The Parable of the Two Builders (Part 2)

Prayer and Reading Matthew 7:24-27

Nolan: I’m going to pray for John here. Father, thank you for my brother. Lord, I pray that whatever he has to say will penetrate the hearts of our friends here. Give him the pleasure of delivering it, and thank you for the words you placed on his heart. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Thank you, Nolan. That’s a perfect setup for what I feel God has told me to talk about. It’s hand in glove. It’s amazing. The two builders. I’m going to read the Matthew version, which comes right at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, starting in Matthew 7:24.

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rains come in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against the house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and the floodwaters come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”

Which Teaching Are We to Follow?

So what teaching are we supposed to follow? Look at the piece at the beginning: “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it.” So we need to listen and follow in order for this to apply to us. What teaching is it? It’s the Sermon on the Mount. It’s everything Jesus taught. Jesus went into the villages and the towns, and he taught in parables, gave illustrations and expounded on scripture. The Sermon on the Mount is the one great collection of all of that, put together in one place: the kinds of things Jesus taught wherever he went. Anywhere you go through your Bible and see the red letters, those are the teachings of Christ. Those are the things we’re supposed to be doing.

Nolan just read a whole list. How many of you have it nailed? How many of you have a little bit of it? You’ve got a little bit of Christ. And how many of us have a ways to go? Lots of hands up. So what does that say? We’re a work in progress.

Bedrock Is Either There or It Isn’t

If the onus is on us to do what Jesus taught, and we all want to do it, it’s our heart to do it, then we run into the fact that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. So how do we follow it? Our default thinking is that if we do a little of what Jesus says, maybe we have a little bit of bedrock, and if we do a lot of what he teaches, maybe we have a really big, strong, solid bedrock. Does that match what most people think? That’s not how bedrock works. Bedrock is either there or it’s not. You can’t make bedrock bigger. You can dig down to it. You can find it. You can put in the effort to know where it is. But you can’t make bedrock bigger, stronger or more permanent. It simply is.

Everybody is talking in the news today about server farms, and it’s all about AI. But there have been server farms for a long time: servers that hold YouTube videos, websites, corporate data, government data. A large number of them, especially the ones built for disaster recovery, so that you can back up and recover after a disaster, are built in BC, in Kelowna and farther east. Do you know why? Earthquakes. Here, we’re all built on clay. Under a decent-sized earthquake, clay liquefies. Things shift and move, buildings topple over, and bad things happen. That won’t happen if there’s bedrock underneath. We’re literally talking about building on bedrock so that we can withstand disaster. In Alberta the bedrock is even stronger, and that’s why they want to build AI server farms out there. I’m not talking about that today, but I am talking about bedrock.

You can put in the effort to find out where the bedrock is and what its properties are, but the only real choice you make is to build on it or not.

Two Qualified Builders

Both builders were qualified builders: the one who built on the bedrock and the one who built on the sand. They were both at least as good as Nolan, building amazing structures, pleasing to the eye and structurally sound. They even passed code. Two builders who both did a good job, but one of them built on a foundation that was strong and already there, and the other built on something that wasn’t there.

We have this idea that if we do the work Jesus is asking us to do, that somehow shapes our bedrock. But the formula goes the other way. Building on the bedrock affects our ability to do Jesus’ work. The wise person hears Jesus’ words, and we might assume that we hear them, do them, and then end up with bedrock. In fact we build on the bedrock first, and then we’re able to do the things Jesus said we should do.

God’s Laws Describe God

So what is that bedrock? Jesus is the rock, and Jesus is the perfect representation of the Father, and God is love. This was pointed out to me at the A School, and then I read a book about it by James Jordan called The Ancient Road. We have two copies in the back, and I encourage you to buy one. It’s a good book. In that book, and in the discussions I had at the school, we talked about the fact that God’s laws describe God.

So we have these laws: don’t murder, don’t steal, honor your mother and your father. We think those are pointed at us, things we need to do in order to be perfect. But God is perfect. God doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Okay, today I’m going to nail it. I’ll do my positive mental attitude, look in the mirror, recite my positive self-affirmation, and not break any laws or rules today.” God is love, and love can’t do the wrong thing. When God says, “Don’t murder,” what he is saying about himself is that it’s not in his heart to murder. When he says, “Don’t steal,” he is saying it’s not in his heart. Love doesn’t take what isn’t its own. It doesn’t invade. It doesn’t take away. All the things in Corinthians about love, that love is patient and love is kind, are God describing himself.

When Jesus stands up and teaches the Sermon on the Mount, he says some bodacious things, like Nolan was just saying. Some of them are really difficult. If you read through the Sermon on the Mount, there are things you won’t line up with. Besides “don’t worry” (does anybody here have that one nailed?), he says to turn the other cheek. Some of us might be okay at that. He says to forgive, and even bless, people who are actively oppressing you. How many of you have that nailed on social media? And just to be sure everybody has something to work on, at one point in the sermon Jesus simply says, “Be perfect.” Who has that one nailed? None of us.

Jesus Starts the Day in the Father’s Love

So how can we do the teaching Jesus gave? Was Jesus perfect? Yes. So how did he wake up in the morning? Did he say, “Today I’m going to nail it. Today temptation is going to go away. I’m going to pray the right prayers and do the right things. I’m going to make it happen”? No. That’s all performance Christianity. Do you know what Jesus did in the morning? He connected with the Father. He got absolutely sourced in God’s love. Every word, every action, every miracle, everything he did, came out of that perfect love from the Father. And then he couldn’t do the wrong thing, and he fulfilled all the law. Why do love God and love your neighbor as yourself fulfill all the law? Love is the answer. Love is Jesus. Love is the Father. Love is the bedrock.

So the challenge between these two builders is to recognize, instead of sitting here judging ourselves for not measuring up, that when we build on love and let it be the source of our lives, we won’t do the wrong things, because we’re operating out of that love. It makes us more and more like Christ. Christ is formed in us to the extent that we allow his love to be our source. His love doesn’t change. That bedrock is solid. You can’t make it bigger. It’s already as big as it needs to be to support your life.

Moving Your Foundation

The challenge today is this: you can choose to build your life on God’s love and let that be your source. Or you may have already started building your life somewhere else, and now you’re recognizing that a foundation needs to get shifted and adjusted. Take how you raise your children as an example. You might raise your children with a legalistic approach, trying to control and direct them, with some fear about how they’re going to turn out and where things are going to go. Then you realize, from a father’s heart perspective, that there is a different way to love your kids. You can love and parent them the same way God loves and parents you. That’s a completely different look and feel.

How do you shift from one to the other? It’s a good thing we’re all mobile homes. We can disconnect from where we’re built right now and move to be built where God is. Sometimes that does take some rethinking, some work, some prayer ministry in our hearts, reconnecting with how God is interacting with our lives and how he fuels us. If you find that what’s coming out of your life is built on previous thinking, on performance-based Christianity where you have to be good enough, then it may be time to move.

The Two Trees

I was introduced to another topic at the A School that was really cool for me. There’s a lot in my head that made a real difference in my heart. There’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we’re not supposed to be fed from that tree. We understand easily that we shouldn’t be fed from the knowledge of evil, because we know not to judge and not to do that. But it’s also the tree of the knowledge of good, and that one is tricky. As a Christian, you come in and want to identify what’s good and get on board with it. That is also the wrong tree. God’s love is the other tree.

If we’re going to move forward in Christlikeness, be built on God’s love, and have that love be the source that fuels our life, so filled up that nothing else can possibly come out of us, then we need to stop eating from the wrong tree. It’s easy to say I shouldn’t be eating from the knowledge of evil. But I also need to stop focusing on the knowledge of good and stop giving myself a litmus test. You hear that Christ is the standard we measure ourselves against. Stop. Just be filled with God’s love. You’re a son and a daughter, brought into full sonship, full inheritance and full relationship with God through Christ. Let that love fill you. That’s the only thing you need to do. Then the formula works in your life, because it works backward. When you build on the right foundation, on solid rock, on the bedrock of God’s love, it makes you a doer of the things you’ve heard. Amen.

Altar Call and Prayer

Nolan, we’re going to do an altar call together. If some of the things we’ve been talking about hit home for you, we all have housekeeping in our lives that we have to deal with, and that’s okay. We want to come alongside you. We might not fix it, but we can bring it to the Lord. Amen. I really want to encourage you, anyone who needs prayer, we want to pray with you. I’d also invite the prayer teams to come up. It’s good to let it go and give it to God.

Let’s have everybody stand. If your mobile home needs to shift, if you need a refoundation for your house so that it’s built on the right foundation, and you’re not sure how to do that, come on up, get some prayer, and talk to somebody up here about it. God wants to do something amazing in your lives. Amen.

Father, we thank you that you’ve come today. You love us so dearly, you love this place, and you love this city. Father, I just pray that your…