The Foolish Man- Matthew 7:26-27

Last week, I announced that we would be looking at verses from the sermon on the mount for the VOW in 2013. The verse we looked at last week was the beginning of Jesus' summary of the sermon. The person who hears the words of Jesus and puts them into practice is like a wise man.... But we know from the VBS song, that there is a second part to the sermon- the part about the foolish man.

Many people point out that both the wise man and the foolish man will experience storms. In fact, it is likely that they will experience similar storms throughout their lives. They will both experience the death of a loved one. They will both experience heartbreak. They will both experience betrayal.  There is even a chance that they will both experience something like a divorce or the rebellion of a child. Why? Because when sin entered the world, devastating pain, death, and a host of other things came with it...including more sin and temptation to sin. Paul says in Romans 8 that the creation itself was subjected to slavery to corruption because of man's choice to sin. Where there is sin, there is death. Where there is death, there is suffering.

Until the creation is once again set free from corruption at the coming of Jesus, there will always be storms...some caused by nature and others caused by people.

The only difference between the experiences of the wise and the foolish, is the condition of the house after the storm.

It's interesting to me that Jesus adds the detail that when the house fell, "it fell with a great crash." We could have gotten the same basic point- that obedience leads to a solid foundation and security while disobedience leads to insecurity and the future destruction and fall of a house- without His adding this detail of how great the crash is.

Why does He add this detail?

Maybe it is because those of us who have heard and listened to the words of Christ are already built up a little taller than the houses around us who have not claimed to build their lives on Christ. When we proclaim that our teacher is Jesus, we automatically put ourselves on a pedestal in the eyes of the public. We are claiming the position of a city set on a hill and a light on a lampstand. We become visible to others in a way that before our claimed allegiance to Christ we were not.

Perhaps it is at that point that a house crashing because of a poorly built foundation becomes more than just a house crashing. It becomes a house crashing that is a "great crash."

Just think about how much longer the public will disdain a well known preacher who has a serious lapse in judgment. Think about how much harder and longer a child's rebellion is when the parents profess one thing but live another as opposed to the child who rebels but who has parents who walk the walk and talk the talk. How much harder is it for someone who has turned from their faith when they are disappointed with God over the death of a loved one, than for someone who has never listened to Christ's words when the tragedy happens? How much more painful is a problem in the church than a problem in the workplace?

Before we begin listening each week to the words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, I think it is simply worth reminding ourselves that once we have heard these words, we take on ourselves the possibility for a real blessing or a real curse. It all depends on what we do with our hands, feet, thoughts, and mouths after the words have come into our ears.

May we each VOW to pursue the blessing of a house built on the rock.

The Wise Man- Matthew 7:24-25

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock."

Matthew 7:24-25

I suppose it usually makes more sense to begin at the beginning of a sermon than at the end. But the sermon that I want us to look at is a sermon that many of has have almost completely memorized. You probably don't even realize you have so much of it memorized. But just start reading and I'll bet you will be surprised about how many sentences you could finish with your eyes closed. The sermon that we are talking about, of course, is the sermon on the mount found in Matthew 5-7.

My original plan for 2013 was to have a memory verse each week simply from the mouth of Jesus. So last week I started at the beginning of Jesus' teaching with the intention of picking out all of the statements Jesus made that I thought were worth memorizing. What I quickly realized is what has already gone through your head- every statement of Jesus is worth memorizing! As I was making my survey, simply picking passages that touched on different topics led me to a list of almost 50 before I even left the sermon on the mount! Since several of the passages I put down really could have been split in two or three ways, I decided that instead of trying to survey all of Jesus' ministry in a year of memory verses, I'll just try to cover almost all of the first sermon of His ministry.

Here are my prayers for this year:

1. That we will commit to memory almost all of the sermon on the mount. What a difference it would make if these words we written on each of our hearts and ready to be pulled to the front of our minds and applied in appropriate situations!
2. That each week, the verse that we look at will become a challenge to really live in radical obedience to that passage. On the surface, that sounds almost easy. After all, many of us have been Christians for years. We've been trying to follow Jesus' teaching for most or all of our lives. But I know me. And I don't feel like I'm alone. Jesus' teachings call us to a radical kind of life that is much easier to memorize and quote than to apply consistently. Some of the statements he made go completely against what we think is common sense. They leave us feeling vulnerable and irresponsible. And yet Jesus said it.

Jesus closed His first sermon comparing those that obey His teachings to someone that builds their house on a solid foundation. The test, of course, is the storm. When the storm comes, if the house is built on a rock, it may suffer damage, but it will stand. I want my house to stand. I want my wife and my daughters to have a faith that will only get stronger when they face death, failure, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, defeat, and discouragement...and success, popularity, achievement, and pride.

I have to believe that if Jesus really was, and is, God (and He is), then whatever my human reasoning and past experiences lead me to believe about the best course of action in a particular instance, He actually does know the best way that I should respond.

What are you building your house on? If you want it to last it had better be the words of God. The first step is simply knowing the words. Without a commitment to reading, hearing, and meditating on His words, we simply can't put them into practice. And obviously, if we want our houses to stand, the next step is actually living to the best of our ability- and even more so because we have the Spirit of the Christ living in us- the words that we are hearing from Christ.

Will you join the experiment this year?