’t care about beauty and life and food and clothes.  He’s talking about the creator himself, who has filled the world with wonderful and mysterious things, full of beauty and energy and excitement, and who wants his creatures to trust him and love him and receive their own beauty, energy and excitement from him.  So when Jesus tells us not to worry about what to eat, or drink, or wear, he doesn’t mean that these things don’t matter.

             He doesn’t mean that we should prefer to eat and drink as little as possible, and to wear the most ragged clothes, just to show that we despise such things.

             Far from it!  Jesus liked a party as much as anyone, and when he died the soldiers so admired his tunic that they threw dice for it rather than tearing it up.

             But the point was again priorities.  Put God first and always.

Living totally without worry sounds, to many people, as impossible as living totally without b breathing.  Some people are so hooked on worry that if they hadn’t got anything to worry about, they worry that they’ve forgotten something.

           Worry Joke:   For several years a woman had been having trouble getting to sleep at night because she feared burglars.  One night her husband heard a noise in the house, so he went downstairs to investigate.  When he got there, he did find a burglar.  “Good evening,” said the man of the house. “ I am pleased to see you.  Come upstairs and meet my wife. She has been waiting 10 years to meet you.”

            An average person’s anxiety is focused on:

•                                                        40%– things that will never happen

•                                                        30%– things about the past that can’t be changed

•                                                        12%– things about criticism by others, mostly untrue

•                                                        10%– about health, which gets worse with stress

•                                                        8%– about real problems that will be faced

 As we read the passages of scripture in today’s gospel we gain insight into some reasons why we should not worry:

•                     The same God who created life in us and be trusted with the details of our lives.

•                     Worrying about the future hampers our efforts for today.

•                     Worrying is more harmful than helpful (especially to our health)

•                     God doesn’t ignore those who depend on Him instead of worrying all the time and leaving Him out of the picture.

•                     Worrying shows a lack of faith in and understanding of God.

•                     Living one day at a time keeps us from being consumed with worry.  (AA motto)

          In verse 33 Jesus shows us how to get our priorities in order:

           “Seek first His kingdom and his righteousness” In other words, turn to God first for help, to fill your thoughts with His desires, to take His character for your pattern, to serve Him and obey Him in everything.

           Put me first and foremost.  Let me be the first person you come to when things are not going right.  Make me your first choice, not your last resort. 

             Make me the most important thing in your life.  I know that people, objects, goals and other desires compete for your attention.  Any of these things can become a priority and I get bumped out of first place in your life.  I want you to actively choose to give me first place in every area of your lives and be thankful for everything that comes from me.

             Planning for tomorrow is time well spent, worrying about tomorrow is time wasted.  Careful planning is thinking ahead about goals, steps and schedules, and trusting in God’s guidance.

            When done well, planning can help alleviate worry.  Worriers, by contrast, are consumed by fear and find it difficult to trust God.  They let their plans interfere with their relationship with God.  Don’t let worries about tomorrow affect your relationship with God today.

         The Lord has done great things for us, and we are very glad.  Psalm 126:3

          Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

           Don’t worry, be thankful.  Let us be thankful not only on this Sunday but everyday, and let us give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus.  When we make a conscious decision to do what God says, we will begin to see things in a different perspective.  When we do God’s will, we will find it easier to be joyful and thankful.

           Let us bless the Lord, for He has blessed us.  He has done great things for us, and we are very glad.  Thanks be to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Amen+

                Prayer:

                 O Almighty and everlasting God, who crownest the year with thy goodness, and hast given unto us the fruits of the earth in their season: Give us grateful hearts, that we may unfeignedly thank thee for all thy loving-kindness, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen+