4/7/2002

Going to start a new series today,  “Life in the Kingdom”.  Life in the Kingdom, Jesus tells many parables.  We are going to be studying parables for the next few weeks.  Life in the Kingdom, often times Jesus would precede his parables by saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like this.’  Sometimes he didn’t but often times he did.  And so the parables were designed to illustrate truths of how life is when you belong to God.  When God is in charge.  And so we are going to study one of them today.  Actually it is one of the most familiar ones you ever found. 

Matthew Chapter 7, we are going to read more than just the parable.  We are going to read the part that is preceding it.  The parable is the parable of the two foundations, or the two builders, the wise one and the foolish one.  Jesus talks about the wisdom of having a good foundation for life.  And he makes it very clear what that foundation is.  It might surprise you exactly what it is.  As I was studying this passage it’s like oh ok, I really hadn’t looked at it that carefully before and it has taught me something brand new.  When you get down to the parable we are studying about the two foundations in verse 24 of Matthew 7, you come to the first word, therefore.  Now anybody know what the word therefore is there for?  Well, you have heard it before it you see the word therefore, you have to see what it is there for.  And therefore is what part of speech is therefore?  OK nobody knows that.  Isn’t it a conjunction?  It connects something to another.  This connects the truths that he has already been teaching.  And so he says therefore this is true.  Because of what has gone on before this is true.  So you see that the parable of the foundations is actually the culmination of the teaching that he has been giving already.  And the teaching begins, actually up in verse 13. 

“Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide, and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it.  For the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it”.  Now you will notice that often times Jesus, in fact culturally they would often us couplets.  We kind of say there are two kinds of people in the world.  Ok there are two kinds of gates, two kinds of people, there are two kinds of foundations, that is kind of the pattern he uses here, a little bit.  So he says there is a wide gate and a narrow gate. 

Verse 15 says, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.  You will know them by their fruits.  Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they?  Even so, every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down, and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” So he says you have good trees and bad trees, you have narrow gates and wide gates.  

Verse 21 says, “ Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.  Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform miracles?’  And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.’  Sounds like there is going to be some surprised faces when they get to stand before Jesus and say, Lord, Lord, and he says I never knew you.  Because you practiced lawlessness, by the way lawlessness, in other words iniquities is another word that is used.  The essence of it means, you may have done good things, you didn’t do them for me though.  You did it to benefit yourself, It looked like good stuff but it really wasn’t good.  Kind of the same thing when he talked about the Pharisees earlier in Chapter 6.  Says beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.  So the same thing is true here.  He said, some people do many good things even powerful things for there own benefit, not to please God, not to serve God.  So he says, I have to say I don’t know you because you did not do them for me, you did them for yourself. 

Verse 24 we get to therefore.  ‘Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine, and acts upon them may be compared to a wise man, who built his house upon the rock.  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and burst against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded upon the rock.  And everyone who hears these words of Mine, and does not act upon them, will be like a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand.  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and burst against that house; and it fell, and great was its fall.”

A number of years ago I was in a Los Angeles for a seminar and my brother was their and a couple of other guys so we had a day or so to wander around.  Our plane schedule required that we go over a Saturday and things so we had day or two to travel the country side just to see what California was like.  We traveled on Highway One up north of Los Angeles, and it was really neat because Highway One goes along the ocean there, Pacific Ocean, you could look off to your left as you were driving North and you could see the waves down there and the surfers and you could see one in a while you could see the body of a whale out there swimming around, a big long things out there moving around and it happened that we were there in midwinter but they had  some heavy rains.  As we were driving along we actually had to keep to the left away from the shoulder because there were drifts, not of snow but of mud, where they had plowed the mud off the roads.  They had to have bulldozers come through there and like we plow snow they plowed mud.  Because up on the hillside, you probably seen the news accounts of them, where the houses that had been built, not on rock, but had been built on soft soil when the rains came and the floods came then the soil washed out from underneath them and they began to side right down the hill.  And you could see many houses that were, the hill was here and the house was hanging like this, some were like this, some were half way down the hill already because the foundation was no good whatsoever.  Now for years those houses have stood but when the big storms came, when the big rains came and the torrents came then the houses did not stand because there foundation was poor.  And so we saw many, many like that and it was just kind of fascinating to look up there and wonder if they count the days when that house is going to slide down the hill, because they were foolish enough to build up there where they had a great view but they had a bad foundation.   

We were talking yesterday to some of our folks who had been out to Hawaii last week, suffering for the Lord in Hawaii and they said the beaches they were on was all rock but when the summer ocean waves came it actually built the beach back up with sand.  The sand comes in in the summer time and is washed away in the winter time.  The waves have a different motion, back in the days of physics, in college we learned about wave motion and we learned that waves are different depending on the time of year. Sometimes they kind of dig away and sometimes they push up.  And so right now the beach is not sandy, it is rocky, but later on it will be sandy.  Well that is the nature of sand.  It comes and goes and switches around and leaves and gets blown around by the wind and pushed around by water.  So if you are going to built a house it is not wise to built it on that kind of sand.  It is going to come and go.    While I was thinking about this I thought you know, we built our house two years ago on sand but it is on top of a hill we are not expecting any great floods.  And we did dig down and put some stuff down there for a better foundation so we think it is going to stand.  At least if has for two years anyway, we’ll see how much longer it stands.  Hopefully we don’t get big floods.   

But the foundation may be wonderful in easy times, but when the tough times come that is the test of a foundation.  That tests to see if your foundation is worthy to have a house upon it.  And houses built on a soft foundation and on a hard foundation can look a lot the same.  In fact, in California the houses that were built on the solid ground, away from the edge of the cliffs, would look fine and they would last pretty much forever probably.  But the ones built on a poor foundation weren’t going to last even though they look the same.  They might have been well built in terms of structure but the foundation was the key.  And so there are many times that we look at people and say, Boy, they are doing well in life.  And another person say they are doing well in life.  They are mannerly, they are kind, they have all the qualities that you think they ought to have and then when the real storms of life come one person stands the test and another person falls to pieces.  And it is interesting that Jesus says, ‘Great was it’s fall.’  People who apparently have it all together when they fall, in terms of troubles or trials or temptations whatever it might have come, it is noticeable.  Because they had looked like they were so well put together.   

Let’s look at this though and see what he is really saying.  He says, ‘You have to have a foundation upon rock.’  What is the foundation that is a rock foundation.  He tells us what it is.  He says, verse 24, ‘Everyone who hears these words of mine and act upon them.’  Many people believe that just accepting that Jesus died on the cross is enough.  Others say accepting him as their Savior is enough.  And it is truly.  But that faith has to be proved genuine.  If you read in the Book of James, Chapter 2:14.  James is very clear here that there is faith and then there is faith.  There is a faith that saves, there is a faith that doesn’t save.  So to say that we believe in Jesus is not the test.  The test is does your life confirm and prove that your faith in genuine?

Verse 14 says, ‘What use is it, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but he has no works?  Can that faith save him?  If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?  Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.’  He is not saying that good works are the issue, he is not saying give people food and clothing, he is saying, ‘No just as it is useless to say be warmed and filled without giving them what warms then and fills them so saying you have faith but never living a life of faith doesn’t work either.

Verse 18, ‘But someone may well say, “You have faith, and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will how you my faith by my works.”  You believe that God is one.  You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.’  I have heard many people say, ‘Well I believe in God.’  Well that is good, that is a start.  Hebrews says, ‘Those who come to him must believe that he is and he rewards those who genuinely seek him.’  And so yes it is good to believe in God but that is certainly not enough.  It is not even enough to say, ‘ I believe in Jesus’, if your works are not there.  If there is no confirming works and obedience in your life then Jesus might say, Depart from me I never really knew you because you said you had faith, just like you say go be warm and filled but never do anything about it.  You didn’t do anything about your faith which proved your faith truly to be worthless.  That is what James is saying.  But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?   Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works, when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar?  You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected, or completed; the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “AND ABRAHAM BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS, and he was called the friend of God.’  Abraham already believed that if God said take your son or do these things and Abraham never did them he would have proven that his faith was useless.  There was no faith really because he never stepped out on that faith.  But he did.  ‘You see that the man is justified by works, and not by faith alone.  And in the same way was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works, when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?  For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.’  And so a person may say all day long, ‘ I know Jesus, I know Jesus’ but if there life does not conform to that statement you questions as to whether they have faith, and rightfully so.  Because like Jesus says, ‘The foundation is those who hear my words and act upon them’.  The foundation is not just a statement of faith, the foundation is a life of faith.  And that is the beginning, by the way.  You start the house with a foundation, that’s not the house you build with obedience, that is the foundation of your life.  Is to start with hearing and acting upon the words of God.    So we says, ‘Everyone who hears these words, and acts upon them may be compared to a wise man who built his house upon the rock.  The rock is not faith, the rock is faith that is confirmed by a life of obedience.  Now what does that require?  What’s that require?  It does require faith.  It requires an understanding that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, he has lived a life without sin, he has been crucified on the cross for our sake, he has paid the price for our sin and we trust in him for our salvation.  Not in ourselves, nothing we can do can cause our salvation, bring our salvation, he has done that for us.  We accept him by faith, as our Savior, not counting on our goodness to get us there but upon his finished work of sacrifice on the cross on our behalf and that is a starting point.  We are starting the foundation there.  But the foundation is built when we say, ‘Ok now I have accepted Christ, I am going to now conform my life to his way.’  Which means we have to study is word.  We have to begin to apply his word in our lives, so we begin to say, ‘Ok God, you want me to do this, I am going to do it.’  That is the foundation.  The foundation is the doing and the believing.  It is not just the believing.  That is what Jesus says, ‘Everyone hears and acts as one who is building upon a foundation.  The foundation is hearing the words of God and then doing them.

How do you go about doing that?  Well, one is you have to know him and you have to know his word.  What I don’t like to hear and you don’t like to hear either are people when I mention a passage of scripture or somebody else mentions they go, well I never read that, are you sure that’s in the Bible?  Or they quote something that isn’t even in the Bible.  Like God helps those who help themselves.   Or a stitch in time saves nine.  That is the Proverbs, it’s not and you ought to know that.  Because how can you conform your life to the words of Christ and the scriptures if you don’t know what the words of God are.   

2 Timothy 3:16 says, ‘The word of God is inspired.  Inspired by God.  All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for review, reproof, for correction, and training righteousness that the man of God may be equipped for every good work.’  Now good work is one that is ordained by God.  Not our of our own heart, out of his heart.  So the foundation is when we diligently study his word. 

2 Timothy 2:15 says, ‘Study the word so you can become a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth.’  That means we need to take personal responsibility for our own life.  I can’t grow you as a Christian and you can’t grow me as a Christian.  You are responsible for taking charge of your own Christian life and knowing the word of God for yourself.  Not for the purpose of knowing the word, for the purpose of doing the word

Back in James Chapter 1 he says, let me read it for you.  ‘But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.  For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in the mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.’  So he says don’t be one who just reads the Bible, be the one who reads it for the purpose of changing your life to conform to it.  It is not a matter of finding verses and being able to know where they are, be able to quote them, the key is are you doing them.  When it says in Proverbs 15:1 says, ‘A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh words stirs up anger.’  Has that changed your life?  Has it changed your life?  The purpose of God’s word is not to inform us, purpose of God’s word is to change us.  Because if we are his, if we have committed ourselves to him, the Bible says that we have been bought with a price so therefore glorify God with our body.  We are not our own, we don’t belong to ourselves anymore.  Christ paid the price for us so therefore we belong to him.  So the word of God is not for information, it is not for history, even though it is historically accurate in every incident.  It is true is every aspect, it is inherent in every aspect and every truth, but it is not for our information.  It is for our instruction.  In order to change our lives, not to just give us more understanding about life.  It is for our lives to begin to conform to it. 

Romans 12: 1-2.  Paul says, ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, do not be conformed, offer yourselves as a living sacrifice.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good , righteous and perfect.’  So he says the word of God is for the purpose of changing our life not of informing us about Christ.  We already have that.  That is part of the foundation, the other foundation is hearing the words of Christ and acting upon them.  There is no foundation until we act upon them.  To know the Bible means very little.  James says in fact, If you are just a reader, a hearer of the word and not a doer we delude ourselves because we think we are acting upon it when we just know it.  In fact, there are many people that you know and I know and sometimes I am like that; where I read about something so therefore I think I know about it.  Well, I may know about it, a little bit about it, but since I haven’t practiced it I really don’t have any experience or know it personally.  That is why James says you have to do it.  Because when one just looks at the law, it is like looking at our face in the mirror.  What a privilege, uh?  Especially this morning an hour earlier.  Look in the mirror and go oh boy, needs fixing so you go fix it.  Well you look in the mirror and walk away and you have to go back and say was that hair in place, was everything alright because we walk away and we immediately think of other things.  James says that is how people who don’t practice the word are.  Because they look at it, they walk away, and if they don’t do it they don’t experience it, they don’t learn it.  They don’t really understand it.  Because you come to understand it by practicing it.  So that means, like I said in Proverbs 15:1 it says a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  Next time you are in an argument, what do you use?  Harsh words?  No, a soft answer.  That’s Biblical, right?  If you don’t use the words in your life, you have no foundation of Christ.  Because he said the foundation is hearing and doing.  So if you say, ‘I know what it says, but I’ll do what I want.’  Jesus may say, Boy I don’t know you very well because you didn’t do anything that I said.  A servant does what his master says.  A foundation is hearing and doing, not just hearing.  It says if you have that then you have a great foundation.

The result it says in verse 28 was that when Jesus had finished these words a multitude were amazed at his teaching.  For he was teaching as one who had authority, not just as the scribes.  This man had authority to say this.  He said, ‘Listen to my words and follow them.’  Do what I say and that is our foundation for life. 

So if you are going to build a building, you dig down until you find something solid enough to build it on.  You need to have fresh soil or fresh whatever it is down there so you can dig a foundation and put it on something that is going to be solid so it doesn’t shift around.  Notice what he says happens to any house.  He says, ‘The rain descends, the floods come and the winds blew.’  Those happen to every house.  Some point in life the question is, how will the house stand?  The house is not what people see on the outside, the house is what people don’t see as the reason for the house.  And notice what he says before that, ‘You can enter by the narrow gate or the wide gate, it is your choice.  If you want to follow the crowd, go ahead, follow them to destruction.  But if you want to find Christ follow the narrow way.  He says watch out for false prophets because they will come in sheep’s clothing but they will be inside ravenous wolfs.  It will look like innocent people just like you and I, but some false prophets will look good but there fruit will reveal what there nature is.  So he says, watch for their fruit, there are many people who can say all the right words when you deal with them in business or deal with them behind the scenes or see them in private, it is like wait a minute here, something is not computing here.  Something doesn’t compare.  They say the right things but in their fruit you don’t see the same kind of thing.

So he says in Verse 21, ‘Watch out, some will say Lord, Lord, they will do great things, they will claim relationship. But if their life does not conform to my words there is no foundation.’  So he says be careful of that.  So don’t be mistaken.  Your foundation is not just saying I am a Christian.  The foundation is saying so and living so.  Deliberately studying God’s word for the purpose of conforming our lives to his word.  So we become like him, so that our fruit becomes indicative of the nature of the tree.  It says you can not produce figs from thistles and you don’t grab grapes from thorn bushes because the nature of the tree grows the fruit.  So watch what the nature of the tree is.  Jesus says later on in Luke, ‘The mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.’  We have a heart full of evil sometimes.  He says fix the heart because the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.  So your true nature will become eventually revealed.  It won’t be in the easy times, it will be in the tough times.  It will be when temptations come, it will be criticism comes, it will be when hardships hit, it will come when sickness hits, it will come when losses strike you, it will come when the world falls in around your shoulders and the torrents come, the rains come, and the wind blows, things like that.  Then the foundation is real.  As long as things are going smoothly we can all look good.  As long as the wind doesn’t blow your hair, your hair looks fine.  Ok, when the wind blows then you see if you are a person of God or not.  Remember the foundation, if you are going to build, which I trust everyone who is here this morning, set your clock right, is here for the purpose of building a foundation in Christ.  The foundation is not just the word of faith, the foundation is the life of faith.  So build well.

Lets pray:

Father we ask that you would teach us your word.  Father help us to go home this day and say ok God give me a sincere desire for the milk of the word that I might grow as a result.  You said in 2 Peter 1 that we should to our faith add moral excellence.  For the desire to do right and to our moral excellence, our desire to do right, we should add knowledge.  That means what we ought to do.  Finding out from your word what we ought to do.  Into our knowledge self control, which means to obey immediately.  And to our self control add perseverance which means to continue obeying.  And you said at the end of that passage that this way we are neither useless nor unusable for you.  In fact the way of eternal life is open wide to enter the kingdom of God.  So Father you say consistently what our words are not the key, our life is the key.  So Father I pray that those who are here this morning, me included, if there are errors in our life where you have been saying you need to change, you need to change, you need to change, need to fix this area I have been trying to teach you through the word, I have been trying to nudge you through the Holy Spirit, we need a change.  Because our words don’t mean much unless our actions back them up.  As James says, ‘Faith without works is dead.’  You can say I have faith but if you have no works there is no faith.  Because faith means giving ourselves to Christ in our Life.  Not words, but works too. Father help us to confirm our faith through an act of faith, through an act of faith continues to perseverance in acts of faith, through obedience to your word, through studying your word diligently, taking responsibility for our own spiritual growth and becoming like you.  In Jesus Name we ask it, Amen.

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