Walls and Foundations

Matthew 7: 24-29
24"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
28When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.

Fifty years ago, a natural gas company laid down gas lines made out of steel along a sparsely populated stretch of land. Throughout the country the standard procedure was to use steel pipes for gas, steam and oil lines. It was thought to be the safest and least likely to cause problems for a long period of time. In the last twenty years the government has realized that steel pipes will not last forever, matter of fact they only last about fifty years.

However, they let utility companies regulate their own pipelines and only made it priority in 2002 that companies must inspect lines running through heavily populated areas, but still left it up to the individual company to inspect the pipelines. And because our population is constantly growing, areas that were rural fifty years ago are now suburbs or parts of expanded cities.

And then a couple weeks ago in California, a natural gas line became corroded and caused an explosion that killed four people. It was a terrible tragedy and thank God more people didn’t die. From this tragedy, an article was published that said there are quite a few natural gas lines in the US that need replacing and many of them are located in cities and towns. This is only the latest in infrastructure failures that have been happening all over America. A few years ago a bridge collapsed and when boroughs began to inspect their bridges they found that many of them required work.

Tragedies like these occur because of a lack of foresight and neglect. It’s easy to blame the government and businesses in charge of these things, but the truth is we all carry a little of the blame when something like this happens. We are content to let others take care of the big problems. We are content with voting once every couple years for someone else to change the world and then muttering about them when it doesn’t happen right away.

Our lives are not about sitting back and letting others do all the work for us. During his ministry, Jesus was not someone who let others do the work. He was right there spreading the good news and teaching others. Eventually he sent out his disciples to preach and teach the Word, but not without extensively working with them until they began to understand the Kingdom of God is not about what you can receive, but about what you have to offer.

We are here on this earth not to see how much wealth and material good we can accumulate. We are here because the Lord has great things in store for all of us. Our lives are a building block to the Kingdom of God. Our foundation, if we are wise builders, should be Jesus Christ. Only foolish people will build their life on something other than the Lord because when tough times come calling – and they will – everything they have worked for can be swept away in the blink of an eye.

A person’s life is like a house. Every thought is like a piece of lumber in our house of life, every habit is like a beam, every imagination like a window, whether it be well or badly placed; and they all gather into some kind of unity, seemly or grotesque. Of the two builders in the Gospel message, one is a thoughtful man who deliberately plans his house with an eye to the future, the other is not a bad man but he is thoughtless, and casually begins to build in the easiest way. The one is earnest; the other is content with a careless and unexamined life.

Christ is not only the foundation but also the architect of our house. The passage tells us, “Who so ever hears these words of mine and does them” Only on His truth can life or a church stand. This passage declares the authority of Jesus as absolute. He is our Lord and Savior. He is the one that redeems us, he is the one that brings us to the Father and delivers eternal salvation.

The wise person listens to Jesus Christ. The wise person understands that only through and with Christ are we able to live a life pleasing to God the Father. Our house built on the rock of Jesus is built day by day. I heard a proverb one time of a rich man who hired a contractor to build him a house. He told the man that no expense should be spared and the contractor was very pleased with the finished house. Then the rich man told him, “The house is yours, but you must live in it if you want to keep it”. It was only then that the builder could see the areas that were poorly put together when he was forced to call the house a home. We too must live in what we build out of our lives.

We decide what foundation is good enough; we decide what walls to put around us. We are the ones that either create a house that will stand the test of time or will wash away in the first hard rain. We decide whether to listen to Jesus and follow his example or to ignore his truth and go our own way.

There are many people in this world that choose their own way rather than Jesus Christ’s. Then when things go wrong they ask themselves and others, “Why is God doing this to me? Why is God punishing me?” The truth is that God didn’t do this to them. They chose their path; they chose to ignore the Lord and what he has taught them because it was easier.

Isn’t that the real truth of why we do something or not? What’s the easiest way? If I tithe ten percent or more of my income then I won’t be able to buy that big screen television this year. If I volunteer at the community shelter on Saturdays then I won’t be able to play golf or have lunch with my friends. If I write a letter to Congress about that bill I don’t like being passed they’ll just send back a form letter, so I’m not going to even bother.

We choose not to care. We choose to live a life of indifference and then when something atrocious happens we are all upset and riled up. Out of the four people that died in the California gas explosion a few weeks back, one of them was a woman that had worked on getting the natural gas companies to regulate old gas lines. She inadvertently died because of the very thing she had worked her whole life to fix. Talk about irony. There are always going to be cynical people that say she dedicated her life to a cause and then died for nothing. But the truth is she knew there was a problem and she wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she believed in. In the end she died from what she was warning this country about, but now the whole world knows it. And now there will be changes made because tragedies like this one need to be avoided.

The Lord offers us a choice. We can stand up for Him and sometimes be put down or hurt, or we can take the easy way out and everyone around us will get hurt instead. What Jesus’ parable doesn’t tell us is what happens after the flooding of the foolish man’s house. The foolish builder probably had a family. Did they die in the flood because of his mistake? Did they go hungry while he worked and scrimped to build a new place? Our actions don’t only affect us, they have a ripple affect.

The truth is that when we do things God’s way, fewer people are hurt. When we build our lives around the foundation of Jesus Christ even when our whole world seems to come crumbling down, we have God to help us rebuild again. There is no guarantee in life that we won’t have to rebuild. Many people have found that out during this recession. People that have worked in the same company for twenty years were told they were no longer needed. They had to find new ways to support their loved ones. The Lord has never promised our road will be easy, but he did and does promise that He will be with us every step of the way.

What this story comes down to is that every house is tested. Spring and summer do not last forever, eventually winter will come again. Our lives are not without temptation. To understand how sweet the fruit of our faithfulness is we must at times taste the bitterness of our failures. There will be times when ‘flash floods’ test the foundation of our lives. Whose house will continue to stand no matter how fast the storm approaches?

Jesus tells us here that those who build on surface values, those who forget the truth in his words will know more than the bitterness of failure. Their whole lives will be swept away. This is a challenge for all of us to not be apathetic to the crises of this world. This is a warning to stand up for what we believe in and to let those around us know we are Christians and that means something. It is not just a label for the census bureau.

It is not just ‘any old way’ of living – we are a people that choose to live with the ideals and values of Jesus Christ. We choose not just to be Christ-like we profess and proclaim to be children of God because Jesus Christ has redeemed us. Jesus is our foundation; he is the way, the truth and the life we center our own lives around. When the Father looks upon us, he sees His Son because we have been brought into that relationship between Father and Son.

That is what it means when we say that Jesus Christ is our foundation, our rock and refuge. We couldn’t make ourselves worthy of salvation, so Jesus did it for us. Our RESPONSE to that is thankfulness and praise. Our actions need to reflect our new status as brothers and sisters in Christ. The only way for that to happen is to keep our lives centered on Jesus. The only way we live a life pleasing to God is by constantly seeking the truth in the world – we must look to see what Jesus is doing in this world and follow Him.

This can only be done if we allow Jesus to be the foundation of this church and our lives. Carrie Underwood had a song out a few years back that said, “Jesus take the wheel”. We need to do that – to let Jesus take control of our lives and steer us to the right paths. Jesus Christ has promised us all eternal salvation if only we would believe in Him. Belief means we must trust him with every part of our lives, not just the easy stuff. Trust in the Lord to see you safely home.

Amen.

A Disciple Knows How to Share

In the Gospel reading of John 13, Jesus gives us a new commandment – to love one another so the world may know we are disciples of Jesus Christ. Peter is the first disciple to understand how radical the love of God can be. In Acts 11 God gives Peter a vision and tells him all things and all people are clean (which means pure) because Jesus has made it so with his death and resurrection.

This is radical because if we look at the first five books of the Old Testament, we will see that they are filled with laws about what makes animals and people clean or unclean. The whole Jewish religion is based on these purification and ritualistic laws. However, when Jesus came and died for humanity everything changed.

It is no wonder that Peter first says no to God – this was unlike anything done before. Peter’s world as well as Christianity, were about to take a radical new turn, one where the Holy Spirit led the way, one where grace and love became the new “law” of the land. No longer would Christianity be fore the Jewish people only – it was now also for the Gentiles. These were people that knew nothing about purification and maybe not even about the Ten Commandments – so how were they to be made clean and worthy of the Lord?

God answered Peter in reminding him of what Jesus once said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit”. Laws and rules were no longer the way a person became obedient to the Lord – baptism and the working of the Holy Spirit inside of them was all that was needed.

You may ask why the Lord did not do this sooner. Why use the Jewish people at all? It’s about a calling. The Lord calls us, the Lord chooses each one of us. Six thousand years ago the Lord chose certain people, the Israelites, to be the light to all nations and they answered the call. They heard the Lord and they obeyed.

However, the Lord is not done calling people. Every one of you in the pews today are here for a reason. The Lord has been working on you, refining you so that as you live your lives you answer the call he has for you. What does our Lord ask of us? “You should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples”.

This is what our calling is because when we love each other we witness to the love God has for us. We show the world that just as Jesus sacrificed his life for us, we give ourselves to Him. When we give ourselves to Jesus, when we allow the Holy Spirit to refine us into loving disciples, the Lord becomes the beginning and end of our lives.

It no longer matters how much money we make or if Jane is dating John, or any other thing we like to use to distract us from our calling. No, what becomes important is Jesus Christ. We begin to ask ourselves, “What is Jesus doing in my life?” We learn to see God even in the bad things that happen. So when a tragedy like the earthquake in Haiti happens or the flooding in Pakistan or the oil spill in the Gulf or the Yellow Sea, Christians look past the pain, destruction and death and begin to look for Jesus.

We open our eyes to the working of the Holy Spirit even in places of despair. We see God in the thousands of relief workers, we see the Lord in the people that send money or adopt children that have become orphaned. We see Jesus in the way the Haitians and other victims of these disasters do not become bitter, but instead they accept what they cannot change and begin to rebuild their lives with love in their hearts.

What Christians realize and what we are supposed to witness to is what the Father has promised us in Revelation. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” because the Lord is creating a new heaven and earth. Jesus’ life and death, his resurrection and ascension have made this all possible. His blood and tears wipe away our own, his sinless life has given us the chance at a new life.

While we all must eventually shed this first body, Jesus has given us hope – for He has promised us new bodies and a new life. But first we must proclaim ourselves His disciples by loving one another, by witnessing to these truths – that we have LIFE in Jesus Christ.

Our new life should begin now. Jesus told us to love one another because it opens us up to what he is doing. When we care about people we pay more attention to them. Think about when a person meets their first love. As they become attracted to them, each person begins to notice more about each other and the more they pay attention to likes and dislikes, the more they each begin to care about who the other is as an individual. Jesus wants us to care. He wants us to be interested in those around us and to pay attention to who they are and love them for it.

It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be. We are called to care, to love and to witness to God’s mercy and goodness. The Lord has blessed us by giving us his love and grace. He has not done this so we can be greedy and not share these blessings with everyone. If Peter had not listened to God the Father’s vision, none of us would be here today because we are the gentiles that have been giving the great blessing of Peter sharing the Word of God with us.

We were once the Gentiles. Now, the Gentiles are all those people we meet who know nothing about Jesus. As disciples of Jesus Christ we are given the task of telling all those people about Jesus and his love for everyone. Jesus, the Lord came to set us all free from sin and death. When we share this wonderful blessing we need to do so with both our words and our actions.

No one wants to listen to a hypocrite preach about loving everyone when they have no love in their own heart. We cannot speak about forgiveness and grace if we are unwilling to forgive. We cannot tell others to give to the poor if we do not. We need to be genuine. People know when they are being lied and manipulated and if we do not act like Christ, then we should not say we are Christians.

We are here for a reason. God has called all of us. We must begin to look at the world with love, sharing our hope for a new life in Christ with those around us. The Lord is present in our lives; let us bear witness to it. Let us live truly in Christ as Christ lives in us.