CONTENTS

PROGRAM

VISIT

SERMON ARCHIVE

REVIVAL ARTICLES

NEWS

MISSION

AIM

MEET US

HELP!

FREE STUFF

LINKS

GUESTBOOK

Read

Sign

What are you building?

Matt 7: 24 - 28

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 20 Jun, 2004

“THE WISE man built his house upon the rock and the rain came tumbling down, and the floods came up, and the house on the rock stood firm.” You know the song..

  It's an easy song to learn. We know the song, we know the parable, and each one reinforces the other one in our minds.
  “The foolish man built his house upon the sand and the rains came down and the floods came up and the house on the sand went crash!”
  That’s easy enough,too, isn’t it? Jesus taught that, as the wise man builds on the rock and is safe when the storms come, so the foolish man who builds on the sand gets his house washed away when storms arrive.
  Another easy one.
  “So build your life on the Lord Jesus Christ, and the blessings will come down as the prayers go up; so build your life on the Lord.”
  Another easy one. Except, where does Jesus say anything about blessings? Where does he talk about prayer in this parable?
  You're right: it’s not there.

  Do you see what we do? We don’t like the stark reality of what Jesus taught. It’s like brussels sprouts — good for us, but we don’t like the taste. So we put ice cream on top of it so that that taste is hidden.
  Let’s look very carefully at what Jesus is telling us, because it is too easy for us to re-interpret his teachings to suit our own desires.

  Who wants to think of floods and destruction? Who wants to consider hell and judgment? Yet that is exactly what Jesus is on about. Storms, floods, destruction, judgment. He is on about the consequences of our choices and actions.

  When I was a kid, we lived directly opposite Jim’s back gate. Jim was a nice fellow, keen to help everyone, something of a self-taught mechanic, but he didn’t have a clue about building gates.
  Every few years, he would build a new set of back gates, and, after a while, they would collapse, and he’d have to rebuild them.
  Jim knew that wooden gates need an upright piece to connect hinges to, and another upright piece to meet the other leaf of the gate. He also knew that gates needed a horizontal top and a horizontal bottom. And he knew that they had to have diagonal bracing to stop them from sagging.
  So, every time he rebuilt his gates, he would make sure that that diagonal brace was in on each half of the gate.
  He always ran the brace from the top hinge to the jamb side at the bottom. In other words, he ran it exactly the wrong way.
  And the rain came and went through the seasons and the years, and the winds blew every August, and the flood rose in 1952 and it rose higher in 1956, and it rose pretty high in 1968, and Jim's back gate sagged and sagged and sagged. Every year you’d see that he had to lift it higher to make it open, and push it harder to get it shut, until he would give up on it, and have an early morning working bee with his two sons, and build another gate exactly like the last one.

  I'm sure my father said a number of times, “Jim, your gates would probably sag less if you ran the bracing the other way.” But Jim always did a Frank Sinatra — he did it his way.
  Jim didn’t need to have all those gate problems. He could have listened to advice. He could have thought harder. He could have read a book on the subject. But he did what he thought would work.

  It’s like the Bible says,

There is a way that seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.

  Now, I’ll tell you something: Jim could have built the best set of gates in Fairfield. He could have put the braces in the right way around. He could have gangnailed the corners. He could have done everything exactly right, and he would have saved himself the bother of having to build a new set of gates every time there was really bad weather, and he would have saved himself the cost of all that new wood and hardware.
  But here’s the crunch: he wouldn’t have had a blessing from having new gates. He wouldn’t have felt personally fulfilled for more than about half an hour, he wouldn't have had a pay increase or a good crop of artichokes growing over the outdoor toilet, or a deeper experience of God. He’d have had a sturdy new gate that would last him twice as long as his old one.

  So we come back to the parable Jesus taught. It is not about blessing, it is about avoiding trouble. It is about how not to lose everything when difficult times come.
  Jesus talks about two ways to live, two choices to make. We can choose the way that will see us through the stresses of living, or we can choose the way that ends in destruction and loss. The choice is ours.

  In those days, there were no building ordinances. You built a house, and, if it was suitable to its purpose, you left it standing; if it was unsuitable, you could abandon it, knock it down, or have it fall down —  preferably not while anyone was in it!

  These days, people try new things, and they have all the science behind their designs to know what is safe and what is not safe well before they do the first concrete pour. In those times, people built what was tried and true. Anyone who did anything different was a madman, who was sure to have a catastrophe on his hands.

  So, if you built a house, you always built on a solid foundation. You always rendered the walls to keep rain out. You always made sure that your beams were at least so many finger widths deep, and so on. Only an idiot built on a loose, moveable foundation — for exactly the reason Jesus gave. A desert flash flood would carry the whole structure away.

  Jesus is talking about the harsh events of life when he discusses storms and floods. He talks about both the wise and the foolish builder meeting similar events. But we can’t entirely separate the hard parts of life from judgment to come.

   We all do face stormy periods in life. In the past 12 months, Neci and Elmer have had a few crises with accidents, work situations and so in.

   A couple of years ago, the Neph and Divina went through a very rough patch, particularly when Divina and her mum were both invalids together.

   In the last 18 months, Chris and I have lost three out of four parents, and Chris has lost an aunt, an uncle and someone who was a close friend and work–associate. She also had a bout of very serious illness.

  In 2000 — I think it was — Gloria lost several family members and a couple of close friends as well as having a spell in hospital with pneumonia.

  The list goes on and on. And those storms toss you around. You can’t concentrate properly, your faith is rattled around, you are struck by sudden anxiety about whether you will ever come out of this safely.
  No one comes out of such periods undamaged. Some suffer worse than others.

  I have a friend whose father and step–father both died of prostate cancer. Her mother, who is now a little older than I am, recently met a really nice chap and they were getting on well together and — guess what! He’s got prostate cancer.
  The lady was thrown into chaos by this. At one point she even considered cutting off her relationship with the man, because she felt she could not face going through a third death–by–cancer situation.
  Fortunately, the fellow is responding well to radiation treatment, and my friend’s mother is feeling at ease to continue the relationship.
  None of us would judge the lady for her reaction. We all understand it.
  Yet, if we look at it from the man’s perspective, there’s something seriously wrong with the idea that a relationship is only worth keeping if it is in health, but not in sickness, if it is only in wealth and not in poverty.
  The storms of life have damaged that lady far more than she realises. A great mound of sand has been created downstream because the floods have scoured it out from under her foundations.
  If God is love — we know he is — then the more our love fails, the further we are from him.

  When Divina had her most recent illness, I very nearly ran away from you all. There were so many problems: one just been diagnosed with heart problems, another with a melanoma on his leg, another had major surgery, and yet another had just been seriously ill... we had a quarter of the congregation hospitalised for various major health issues that year. And Divina’s illness seemed like just one thing too many. I was ready to quit.
  Then I saw that that would be just one more blow to people who had already suffered too much. I saw it would be abandoning the church to satan, who has long had a clear goal of destroying us. Yes, my faith was challenged and nearly broke.

  Over the time I have been here, you have seen me go through quite a number of storms, and have seen that I have weathered some better than others. I have to admit there is a lot of storm damage.

  Here is where judgment and hell come in. Life must be summed up. The Bible says (Acts 17)  that God

...has appointed a Day in which he will judge the world justly by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given everyone assurance by raising him from the dead.

  There will be a Day when what we have built will become totally clear and obvious: As Paul writes in I Corinthians 3,

...each one’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done.

  So, when you consider it, Jesus is saying pretty serious stuff. There is no ice cream here to hide the brussels sprouts. Jesus says that we either build what will take us through the storms of life and still be standing when judgment comes, or we build what will ultimately be swept away.

  Now we come to the critical part, which is, how do we build so that it will remain secure?

  Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t directly say that it is about faith. In fact, he says.

Whoever hears these words of mine and does them...

  In other words, to be protected from what life flings at us, we need to listen to what Jesus says and obey what he says.

  I’m just reading a book about the theology of John Wesley, who founded Methodism. You know that I am from a Methodist background.
  One thing he mentions is an area where Wesley differed from many theologians of his time. He says that Wesley would never have been content if someone said to him, “I was converted 17 years ago.” The writer says that Wesley would have wanted to know, “Are you converted right now, at this present moment?”*

  Wesley didn’t tolerate people living in the past. If they were not pressing on towards their heavenly goal, they were not living the teachings of Jesus.

  This parable clearly illustrates what Wesley meant. Jesus doesn’t talk about making a decision of faith; he talks about people living daily by faith. That is what really counts.

  I made a decision nearly 42 years ago to become a follower of Jesus. Over those 42 years, there have been periods when I have not been moving forwards at all, and other periods when I have been moving very reluctantly with Jesus, and there have been some periods when I have been hearing clearly and doing obediently.

  I can tell you that hearing the words of Jesus and doing them is always a test of faith. Recently, I faced a choice of indulging my own desires or of serving others at personal cost. It came as a challenge from the Lord.
  It was really not a big deal to serve others, yet I was unwilling to do it. I was afraid that the cost to me was too high.
  It took faith to provide that small service. I had to trust, that I could do it and not lose more than I could handle. I also had to trust that people wouldn't disapprove, or think I had acted foolishly in following Jesus rather than just leaving things as they were. In the event, it turned out that my half a loaf and sardine fillet achieved much more than I had ever expected, but that’s another story.

  What I am saying is that every act of hearing and obeying Jesus is an act of faith.

  It parallels what we find in John’s gospel. He never speaks of faith: he always uses the verb, to believe. To John, faith is always something you do, something active; not something you have or possess without any ongoing action.

  Or, as John Wesley would have had it, belief is ultimately expressed in obedience. He said that it is

“...obedience to all the commands of God, internal and external; obedience of the heart and of the life: in every temper and all manner of life.”**

(*, **: quoted in Harper, S: The Way to Heaven The gospel according to John Wesley, Zondervan, Michigan, 2003)

  Whoever hears and does Jesus’ words is like the wise man who built on the rock.

  There are two consequences for us, if we are to begin living as wise people.

  First, if we have never begun hearing and doing Jesus words, we need to start. Time is running out, and the final storm is near. To do that means ceasing being someone who hears and does not do and starting again with Jesus in all ways.

  Second, for those of us who have begun in a life of obedient hearing, we need to resolve, to make an act of will, to continue in that path.
  We live in an age when personal choice is so dominant that we do not enforce Jesus’ teachings. We make up our own mind whether to be baptised, whether to join the church, whether to become active in ministry, and the consequence is that people make decisions that they never follow up. In other words, they make a decision, but continue hearing Jesus words and doing anything but. That is the way to destruction!

  My challenge to the Christians here is to do everything that Jesus commands, and begin doing it now, while there is still time. 

AMEN