« The Principle of Buried Treasure | Main | Does God Micro-Manage World History? »
October 26, 2003
How to Build a Life
How to Build a Life
Psalm 33 / Proverbs 14: 1-12
Luke 6: 46-49
October 26th, 2003
Reformation Sunday
Protestants around the world call today “Reformation Sunday.” Reformation Sunday isn’t one of the great festivals in the Christian year such as Easter and Christmas. All Christians don’t celebrate it. In Greece and Russia Christians don’t know what the term means. No doubt at St. Mary’s Cathedral this morning, the morning sermon may remember the Reformation, but for sure the bishop will not rejoice in it.
In fact, Reformation Sunday challenges one of Jesus’ most basic longings, expressed in His great prayer recorded in the Gospel of John, “That they may be one as we are One.” I wonder what the Apostle Paul thinks, as he looks down on this massive, worldwide thing called “Christendom,” that evolved from his hard labors. As Paul and Jesus confer, what do they think about the splintering of the Church that took place after Martin Luther re-discovered the words of the ancient prophet, Habakkuk, that stirred the soul of St. Paul—“The just shall live by faith”?
Who can dispute that Jesus is the foundation of the Church, but who can dispute as well, that the building has gone every which way on top of that foundation?
Fear and pride, I sense, have been like two very bad tools preventing a strong house from coming together on top of that sure foundation. Humility and contrition were needed, but in their place came pride and fear. Knowing that even the gates of hell cannot prevail in destroying the Body of Christ, the devil has used pride that makes us grab on to this or that perception of truth, and fear of the criticism of others whose approval we cherish, to prevent our visible unity in Christ. Pride and fear far more than doctrine separates us. How similar are the doctrines of many who will never come together in one house until Jesus forces us to at the end. We’re all proud. We’re all afraid.
The Church was already divided when the Protestant Reformation began. The first official division in Christendom took place in AD 1054, separating east from west. Then, on October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther took a hammer and walked to the front door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. He nailed there his now famous 95 Theses, little knowing how each blow of his hammer was a harbinger of the splintering of the Western Church.
How I love Luther’s hymn with which we began our worship this morning, “A Mighty Fortress is our God!” But it was never intended to suggest something different from “The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.” What a “house” Protestantism has turned out to be! We’ve built a house with so many rooms with different décor in each so that you’d wonder if there was a common architect behind it all. The Psalmist wrote, “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” I wonder is the Lord building this house?
This morning we have been reminded of Jesus’ story that encourages us to build life on a strong foundation. He gave this word-picture at the end of His “Sermon on the Mount.” Hearing and doing what He taught is like building our lives on a rock-solid foundation. Floods and winds destroy a house with a sand foundation, but they cannot destroy a house built on a rock.
He gave us images we can understand clearly in the wake of this summer’s flooding. The flooding of the Wabash River wasn’t as successful as the mudslides in California in wiping away the homes of many people. We had flooded basements and even living rooms, but not many of the homes in Indiana were carried away with the flooding. Perhaps the good concrete foundations our homes are built on helped.
When you pause and think about it, the very idea of having a strong foundation for life is good, but what does it mean? And how do we “build,” an image that suggests blueprints and skill? What Jesus taught refers to the Church, but it also refers to your life and to mine. The Church is made up of very many people like you and me.
You and I have five senses, one brain, and a host of physical and emotional hungers that agitate to be satisfied. Hunger, thirst, the longing to reproduce that seems to drive human society crazy, the need to be safe, warm, correct, satisfied, and to thrive—all of these appetites and instincts and many more seethe inside us like chemicals in a test-tube. And there is no guarantee how the experiment will turn out. How will the experiment turn out in the test tube called “You?” Did Jesus have something like your life, or like Faith Church in mind when He said, “Build on the Rock!”?
What do we mean, then, when we speak of Jesus building His Church, and what do we mean when we think of building our lives on a strong foundation? We talk about growth a lot. What do we mean by growth? It seems most people stay pretty much the same.
When God began the process in human history that would lead to deliverance from sin and death He made two promises to Abraham. First, God promised him a family, that is, a house. “I will build it,” God promised. People would be able to speak of the “house of Abraham” as a very big house. He would have descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore. His seed would be a blessing to all nations. Second, God promised him a homeland. Abraham’s life was an odyssey to find that homeland. Today that homeland is torn with violence.
Later in the story of Abraham’s “house,” his descendant, King David, wanted to build a house for God. God told David, “You will not build me a house, but I will build you a house.” This meant that David wouldn’t get to build the Temple in Jerusalem, but that God would make sure that someone from David’s family line would be king over Israel for ever. As Christians we often remember the mysterious way God kept this promise.
Quietly history unfolded, and the Tribe of Judah didn’t go the way of the dinosaur. In the little Palestinian town of Nazareth God began to bring together the threads of Israelite history as a little boy from the tribe of Judah was born named Joseph. Judah was the tribe of King David. Joseph fell in love with a girl from the tribe of Levi named “Mary.” Levi was the priestly tribe. The royal and the priestly lines came together when Joseph and Mary fell in love.
And even though they reserved the full physical expression of their love for each other until after they got married, God did something special in Mary. She found herself with child in a special act of God. We call this the Virgin birth, or more properly, the virginal conception of Jesus. This Child was the ultimate fulfillment of the promise God made to King David. This Child was not merely King of Israel, but the King of Kings and Lord of Lords—and our Great High Priest. He was Immanuel, God with us. All of this wrapped up in that little baby born in Bethlehem, the City of David. He fulfilled God’s promises to King David and to Abraham and to Adam and Eve—and to Himself when He said, “I will make myself a beautiful world.”
These past few weeks we have been reading and pondering the special teaching of this Immanuel, this King of Kings and Great High Priest to His closest followers. Here Jesus explained the blueprints for building on His strong foundation. To individuals and to the Church Jesus said, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, give to him who begs of you . . . I’m the sure foundation, but this is how you build.”
How are we building with these blueprints?
When Matthew’s Gospel tells us Jesus taught these things from the top of a mountain, it was to make us think of Moses who received God’s commands to Israel from the top of a mountain.
How different the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is from Moses’ Sermon on the Mount. After Moses gave to Israel the laws of God from the mountain, he sternly warned them to obey these laws with a list of blessings and cursings. If they obeyed the laws of God, blessing. If they disobeyed, cursing. And the curses were enough to make you shudder. But as bad as the curses were they didn’t work to scare Israel into following God’s plan of life.
Jesus followed up His Sermon on the Mount with a story. No threats. Just a story.
But I notice Jesus prefaced this concluding story with a question: “Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say?” I wonder what His tone of voice was? When Matthew mentions Jesus’ asking the same question he tells us Jesus will one day say to those who call Him, “Lord, Lord,” but do not do what He says, “Depart from me; I never knew you.” That sounds stern. Luke skips this hard saying. But it seems we should remember Jesus said this too.
Did Jesus say this sadly? Did Jesus look into the future and know that His grace would cover all our sin, and wonder why people who call Him “Lord, Lord,” should use grace as a reason for not building in His way? “My blueprints matter,” Jesus said. Paul explained grace. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” If I were God and knew that people would use my undeserved favor as a reason for not even trying to build using Jesus’ blueprints. . . well, I’m not God, and that’s just as well.
Jesus looked at His disciples who wandered like sheep without a shepherd, who stumbled into foolish mistakes. He looks at us and says, “But I have offered you a better way. Why don’t you give my way a try? Why do you call me Lord, but don’t try to follow me?” Jesus might have continued, “You don’t try because it’s hard and you’re unsure of yourselves. But you make it harder still by not trying, and by defending your blunders. I will help you. My father has given you the Holy Spirit.”
When Jesus told his story about the wise and foolish builders, it was to make clear that He intends for us NOT just salvation from sin and death in the end, but that we should build a full and abundant life. Life is like a house we build. Salvation from sin and death is a gift of God; it’s the foundation. But the life Jesus offers us is a house we have to build.
The Apostle Paul tells us, “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest. It will be revealed with fire. . . If any one’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”
When Paul wrote this, it seems he had himself in mind as someone who was building the Church. He and Apollos were two very respected Church leaders. But Paul knew there is a difference between building big and building good. Paul never forgot that the heart and soul of his message was the odd idea that God became flesh in Jesus, and that this God-man suffered death by crucifixion, and that He came to life again on the third day afterwards. This message, foolishness to the Greeks and scandal to the Jews, was the heart and soul of his message. It was monotonously simple. Come to Jesus and be reborn and changed by the renewing of your mind.
Other ideas can draw a following. God can make you rich—oh yummy! But money burns fast—yuk! Other ideas are the kind of building material that will burn with fire—wood, hay, straw.
But it’s not just the overall thing we call the Church that Jesus and Paul had in mind to build right. Your life and mine are houses God wants to raise on top of a sure foundation. Jesus is your foundation. But how are you building?
It’s hard. For one thing, it’s all well and good to speak of the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’ blueprints for life, but with a set of blueprints you are supposed to have a final page showing how the finished house looks. I can’t see the picture of my finished house called Stuart. You have no picture showing what your house will look like. All we have is blueprints that look very awkward to follow now. “Turn the other cheek?” “Give my jacket to the one who stole my shirt?” What kind of blueprints are these? We don’t try to follow these blueprints because we’re proud and afraid they will only lead to disaster.
Jesus is the one person in the world to whom I’ll say “OK!” when He says, “Just trust me.”
You say you love God. What’s the proof? What are the priorities of your life? What questions do you ask before you make your decisions? What we can afford very often is the prime consideration in how we use our money. Are your questions the kind that have your comfort and best interest in mind first? You say you love your neighbor. What’s the proof? How does your prosperity figure in to the blueprints you follow day by day?
Loving God and loving our neighbor are two aspects of the house- building project God has given us. We begin on the foundation of realizing God loved us despite our sin. We trust that Jesus died to forgive us our sins, and this is the bed rock of our life and faith. Now where do we go from there? And where does the Church go from that basic trust? Building his hard work. It is a task that must follow a blueprint.
I worked construction during the summer after graduation from college. I was strong and loved to push wheel-barrows filled with concrete up ramps to where the brick-layers worked. Everyone who worked building dormitories at Allen University in Colombia, SC, worked hard. But our hard work was far from the whole story. There was a guy wearing a hard hat who carried a sheaf of papers around, and a tape measure, and he kept checking what we were doing. Because we not only had to work hard, but we had to follow the blueprints.
Building on the foundation of Jesus requires hard work and using the blueprint He gave us. We can’t see the finished picture. We have to trust that in the big blueprints God drew, the building will be worth seeing. You and I are builders, and it matters how we build. You are building the house called “You.” We are building the house called “Faith Church,” just a small part of the Big House called “The Body of Christ.”
The winds will blow hard, and the flood waters come, but the Church will stand. I pray your life will stand too when the hard wind blows and when flood waters come. How are you building your house?
Let us pray: O Lord, in these few minutes we have tried to understand how to build on the sure foundation of Jesus. Now give us grace to build. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at October 26, 2003 09:30 AM