"Seaside vs. Bedrock" Matthew 7:24-27 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning though, we wrap up Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew chapter 7.

Matthew 7 · chapter mention

My Bible just naturally falls open to it now.

This is we end our time studying Jesus' sermon here.

We might come back next week.

Haven't decided yet and look at verses 28 and 29.

I'm still on the fence about that.

But for this morning, verses 24 through 27, these are the last of the red letters in Jesus' sermon.

Let me read them for us now.

This is the word of God.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house in the sand.

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat against that house, and it fell.

And great was the fall of it.

These are the final words of Jesus' sermon, the most famous sermon to ever preach, and he closes with a parable about two houses.

We don't have the same kind of geo geological formations as are around Israel, but I will tell you about a house that is just down the street from Emmanuel Bible Church.

Right off of Braddock Road, not very far from here, is a property that is zoned for a house, but there's a creek that runs through it and divides it, not in half, not even in thirds, but probably in fourths.

It was purchased by someone in 2008 or 9 or so, and they built a house on it.

But they did not build their house on the main part of the property where I think the county had designed it to be built, because that would have required opening up the sidewalk and putting in a new a new driveway and all that.

Instead, they built on the other side of the creek where they could borrow their neighbor's driveway, like one of those pike stem kind of things that I think only exists in Northern Virginia.

So they did that and built a house right there.

It probably saved them between$10,000 and$15,000, the contractor told me, uh, to build it on that side of the creek instead of the other side by virtue of the driveway.

Uh and it is a nice house, like 4,000 square feet, three stories tall.

It has granite uh countertops, state of the art appliances.

The kitchen has even been redone in the last few years.

It has bathrooms that are marble and just amazing, look like something from uh a Greek king's house, like four shower heads kind of thing.

It's incredible.

The problem is that the creek runs right to the door of the house before it turns.

And so the county wouldn't give them an occupancy permit.

And so that house has sat there just down the street from here for approximately the past 11 or 12 years, empty.

Um put on the market every now and then, and of course, nobody can buy it.

It's gone to auction before, and um people find out about it, and the auction falls through.

In the course of those years, the creek has flooded several times and the water has gone around the house.

The house has shifted ever so slightly.

The patio that was built off the back of it has washed away over the years, and yet it stands three stories tall, looking like a million-dollar house.

To try to recoup money, the owner has rented it out for raves.

Uh, where people come party in it.

Neighbors call the police, police come shoot them away.

They've tried paying the owners a cut of the rave money to get their paying the neighbors a cut of the rave money to get them to not call the police.

You can imagine how that well that would go.

Somebody knocked on your door, like, hey, we're gonna do something at this house over here.

Here's 500 bucks, don't call the cops.

You would probably decide not worth it.

And so they've been unable to do anything with it.

Although they did redo the kitchen, as I mentioned, not too long ago to try to increase the value of the empty house.

They sued each other.

Uh the builder's argument is that it so obviously shouldn't be allowed to be built here.

I can't believe the owner wanted me to do it.

The owner's argument is that it's so obvious it can't be built here, I can't believe the builder did it.

What are you supposed to do if you're a judge?

Both of you are fools, go away.

I don't know if there's a legal category for that kind of verdict or not.

I've gone and looked to the windows of that house a couple times.

Last time I was there, one of the neighbors called over to me, and I got to meet him.

Turns out he's a believer, and uh and told me all about the sad tale of woe of this house.

This is the illustration that Jesus borrows.

It is a lovely-looking house, isn't it?

But it's empty on the inside.

Why is it empty?

Because the guy who built a million-dollar house saved$15,000 on the cost of the driveway.

Now the house can be lived by homeless people, pardiers, but man, it's got a nice kitchen.

Would you buy that house?

Or here's a better question.

Would you build that house?

And what goes into the person, the thinking of a person who builds a house like that?

I mean, they're not building it as decoration, they're building it with the goal of somebody moving into it, but they're just not able to think more than a day or a week ahead of time.

As we've been studying Proverbs in the evenings, we've learned a little bit about maturity.

Maturity is understanding how you relate to those around you, how you fit in, how your kids fit in, how your house fits in, just how your life fits in with the lives and the houses and the kids of those around you.

That's maturity.

Wisdom is the ability to project that into the future.

Wisdom is the ability to see how you fit in now, and then to see how the choices you're making now are going to matriculate in a few years.

What's going to happen to them?

And so the immature person is not aware of how they fit in, and the fool, the unwise person, is not aware of how their actions are going to play out in a few minutes or in a few weeks or in a few years.

And so that's why Jesus says the foolish person builds his house in the sand.

He's not able to think of what's going to happen when the tide changes, what's going to happen in six hours?

He's not, doesn't have the capacity to think that way.

We have all sorts of illustrations from our own life about that.

You can think of the uh, you know, you finished dinner and you don't want to clear your plates right now.

You want to watch something on your phone, or you want to play a game, or you want to do something else, check the scores or whatever, and you know it's gonna make the dishes harder to clean in 30 minutes or an hour or the next day, but you don't care because you'd rather have five minutes of pleasure now and 30 more minutes of work tomorrow.

You're not thinking rationally.

And I think we all have that those kind of experiences.

The person who shows up at work and spends the first 30 minutes or hour of his day wasting time doing stuff, and now he's gonna be late going home, or he's gonna have to work on Saturday, or the the student who doesn't study for their test because they'd rather, you know, play a video game and now they're gonna get a bad grade, and now they're gonna have to study on Sunday night, and they're gonna have to make they can't go to the game, and they're just but at the moment they're not capable of projecting out their choices.

They're just minds don't think that way because they are immature.

Jesus uses the ultimate illustration of that.

You want a house to live in?

Great.

Here is a nice house you can build it.

It'll save you fifteen thousand dollars.

And you can live in it tomorrow, but you just won't be able to live in it in two days.

Is it a good investment?

Only a fool would do that.

Only a fool would build a house in the sand.

It's just dumb.

Why would somebody do that?

Because they're immature.

They're a fool.

I mean, why does a fool do anything?

They're not reasoning it out.

So Jesus tells the story.

Both, this parable, he concludes the most famous sermon ever preached with a parable, which sets up his ministry of parables.

Two builders, two houses.

Both builders want a place to live.

Both builders build the same kind of house.

Both builders build in the same neighborhood across the street from each other.

The houses look the same on the outside, and both builders will face the exact same storm.

The waves will come.

The language here in verses 24 and 25 is identical to the language in verse 26 and 27.

The word for storms is the same: wind, waves, beating against the house.

It's identical.

Both houses face identical storms.

Why does Jesus conclude his sermon, the most famous sermon ever preached, with this parable?

And the answer is because he's showing you the importance of this sermon.

He's showing you that how you interact with this sermon is determinative.

It determines your future.

It determines whether or not you are wise or a fool.

All those houses have so many similarities, but at the end, they have very different outcomes.

They have very different futures because the people building them have very different motives.

What changes between the wise builder and the foolish builder?

Now, this is a very common parable.

Like I mentioned, it's the most famous sermon ever preached.

It's the conclusion of it.

So it's likely that most of you, if not almost all of you, know this parable.

But it shocks me how so few people know the difference between the wise and the foolish builder.

Without looking down at your Bible right now, it is probably worth you asking, what does Jesus say the difference is between the two of them?

What makes the one builder wise and the other foolish?

Yes, I know it's the rock and the sand.

I get that, but Jesus tells you, that's the parable.

Jesus tells you what the real life interpretation of it is right there in the parable.

What is the wise person versus the foolish person?

And the answer is the wise person does the will of the Lord.

Both people hear the same sermon.

The wise and foolish builder both heard with their ears.

They both represent the crowd.

Jesus is preaching the sermon to real people in a real place at a real time.

They all hear the same sermon, but not all of them will do the sermon.

This story hinges on what you do with the words of Christ.

Your life and your death hinge on what you do with the words of Christ.

That's the conclusion.

This is so unlike a normal sermon at church.

A typical sermon at church.

You might hear it, you might take some notes on it, you might forget it by lunch, you might, but you know what, no big deal.

You'll be back next week, kind of thing.

Eternity doesn't hinge in how you interact with any particular sermon that I preach.

But this isn't a typical sermon that I preach here.

This is the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and the application of it is what you do with this sermon determines everything about your future.

It determines whether or not you're a fool or you're wise, whether you're on your rock or on your sand.

The Greek word for rock here is the word for petra.

It's not the word for stone, it's the word for a rock like outcropping, like a giant granite slab.

You've got a big meadow, and some of it is marshy and some of it is meadowy, but there's a third of the meadow that has just got a granite underground.

Build your house there.

An earthquake won't move that a millimeter.

You know in Jordan there's a city called Petra, where those houses are built into the rock, and the city has been there for thousands of years.

The Greek word for sand, on the other hand, sand, you know, the powdery substance.

You can't build on sand.

You can't even get you can't even put your umbrella at a beach and get it to stay, it'll blow away, right?

The Greek word for that is Amon.

And you know, not too far from Petra is the capital of Jordan, an ammon.

Built in the sand.

The listeners of Jesus' sermon would have been familiar with that reality.

Jesus is making a wordplay on their world to contrast the wise person and the foolish person.

Are you gonna live in Amman or are you gonna live in Petra?

Are you gonna build your life and your future on rock and it'll last for thousands of years?

Or are you gonna build it on sand where it shifts and turns and won't be there tomorrow?

Everything depends upon what you do with this sermon.

The contrast here between the wise and the fool, the fool in the story is not a person who's never heard Jesus, it's not the person who's never heard Jesus preach.

It's not the person who's he's not talking, he's not calling the Romans fools or the tax collectors fools or the harlots fools.

He's not calling the Gentiles fools.

In this sermon, the foolish person is the one that is out there on the plains at the Sea of Galilee listening to the sermon and deciding that they don't need to do what it says.

That's the fool.

The point is the wise and the fool both build their house in the same neighborhood.

They both build their house around the preaching of God's word.

The foolish person in the story is not the evil, wicked people on TV, not your criminal neighbors, not whoever you're thinking of.

The evil person in the story, the wicked, foolish person in the story, is the person who's in church every Sunday, listening to the Word of God every Sunday, just not obeying what it says.

That's the fool.

Yet they build the house.

The house on the outside, by the way, look, the two houses look identical on the outside.

4,000 square feet, four bathrooms, six bedrooms, nice kitchen.

They look identical.

They're living their lives.

On the outside, they look the same.

What it will take to expose the difference is the storm.

And the storm, by the way, here, yes, it's the trials of life.

Trials of life come to any and all.

Sundry trials of life, rain on your life, of course.

But the final storm here is not the trials of life.

The final storm here is death.

The winds howl, the waves pound against the house, and the person dies.

So at death, did your life matter?

At death, does anything, to use the real estate term, at your death, does anything convey?

Does anything go from this life to the next life?

Does anyone anything make the jump from this life into the next life?

For the foolish person who hears the words of the Lord and builds their house around the words of the Lord, is at sermons and takes notes and is, you know, Jesus is a good teacher.

And of course I respect him.

Of course I respect Jesus.

And yeah, it's got great moral teaching, and I would never judge anybody that follows Jesus, of course.

I personally don't need to submit my life to Jesus because, you know, I'm basically doing okay by myself, but I'm glad people find him helpful.

That's the fool.

And on the outside, the lives can look just the same.

You know, a couple is married and they're at church every Sunday, and one loves the Lord and one doesn't.

On the outside, the house looks the same, is the point.

It will take the storm of death to open the hinge on the door to reveal that one house was full and one house was empty.

So, what are the words of the Lord that Jesus says here that your eternity hinges on?

It's a Sermon on the Mount.

And it starts, remember, it starts back in Matthew 5 with the narrow gate.

Blessed are the bankrupt.

Blessed are those who realize, who recognize, who confess that they are not good enough.

They don't have their own righteousness.

They mourn over it.

Blessed are those who mourn.

They weep over their sin.

They hunger for righteousness that's not theirs.

And they receive it.

In contrast, the fool trusts himself.

Now listen, Jesus is telling this against the Pharisees who are out there listening to him preach.

He says, unless your righteousness exceeds out of the scribes and Pharisees, you're not going to go to heaven when you die.

I mean, he makes the point very, very clear.

You all, because of the nature of this, you're at church, and you know, 2,000 years later, I've never met somebody who has said, I'm a Pharisee.

You hear people all the time call, oh, those people are modern-day Pharisees.

Pharisee is always used antagonistically.

It's always used in a derogatory way.

You would never say, I'm a Pharisee.

At least I've never met somebody who said, I'm a Pharisee.

But this is the Pharisee disease.

The Pharisee worldview is the person who says, I don't need God's righteousness that comes through Christ.

I don't need to surrender my life to God's word.

I don't need that because basically God knows my heart.

He knows that I try as good as I can, he knows that I'm basically a good person.

God's going to honor that when I die.

That's the Pharisee.

The Pharisees had built a complicated system around that with ritual hand washing and dietary restrictions and Sabbath days and all that.

But move that stuff off the table.

That's not the heart issue.

The heart issue at the heart of the Pharisee is the heart that says, I am good enough to stand before God on my own.

When God sees my heart, he's going to know that I tried my hardest, he's going to know that I've done well, he's going to know I've lived my life in a way that should be acceptable to him.

And he's going to say, Depart from me, you worker of iniquity, I never even knew you.

And the Pharisee will say, But I did all these things in your name.

I prayed in your name.

I cast out demons in your name.

I did this and I did that.

And Jesus is going to say, I have no idea who you even are.

That's the Pharisee.

And that person is everywhere in the church, the person who doesn't give their life to the Lord.

So this is why Jesus says, the one who hears these words of mine.

Jesus is the word of God.

His words do not just fall to the ground like our words do.

Our words bounce off the wall, they don't mean anything.

Jesus' words, he creates the universe by his word.

He speaks the universe into existence.

John 1 says he is the word.

He's the very logical construct, the Lagos of the universe.

Jesus is the word of God.

His words matter, his words are determinative, his words have life-giving power.

He creates the universe by his words.

No one comes to the Father except through the Son.

No one comes to the Son unless the Spirit draws him.

So the Father sends the Son to be the life of the world, the Word of the world.

If you want to have access to God, if you want eternal life through God, you have to come through Jesus Christ.

He is the word of life.

This is why Jesus says he is the way, the truth, and the life.

No one can come to the Father except through the Son.

And no one can come to the Son unless the Holy Spirit draws them to the Son.

And so you see, Father, Son, Spirit, and it works in reverse.

When you get saved, it's the Spirit regenerating your heart and giving you faith.

Your faith is in the Son and appoints you to the Father.

So Father, Son, Spirit, Spirit, Son, Father, back again.

There is no way to be saved without that.

This is the will of God, Jesus says.

That you would hunger for righteousness that's not yours.

And so God sends his son from heaven to earth.

His son leads a sinless life, never sins in this world, is crucified for sin.

Our sin is given to him.

God punishes him for our sin, pours out his wrath on him, which we deserve.

Jesus dies because of the wrath of God being poured out on him.

He spends three days in the grave.

He resurrects from the grave because he is life.

He is the resurrection and the life.

He comes out from judgment into new life because he is life.

He is sinless and he is life and he ascends to heaven where he reigns at this very moment.

And it is the will of God that you would put your faith in his death and resurrection for your sin.

And if you will not do that, you cannot be saved.

And if you think I don't need to submit my life to Christ because I am good enough on my own, that's the Pharisee talking.

Even if you don't follow their calendar, even if you don't follow their diet, you're still the Pharisee if you trust in yourself.

Elsewhere, the scripture says Jesus told these parables against those people who trusted in themselves for righteousness.

That's the whole Sermon on the Mount.

One sentence.

You want to come to faith in God?

You recognize your spiritual bankruptcy.

You have to get through the narrow gate on your knees.

You have to be humble.

You have to confess your sin.

You cannot get through the narrow gate standing upright.

You cannot get to the narrow gate with your just self-esteem still intact.

You have to go down.

Surrender your life.

This is John 6, verse 29.

John 6:29

This is the will of my Father that you believe in him who he sent.

I mentioned this last week, but I'll say it again.

There are those that twist the Sermon on the Mount, and where Jesus says the wise man hears the words of mine and does them.

There are those who twist that and give it like a Catholic kind of teaching where they say this means you have to be obedient in order to gain eternal life.

That is not what Jesus says, and that is not what the Sermon on the Mount says.

That is what the Pharisees say.

No, what this says is you do the will of God.

The will of God is that you believe in his Son, whom He sent.

You place your faith in Him, you mourn over your lack of righteousness, you hunger for a righteousness that's outside of you, and He fills you and He satisfies you through faith.

John 6 39, this is the will of Him who sent me, that I should lose nothing that He has given me, but I would raise them up on the last day.

This is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks at the Son and who believes in the Son will have eternal life.

And I will resurrect them also, Jesus says.

That's the will of the Father.

So you want to do the will of the Father.

That means you put your faith in his son.

Repentance, faith, regeneration.

That is the will of the Father.

That's how you do God's will, is you place your faith in Jesus Christ.

You repent from your sins, you humble yourself.

And when you do that, you have the Beatitudes again.

The bankrupt person is satisfied through faith in Christ.

The bankrupt person is blessed.

You go from broke to blessed through faith in Christ.

The hungry person is filled back in Matthew 5.

You go from broke to blessed, you go from hunger to filled.

The mourning person goes to shining, you mourn and you're comforted.

You mourn over your lack of righteousness, you're given the righteousness of God in Christ, and now you let your light shine.

You're the city on the hill that cannot be hidden.

Your light radiates into the world because of your transformed heart.

That's why Jesus says the doing is where the action is.

The Sermon on the Mount doesn't stop applying once you're saved.

It describes the ethics of the kingdom.

It describes how you're going to live the Christian life.

It describes sanctification is the word for it.

So you come to faith in Christ by recognizing I don't have a righteousness in and of myself.

I surrender my life to Christ.

He died for my sin.

I confess my sin.

I repent for my sin.

I give my life to him.

Now you're comforted.

Now you're filled.

Now you're declared to be righteous.

Now you go into the world, letting your light shine as you follow Jesus Christ in obedience.

Last week we talked about the false prophets that hide the path, they hide the narrow path, they lie to you about what it takes.

We talked about those who say, Lord, Lord, and they're not going to heaven when they die.

The most common question I got after the last two weeks of sermons and in the hallway and in emails was how do I know if I'm really saved?

And I love it when people ask me a question that you can find a verse in the Bible that says the question exactly that way and then gives you an answer.

Here it is.

By this we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments.

Whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth isn't in him.

Now pause here again.

Remember, there are those that say the twist this to say you keep his commands in order to know him.

That switches cause and effect.

The cause is your knowledge of God through Christ.

The effect is your sanctified life.

So if you say you're a sanctified life, you're, you're, you're, you have a sanctified life and you don't have one, you're lying.

If you say you know God and He's not changing your life, you're lying.

If you say you're a Christian and you're living in disobedience to the Lord, you are lying.

And the truth is not in you.

So how do you know if you're saved?

Have you given your life to the Lord?

Have you confessed your sins?

Have you been broken over your sins?

Have you mourned over your sins?

Have you asked him to make you righteous?

And he does those things, and now you know that it's happened because you're walking in obedience.

That's the middle part of what's on the screen.

Whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected.

So the obedience doesn't make you a Christian.

The obedience reveals that you were already made a Christian.

That's why it says, whoever, but by this we may be sure that we are in him.

Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.

There should be a life that is changed.

And if you have the life that is changed from the inside out, you are building the immovable house.

And storms may come, the waves may hit it, and the foundation will not move.

Because it's on the rock of Christ.

Peter says, You're the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus says, I tell you the truth.

Upon this rock, the confession of Peter's confession of Jesus as the Savior, upon that rock, Jesus will build his church, and it will never be moved.

Notice in verse 24.

Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them, and remember that's the Sermon on the Mount, we've talked about that, will be like a wise man.

That phrase will be like.

It's one word in Greek.

It's an odd Greek tense that wouldn't come across in the English.

That's why I want to draw your attention to it.

It's future.

That's the obvious in English.

Will be like.

It's future.

But in Greek, it's passive.

In other words, you know what a passive verb is.

An active verb is something you do.

A passive verb is something done to you.

So this is a passive verb.

It means whoever hears the words of God and does them will be made like, would be a better way to translate it.

You're doing the word of God, and you're doing is actually acting on you.

It's making you like this wise man.

So it's future-oriented, of course.

It's a future verb.

It's future-oriented, it's looking to your own death.

You're building a life, you know, you're building a life that will last.

And as you build your life that will last, you're being made like the one who gave this sermon.

You're being made like Jesus Christ.

Your present doing and your future estate are separated by time, but not by actions.

Your present doing now is laying the foundation for your future glory.

And the rock is objective.

The rock is the words of Christ.

He is the rock, of course.

The words of Christ will never pass away.

We know that from the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 5, verse 18.

Matthew 5:18

Heaven and earth may pass away, Jesus says, but my words will never pass away.

And so if you build your life on the words of Christ that are eternal and will not pass away, then your life won't pass away, even though you die, because you built it on the eternal rock.

One of the two baptism testimonies, I think it was Leslie, quoted Psalm 18.

Yahweh is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge.

What a powerful description.

God is my rock.

The rock of, he's the rock of ages.

Build your life on him and it will not be moved.

This leads to the contrast.

The contrast is the foolish man.

Verse 26.

Everyone who hears these words of mine does not do them, will be like the foolish man.

He built his house in the sand.

I mean, what a fool.

Who does that?

The rain falls, the flood came, same rain, same flood, same death, they both die.

The only difference in the way Jesus structures these two in a literary fashion, at the end of the first house, he says it doesn't fall because it had been found on the rock.

He doesn't even bother to say that at the end of verse 27.

He doesn't say it's going to fall because it was built in the sand.

That's like a no-duh kind of situation.

His house fell.

Why?

Obviously it was built in the sand.

Instead, he puts an exclamation point on it.

He says, Because great was the fall of it.

When he collapses there, it is over.

That is death.

That is hell.

Jesus had preached about hell several times in the Sermon on the Mount.

That's where this ends.

He ends with all his themes from the whole sermon.

If you won't go through the narrow gate, if you won't mourn over your own sin, if you want to hear the word of God week in and week out, and then elevate yourself over it and not do it, what do you actually think will happen to you?

What do you think will happen to you?

Great will be your fall.

Great will be the fall.

In the parable, the words of Christ are the rock of ages.

In the parable, man's own righteousness is sand.

You trust yourself that you may as well trust in sand.

Sand is not trustworthy.

You think you're secure because your house looks like your neighbor's house on the outside, the downside part of it is built on sand.

There's a period of my life where I lived on a beach.

I was a little kid, like an eight-year-old kid, and my brother and I would build sand castles, and we built these like million-dollar sandcastles.

You wouldn't believe these things.

I can't tell you how we'd be working on it for hours and we'd run across the street to get my mom to have her come look at it.

And I cannot tell you how many times that my epic million-dollar sandcastle was not there by the time my mom got there.

She started to get tired of that, she's like.

You know, the tide comes in every day.

What am I, a tide calendar?

Come on.

Who would be so foolish?

A person who thinks short-term game, the person who doesn't want to surrender to life, it's just pride, it's just arrogance.

Oh, it's so sad to build your whole life on the beach.

It's so sad.

It's fun now.

It's fun when the sun sets.

It's not fun when the tide comes in.

It's not fun when you die.

This is the person that brings their body to church every week, but not their soul.

They bring their Bible to church, but not their heart.

They don't open it.

The sermon reaches their ears.

It might even get into their head, but never gets to their heart.

It never goes from the ears to the hands.

It never gets acted on.

Why?

Because the house is empty.

The house is empty.

Why is the house empty?

Because their words are empty.

Their words about Jesus don't mean anything.

Why are their words empty?

Because their heart is empty.

They don't love the Lord.

Why is their heart empty?

Because they love their own righteousness.

They trust their own righteousness.

They trust themselves.

They don't mourn.

They celebrate.

And so, when death comes, the house will be turned over.

I said I go look at that house every now and then.

The reason I do that, that is what happens to a person that hears the word of God week in and week out and doesn't do it.

On the outside, it might look like a nice house.

It might even have a good kitchen.

But it is empty.

It's so, so foolish.

You've heard a series on the Sermon on the Mount.

If you ever find yourself in a situation in life where you're like, I don't know if I'm going to follow Jesus anymore.

I don't know.

I want you to think of this house.

That's what that decision means.

Think of how absurd it would be just to say, I'm going to go all in on a house that nobody can live in.

That's what the person does.

He says, I've heard the words of Jesus, but I'm going to keep on living my life my way.

It's so foolish.

In contrast, the song we sang at the beginning of the service.

On Christ, the solid rock, I stand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

When darkness veils his lovely face, I rest on his unchanging grace.

In every high and stormy gale, that's speaking of death.

When the Jordan River comes and crashes down your house, and every high and stormy gale, your anchor, your anchor is Christ, will hold beneath that veil.

His oath, his covenant, his blood supports you in the overwhelming flood.

When all around your soul gives way, Christ, he's your hope and your stay.

And then, of course, when you die, the Lord comes with trumpet sound, and the plea is, may I then in him be found, dressed not in my righteousness, not with my deeds, not with the work of my hands, but dressed in his righteousness alone.

That makes you faultless to stand.

To stand.

To stand before God's throne.

Not to cower, to stand, to be lifted up.

You went from mourning and weeping to standing and shining a life of obedience.

Because you built on the rock.

Oh how how sad would it be to hear these words of the Lord and not do that.

God, we're grateful for this sermon.

The sermon of Jesus in the plains of Galilee to thousands of years.

Makes us sad to imagine how many of them went away with empty hearts.

Pray for this congregation.

I pray that that would be a story of none of us here.

That our hearts would be filled because our life is built on the unchanging rock of Christ.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.