10.4.20 Matthew 7:24–27
24 “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on bedrock. 25 The rain came down, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house. But it did not fall, because it was founded on bedrock. 26 Everyone who hears these words of mine but does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—it was completely destroyed.”
How to Be Storm Ready
St. Norbert’s Catholic Church in Munger was recently for sale for only 119,000 dollars on four acres of property. I thought, “that would be cool to fix up the church!” We’d have to sell our house, then quickly build a kitchen and a shower. Over time we could then put a basketball hoop up in it and a pickleball court. We could have the future grandchildren over - it would be a lot of fun!
When Jesus talks about how you build a house, it’s not for entertainment purposes. He wasn’t wanting us to worry about the bells and the whistles. It’s for survival, ultimately from the Final Judgment. If you don’t build a strong house that can withhold storms, it isn’t going to last. It’s going to crash with a thud. Worst of all, you’ll end up in hell.
This is, of course, talking spiritually. God doesn’t care whether you live in a mansion or a shack. Some of the strongest Christians I have met have lived in shacks. What He cares about is the state of your soul. What kind of a spiritual house do you want to build? Do you say to yourself, “I want my children and grandchildren to be strong Christians. I want them to trust in Jesus as their Savior with a firm faith. I want them to know their Bibles well. I want them to be respectful to their elders. I want them to pray regularly. I want them to know their Bibles well. I want them to fear and love God and to put Him first. I want that for ME too!” Or are your only goals physical, like getting a degree, a job, your house paid off, a spouse, children, a nest egg for retirement? We love to make physical goals, but what about the spiritual?
Notice the way that Jesus paints this picture. Sooner or later the storms will come and beat against the walls of your life, no matter what kind of a household you’ve built. Your health will deteriorate and relationships will go sour. You will lose a job. You will have friends and family that will die. There is no avoiding it. It doesn’t matter how much money you make. Yet somehow we always seem to be surprised when the storms come! We somehow think that we should be immune, as if we aren’t sinners living in a sinful world and body? The point is that you will need to have strength to deal with those things so you don’t crash.
There are two things that are primary to establishing a strong household. Hearing Jesus and doing what He says. (If you think about that in itself, how audacious of Jesus! Whether you stand or fall on Judgment Day - it all depends on listening to HIM and doing what He says.) These words come at the end of His famous Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. Everyone was listening to what He had to say. But not everyone was going to do what He said. So Jesus made a distinction, a key distinction, between those who hear and those who do. If you don’t have both, your house won’t stand.
But it starts with listening, and that’s why we have Christian education and that’s why we have church. We want our children to know about Jesus. We have a Christian day school where we call Christian teachers to teach about Jesus. They can hear about Jesus every day and have Biblical knowledge intertwined with all of our subjects along with the way that we discipline our children. That’s also why we have Catechism classes for public school kids as well as Sunday School. You can usually tell a difference between the children at Trinity and those in public school when it comes to their Bible and Catechism knowledge. Jesus loves public school kids too, but boy it sure does help to get Bible education every day. Either way, you too as parents can play an integral role in raising your children. If you take the time to read them Bible stories and pray with them, that is the most important.
Listening also starts with you as adults. Not only do we have church, but we also have adult Bible studies on Sundays and Thursdays. You can get the Bible on your phone and listen to chapters of the Bible while you are going to work every day. You can listen to devotions and go to Bible studies online.
How hard is it to listen? Well, if you’re like me, it isn’t as easy as you’d think. I think technology has given me a terrible attention span. When I’m sitting behind my desk I find myself going from one thing to another constantly. It’s not good. I think it’s the devil’s ploy to get us distracted with life so we don’t take the time just to listen and pay attention to what GOD has to say to us. It’s difficult just to sit and listen, and you think it would be the easiest thing in the world! We’ve got to listen!
But what is the distinction between the house that stands and the house that falls? Doing what He says. James writes the same thing in James 1:22–24, Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. What does He want us to do? Go back through the Sermon on the Mount and look at what Jesus said. There is nothing flashy in there. He doesn’t tell you to save the world or do miracles or chase out demons. Jesus talks about simple spiritual things like being gentle, poor in spirit, merciful and hungry. Be salt and light. Don’t be full of anger. Don’t lust. Don’t get divorced. Keep your word without making unnecessary oaths. Don’t get revenge. Love your enemies. Give in secret. Pray in secret. Fast in secret. Don’t worry. Don’t judge. Watch out for false prophets. Enter through the narrow gate. Almost all of these are simple things that can apply to anyone at any point in life, young or old, rich or poor. If you want to build a solid house to last into eternity, do these things.
Even though these are seemingly simple things, they are far from simple to do. Think about Jesus' command not to worry. What does He tell you to do to combat worry? Look at the birds of the air. See how they are fed. Use your logic. If God feeds birds and clothes flowers, then He will definitely take care of you. If you were to take this really seriously, would you then buy a book about birds? Would you take time out of each day to stare at the birds and examine their living patterns? Would you become an ornithologist? But what if you had a perfect knowledge of birds, and saw how they still were run over by cars and eaten by other predators. How am I going to fulfill this anti-worry law when I am naturally prone to worry? In this case not only would you be listening to what Jesus said, but you would also be trying to DO what He said, and where would it leave you? Would that make you feel better or worse? Would you get credit for trying? No, that’s not how it works.
You see, the deeper you dig into God’s Word, and the more you actually listen to it and make honest attempts to DO it, the more sins you realize you have. It reminds me of when I had Randy over to do a house inspection when we first moved here. He went around with a clipboard and a flashlight and he found things in my house that I would have had no clue about. The owner happened to be with us, and he was getting more and more nervous as Randy noticed more and more things wrong with the house. After 8 years I’ve fixed some of them, and some of them I haven’t. The roof has needed to be replaced. We changed out our windows. There was also something that nobody could have noticed, connected with a record amount of rain. Within the past four years we have had water come in from UNDER the ground twice, as water was backing up from the city sewer during torrential downpours. So we had to have a backflow preventer put in to keep water from backing up from the city sewer during big rains, and that wasn’t cheap. There’s always SOMETHING that has to be done. That’s the way trying to keep the Word works too. There’s always something that gets exposed. Something that needs fixed. Something that needs to be repented of.
The problem is that if you don’t listen and actually try to DO what Jesus says, you won’t realize how sinful you really are. Think of the rich young man, who thought that he had kept all of the commandments perfectly and wanted to follow Jesus. Jesus told him to do ONE MORE thing. Go sell all of his possessions and give them to the poor. The young man hadn’t dug deeply into the commands of the Lord. Jesus wanted him to dig deeper, so he would realize his need for a Savior! We don’t feel the need to dig deeper because we don’t make harder efforts to listen and do. We like the idea of doing little and simple things, like when I put some new shutters on my house. It made it look a little nicer on the outside, but it didn’t make it any more solid. Jesus wants us to dig down into HIM and make sure we are clinging to Him for forgiveness and salvation, no matter what kind of shutters we put up on our house.
It’s interesting to think of what Jesus did in regards to a house. He had no place to lay His head. He didn’t worry about having a retirement home. He had no wife and children. He didn’t care. His purpose in life was to die on the cross for the sins of the world and to conquer death through His resurrection. He was living to provide a home for us in heaven. How can we forget the wonderful words that He spoke to Thomas as He was on the way to the cross to pay for our sins?
John 14:2–6 In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to be with me, so that you may also be where I am. 4 You know where I am going, and you know the way.” 5 “Lord, we don’t know where you are going,” Thomas replied, “so how can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.
By the grace of God in your baptism, you have been moved into the building of God, the household of Jesus. You now live in a beautiful house of faith in Jesus. You have been rescued from this world, but you aren’t in heaven yet. Jesus wants to take you home to your eternal home. The beauty of it is that He’s already built it. He’s already prepared it. He’s already grabbed hold of your heart. He’s taken you there in spirit, and He’s waiting to take you there in body too. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:1, “Now we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal home in heaven, which is not made by human hands.”
Digging down into the bedrock of life means that I know that everything I build my life on in this life revolves around Jesus. My job is the job that Jesus gave me. My spouse is the one given me by God, and my children too. My time is a gift of God. I am not just living here minute to minute, making it up as I go. I have purpose in life. I have direction in life. I have love in my life. I have forgiveness for every one of my sins and failures. I know, by God’s grace, that nothing can take away God’s love from me in Christ. Listen to what Jesus says! The rain came down, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house. But it DID NOT FALL. Why? Because it was founded on bedrock. It doesn’t fall because of the FOUNDATION of Jesus, the Solid Rock. It’s not a matter of how big and impressive the house is. That really doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is the foundation of your life. You only get that by digging deeply into the Word and sacrament. Some of the most worthless looking shacks, some of the greatest failures, will still be saved on Judgment Day by clinging only to Christ.
Contrast that to building on sand. When you think about sand, it is shifting. There’s nothing solid about it. You don’t have anything to anchor to. There’s no right or wrong. There’s what you believe and what I believe, but it’s all relative. Nobody knows. The shifting sand can also represent how people try to change their goals in life, and they think that the next goal will fulfill them. The next boyfriend, the next championship, the next job, the next spouse, the next school. Always moving the goalposts of life, never getting settled, never happy, because their whole source of happiness is only shifting sand. They are constantly trying to figure out what to do next, because they are never happy where they are or where they are going. They might end up building wonderful and powerful looking homes, but without a foundation in Christ, they will come crashing down on Judgment Day.
What a contrast we have! We know who we are. We know who is taking care of us, God and His angels. We know how to build our homes, through the Word and sacrament, prayer and Bible study. We know where we want to go, to heaven to be with Jesus. His Word doesn’t change. His sacraments remain the same. These are the foundations of life that we build on and dig deep into. We have them when we are young and in high school, facing puberty and so many other temptations. No matter how old or worn down our homes become, the foundation never changes. On Christ, the solid rock I stand.
This foundation in life doesn’t come without being taught, without EDUCATION. Someone has to take you down in the basement of God’s Word, dig into the deeper things of life that are hidden, and show you what life is all about. This is why we have Christian education. This is why we have worship. This is why we do Bible study. This is why we buy Bibles and read them, so we can build our houses on the Rock.
That Catholic Church in Munger ended up being sold to someone else. They bid on it for 129,000 even before we had a chance at it. That’s ok. It’s probably a good thing. Who would want a Lutheran preacher living in an old Catholic church? We still have a nice home to live in and we've already made plenty of updates. I think we are prepared for the next torrential rain. We can stay where we are and be happy and content with what we have. God can bless us just fine.
Think also about your life. What’s underneath the foundation of your home? What are you building on? What are you building for? God has put you in the house of Christ. He has provided a solid foundation for your salvation. He wants you to build on your faith through the rock sure Word of God, Law and Gospel, Word and sacrament. Listen to His Word. Do what He says. See your flaws and sins. Dig into His grace. Cling to the cross. When the storms come, and they will come, you will be ready when you stand on Christ alone. Amen.
