It Fell—And Great Was It’s Fall

It's good to be back with you guys this week. I was sitting in Sunday school as Timothy was teaching, and I go, I don't know what the answer to any of his questions are when he talked about last week, and then it occurred to me, I wasn't here last week. And that's why I don't know what he's talking about. We had a good time down with Pastor Spurgeon and his church down in Jeffersonville. If you're ever down that way, that's the Indiana side of Louisville, depending on where you were born. I do commend them to you. They're doing good work down there, and you'll find yourself blessed and encouraged if you're ever down that way to go worship with them. It is good to be back, and there was one thing I also wanted to mention. I didn't get the announcement to Timothy, but I wanted to just put on your radar if you're available. Next Saturday, September 2nd, there's going to be a community prayer rally down in Mooresville, Indiana. Pastor James Brown is...

a pastor in our presbytery. His church is hosting it or organizing it, and it's going to be just a prayer rally for repentance, for revival, for the word to go forth. We did this last year in response to Roe being overturned, and so I think this is going to become an annual thing that we do. Both John and I are going to be participating in it, and so if you're available next Saturday at 2 p.m., it should last about an hour. We do invite you to come to that. It's at Bicentennial Park. If you have any questions about that, you can talk to John or me. It's right downtown Mooresville. There's a little park. There'll be a good time of fellowship and prayer. And so if you're available, we'd love to see you there. So now we come to our sermon. And this is our penultimate sermon from the Sermon on the Mount. It's sort of sad to end things. Part of the reason it's sad to me is because I have to figure out what I'm going to preach on next, which is a big undertaking because it may be committing us to it.

Probably at least a year, if not multiple years of something. And so do pray for me as we do that. And it's also hard to say goodbye to something that's been so familiar and so helpful to me. And so this week we're going to be picking back up toward the end of chapter 7, where Jesus has exhorted us to live our lives according to the Word, the Word of God. Last time, two weeks ago, we focused on the first half of our section, where we saw that the wise man builds his house on the rock. is Jesus Christ and the words that he said. That man, that wise man, was able to stand when the storms came. And the only reason he was able to stand was not because of his own strength or because of his own wisdom or his age or his wealth or anything like that. He was able to stand because he was connected to Jesus Christ. This week we're going to be focusing on the other man, the foolish man, the one who doesn't build his house on the rock but rather on the sand.

And when the storms of life come to him, his house does not stand, but rather it falls and it's destroyed. And so my hope is that God will help us this morning to see the ways in which we're being foolish. You need to not think when we read this passage, it says wise men do this and foolish men do that. I don't want you to think I'm either a wise man and therefore I have nothing to worry about or I am a foolish man and therefore I have everything to worry about. The truth of most of our lives is that there are places in which we're wise and there are places in which we're fools.

And so my hope is that God will help us to see the areas in which we're foolish and bring us to repentance and help us to dig out and build that part of our lives and attach it to the Word of God as opposed to the sand that shifts and fails us when we need it. Our text this morning is Matthew 7, verses 24-27. Would you please stand now as we read the Word of the Lord? This is the Word of the Lord and it is eternally true. 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. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house, and it fell.

And great was its fall. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Sometimes when you read Scripture, you run into words that we don't use in our normal discussion. And I think foolish is one of them. Parents might use that with their kids, but it's probably a learned vocab word. It's not the sort of thing that you hear or read in society. We don't talk about things being foolish. Mostly because I think foolish has come to mean to us That's just silly. Or they're just naive. But foolish here, biblically, does not mean that sort of thing. It's not this like, oh, isn't that cute? They're just being silly. That's not what it means. What this word means here is moronic. You understand if you were to call someone a moron, or if you were to call someone stupid, or if you were to say that they don't have a brain, that's what this foolishness means to us, or means here.

It's someone who is very stupid. It is someone who is without a brain, who's incapable of thought, who can't count the cost of what they're doing, who can't connect their actions to the consequences that are going to come. I mean, it makes sense if you were to go to somebody and say to them, if you do this, this is what will happen to you. It does take some basic level of comprehension for them to connect those two things together. If you touch this hot stove, you will burn your hand. You realize in small children, at some point fairly early on, they're able to understand those words. Whether they listen to them is another issue, but they're able to understand them. And so when someone here is called foolish, they're not being silly. They're being said to be dumber than a very small child who can understand very simple warnings. This passage tells us that if you build your house on the sand, it's going to fall.

But the fool doesn't understand that. And the fool's lack of understanding is not due to the fact that they weren't told, it's that they didn't understand or comprehend. They couldn't connect the dots, if you will. They didn't see that they didn't put together what they were doing and what it was going to produce. In Psalm 73, Asaph is having troubles of the soul. And the whole psalm is him talking about his difficulty in sorting out why he's done all of this righteousness, why he's given his life to serving God and keeping the commandments and doing all of this. And at some point, he's questioning himself down to the core and he's saying, none of this makes any sense. All of the rich and the wealthy and the worldly wise around me, their lives are so comfortable and so easy and without any pain. And they're wealthy. And when they die, it's not even a hard death. But me, I've been struggling my whole life trying to keep myself pure.

then you're undoubtedly that foolish if you don't see the temptation in your own heart to be that dumb. Maybe you're young and maybe you haven't really screwed something up yet, or maybe you have and haven't realized it. But as you get older, you're going to realize what a fool you are. And you're going to realize you were a fool at the point of where you thought you were wise. I was so sure that was the right thing to do, only to find out years later what a fool you'd been. You hadn't connected your actions in the moment to... The fruit that they would produce. And so this label of being a fool is not the sort of label we should want applied to us anywhere. There are many times it's used in Scripture. The book of Proverbs is a long extended treatment of the comparison of the wise man and the fool in all kinds of areas of life. But I'll give you two examples, not from Proverbs, where a fool is described. In Job 2, verse 10, after the Lord has allowed Satan to strike him and to take away all of his...

all of his wealth, all of his loved ones, everything that he has, except his wife. And I think Satan left his wife because she knew that he would be a temptation to her, that he would increase her pain, his pain. She's speaking to him and she says, will you now curse God and die? Will you hold fast your integrity? And Job's response to her is this, you speak as one of the foolish women speak. Shall we not indeed accept good from God? Shall we indeed accept good from God and not adversity? And so he had in his mind and in her mind and in society this category of a fool, foolish woman. And he says, you're like one of them. You have no ability to think. You have no ability to comprehend. Should we approach God thinking that he will only fill our hands with good things? You speak as one without a brain. You're an idiot. And so, while our passage talks about a foolish man, it is true that women can be foolish, just like Job's first wife. But men aren't free of this charge as well.

In 1 Samuel 25, as David's carrying on, he'd gone up to Nabal's sheep shears and basically said, hey, can you pay us for the work that we've done? We've protected you guys. We've seen to it that your young sheep weren't endangered or killed by the wild animals and stuff. And all we ask now is that you'd give us some of the spoil. And Nabal says, that's not my job. See to that yourselves. And so David takes that very personally. He's very angry. sets out to say, well, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to kill all of them, not just their animals, but the men, everybody, every servant, everybody. So Nabal has a good wife. She catches wind of this, having not heard about it at all. She catches wind of it, and she goes to David with all of the food that he could ever want, a feast, and says, please, my husband's an idiot. Please have mercy on us. And these are her words. This is what she says in 1 Samuel 25, 25.

She says, please do not let my Lord pay attention to this worthless man, Nabal. For as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. But I, your maidservant, did not see the young men which my Lord sent. And so Nabal is not the kind of man you want to be likened to. A foolish man. Someone who's unable to understand the consequences. If someone had come to Nabal and said, if you don't give this guy what he's owed, he's going to kill us. You think he would have done differently? Did anyone warn Nabal or confirm the story? Actually, his servants did. When David's servants came and said, hey, can we have some food? Nabal says, how do I know you're not lying to me? I'm really paraphrasing. I'm sort of summarizing a few chapters of Scripture here. But he says, how do I know you're not lying to me? And then his servants come and say, no, it's exactly like they said. They're not lying to you. They did exactly what they said. So what they're asking for is reasonable.

We had it easy with them, his shepherds, Nabal's shepherds. So Nabal was shown the truth and he just went, he wasn't able to think for a second, what happens if I treat this man poorly? What would I do if I were in his shoes? So Nabal pays the price for his foolishness. His house fell, not his literal house, but himself. He died. And so is everyone who doesn't hear Jesus' words and obey them. In God's book, they're a fool. Now, the difficulty that we have in our life, and it's not exclusive to us, this is something that's gone on since the beginning of time, is that there's this competing wisdom that we have to sort our way through. And it's the wisdom of the world versus the wisdom of God. You'll remember when Jesus was alive, there's a point at which Jesus commends us, the Jews to us, and he says, you need to exceed them in their shrewdness.

You need to be wiser than they are. You need to understand the ways of the world better than they do. And yet you need to be innocent as doves. The Jews were very shrewd. They were very wise in the ways of the world, and to this day still are. They still are, as a people, a very industrious people, a very wealthy people, and a very wicked people. They were wise according to the world's wisdom and not according to God's wisdom. In Matthew 16, 26, Jesus says, What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? What will profit him if he succeeds at everything he does in the world? If he accumulates all of their wisdom and all of their treasures and all that they have to offer, what will it profit him? What will the benefit be if the price was his soul? And so being wise and successful by the world standard is not nearly as difficult as we might think it is. But we do have to consider...

what will become of us if we give ourselves to the world's wisdom. As a Reformed Christian, you're in a really small group of people in terms of people who get along with you. You probably don't feel comfortable in the broader Christian world because you have principles and the truth and you got it all right. And so you feel superior and you tend to think that your thoughts are always the right thoughts. And that everyone else is wrong. But we have weaknesses too. And some of them are glaring and some of them are obvious. At least to those who have eyes to see and probably not ourselves. One of the things I've thought about as Eric and Timothy have been teaching our Sunday school class is I know all the answers to the questions they're asking. And I've also seen that you know all the answers to the questions they're asking. Except when they ask, Did you love anybody this week? Did you talk to anybody this week? Did you do any of the stuff that you know? And it's this painful awkwardness. I don't know if Timothy did it last week, but for the first two weeks he taught, he asked us this really simple question. Did you have any gospel conversations this week? Did you talk to anybody? And we're all sitting there like, stop, stop, don't say that. Don't say that. We know all the right stuff. But Jesus warns us that the man who hears his words and doesn't act on them,

He's a foolish man. And it turns out that we struggle to love people, to minister to them, to talk to them with compassion and with mercy. The stuff that Timothy was exhorting us toward this morning. Because we're too busy, because we have all of the answers. We know what will be said. We know whether it's worth it. We always count the cost just right. And it always turns out that when we count the cost, the thing we wanted to do anyway is the right decision. There are many, many men whose houses have fallen down because they built their house on that sand. thinking that they were always wise and they were always right, that their way of seeing things was superior to everyone else's. And so in that regard, that's one area where we've been fools. It's interesting, though, that we also can have very particular opinions and convictions theologically, but when it comes to living in the world and how to get along, we actually struggle to live like Christians and to have Christian commitments. When it comes to our politics,

We're all very conservative because you're supposed to be very conservative because that's what it means to be a Christian. It's not uncommon for people and our friends and perhaps some of us even to have taken up this idea of having no enemies to the right. Now, if you're political, you know exactly what I'm talking about because it's a political ideology that you will, out of principle, be the most conservative person on every issue because that's the goal of the thing. But is that what Jesus would have done? Is that what he did? Could you imagine taking that ideology and answering the question, should we pay taxes to Caesar? Which was a question that he was asked. If we were to say, I'm going to be the most conservative of conservative, and the government's wicked, and they're oppressive, and all of these things, we'd say, no way. And that, in fact, was what a lot of conservatives say. They whine and complain and gripe about taxes.

Now, am I arguing that all of our taxes are righteous and just and good and all that? No, that's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is, what is godly about that argument? And didn't Jesus address that very question, asked in the context of a very oppressive and godless government? And his answer was not, don't pay the taxes. His answer was, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And so that's a particularly Christian answer. But it's not a very popular answer, is it? You're a liberal if you give that answer. You're not a Christian. You have failed at some very foundational level if you give that answer. But I say that that answer, the foundation that that answer is built on, is the rock and not the sand. Is it possible to pay taxes and work for tax reform where it's screwed up and oppressive and wrong? Yes. But few Christians actually do that work. Many Christians will run their mouths about it, which I wouldn't give a plug nickel for.

I'd rather you just kept quiet. And so Christians in society ought to have a distinct aroma, a distinct bent, a particular priority that's evident to the people around them, that their commitments are to Jesus Christ. And wherever that leads, they're willing to go. And so they find themselves hating abortion, desiring justice, believing in capital punishment. believing that men are men and women are women and that God made them that way, and that marriages, they end up with all of these things, and they end up thinking that we should pay taxes to unrighteous governments. And that one little thing, all of a sudden, all the rest of it doesn't matter. Because if you're not in lockstep at every point with the particular agenda or the people you're around, then there's no place for you at the table. And what I'm saying is, you should care more about...

being united to Jesus Christ, than any particular thing in this world, political or otherwise. And one of the reasons, probably the most prominent or important reason, and the one from our text, that we should care more about being aligned with Jesus Christ than the wisdom of this world, is that those who are aligned with the wisdom of the world will fail. But those who are aligned and rooted in Jesus Christ will stand. I was reading, we were reading in Family Devotions earlier this week, Acts 27. And one of my kids described the chapter as, it sounded like a chapter out of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Because it's just the story of Paul's shipwreck. As he's making his way through Rome and he told them, he's like, guys, it's cold. We don't want it. We shouldn't go out on this ship. And they go out on the ship and then the storms come and the wind and they're throwing all the, jettisoning all the food and all of the cargo and all of this stuff. And then there's basically a mutiny between the sailors and the Roman soldiers because everyone's scared that they're going to die.

And here's Paul, he's in chains. And he's been the only sane one the whole time. And as the story goes on and as the pressures increase, the sailors tried to leave the ship. They said, well, we're going to let down the lifeboat and we're going to go out and we're going to set an anchor. But that's not what they were going to do. They were all going to take their skilled hands, get in that little boat and get to shore and leave all of the soldiers and all of the prisoners, 230 some of them, on the ship to die. That's what the sailors' plans were.

And so Paul, in the moment, says to the Roman centurion, the guard, right, the guy in charge, he says, dude, if you let them go down on that ship, we're all going to die. And so what's the Roman centurion to do? He's got the captain and all of his sailors, and he's got all of his soldiers, and he's got all these prisoners, and then there's this one prisoner, Paul. And Paul's like, if you let them go, we're all going to die. What he does, you guys know what he does? He has his soldiers go and cut the ropes to the boat. We're all going to be on this ship together by his actions.

So that's really, really tense. That's really, really difficult. Life and death are hanging in the balance and everyone's seeing it. And you see everyone doing what they think is best for them. The sailors are like, you can all die. We're leaving. That's not a Christian thing to do, is it? This Roman centurion's in a tough spot. Knows that he and his men are good at being soldiers but not good at being sailors. And they say, we need these sailors. And then there's this really sweet passage. It says that they've been in this storm. I mean, it's an incredible storm. Two weeks. They haven't eaten. They haven't slept. They're just wiped out. They're just done. And what's Paul say to them? Hey, guys, we need to eat. Go get some food and let's eat. And so they go and get some food and they eat. And he prays and thanks God for his provision. It's just this incredible thing that Paul does. Now, why do I tell you all of that? Because what would you have done? If you were on that ship, what would you have done? Would you have been the soldiers? Or would you have been like Paul?

Why could Paul behave like that? Because he was a Christian. And that story, if you know it, you might say, well, the Lord came to him in a vision and told him that nobody was going to die. But that was before he told the Roman centurion, don't let them leave or we're going to die. And so he was the means of all of their lives being preserved because he was anchored to Jesus Christ. All of those anchors they were trying to throw, it says they had thrown four anchors into the water and that they were dragging a sea anchor behind them. trying to keep the ship from smashing into the rocks. All of these anchors they're trying to throw out aren't working. That's why the sailors are like, we're going to go put some more. There's one man on that ship who had an anchor, who was wise. And all their lives were preserved as a result of it. And so that's for us. We should be like Paul. There you see the picture of a wise man and a foolish man. And what they do when the storms come and the rains come down and the winds blow, quite literally,

The Christian stands. The fool falls. Here's the thing, the fool doesn't think he's a fool. Those sailors had a plan for saving their own life. We're going to lie to them. We're all going to get in this ship, this rowboat, and we're going to row to shore. We're going to keep ourselves safe. The fool doesn't realize he's a fool. The fool has no regard for the lives of his neighbors, but only for himself, because he swaps out the truth of God for the wisdom of the world. Because of the pressure that goes on in our society today and the general unrest, there are things that really catch fire in society. There have been two songs in the last couple of, what, six weeks maybe, that have really just shot right up. I listened to one of them once. I haven't listened to the other one. I listened to the first one. Try that in a small town. Right, I listened to that song. And I thought, yeah, that's about right for small town America, like godless.

pointing at the problem and like, you know, don't tread on me. That's all it really was. It's just like, don't tread on me. Somebody got it out of the deep freezer and threw it in the microwave and here came a song. Like, don't tread on me is not a new concept for American conservatives. And then this other song come out. I'd chosen not to listen to it. But both of them, both of these songs sort of, one of them is sort of a threat and the other one is sort of just a lament. But it's about the condition of America. And so there's this sentiment in our society.

that connects with that. And so all these songs are going viral. Everyone's talking about them. They're very popular because they've touched something. They hit a raw nerve in American society. We all want the truth. We all want things to get better, and we all know how it's supposed to get better. But the thing both of those songs lacked, and what a lot of our society lacks, and what our politicians lack, is a Christian answer to the world's problems. But they don't know they're screwed up. And they don't know they're wrong. Now here's the sad part. Neither do Christians. We've gone along with this stuff. We've agreed with it and said, yes, you are giving voice to my concerns. Taxation. Which is what the second song is about, right? Richmond, just south of D.C. Talking about those rich men up north and how it's not fair. Are those your concerns? Are those the top of the list of your concerns? They shouldn't be.

There's a lot of talk about standing for the truth and doing good and standing up for the little man and grassroots movements and all these sorts of things. There's lots of talk about it. The world talks about those things. Conservatives talk about those things. And Christians do. And everyone's trying to figure out how to hitch all the wagons together to save America. And the Christians are all looking around trying to figure out which bandwagon. Who's the guy who's got it right? And so we watch with bated breath the debate because... You know, when it comes to standing for the truth, don't ever prioritize words over actions. James tells us that he'll show us his love by his works. Men will show their love for the truth by their actions, not by what they say. A man's faithfulness or a woman's faithfulness, their commitment to Jesus Christ is not proven until they have to pay the bill for it, until the cost has come due. And they have to say, okay, is it Jesus?

Or is it this other thing? Is it the truth or is it my comfort or my wealth or my reputation or what have you? Don't trust talk of truth over actions that pursue it. And I'm not trying to set the bar too high and say that there's some faithful man out there that's going to check every box and do it all right. That's not true either. But you should have some sense as a Christian, some ability to discern good from evil. Hebrews chastises us for not being able to do that the way that we should. You should be able to eat solid meat by now, but you have need again of milk. You should have become teachers by now. You should understand these things. Which is to say, the stuff I'm talking about shouldn't be offensive or making you bristle. It shouldn't be a foreign concept to you, but I'm afraid that to too many of us, it is a foreign concept.

We think the fact that we've believed in Jesus, that we have said that we're Christians, has settled all of our spiritual business, and now we can set about our worldly business, as though the two aren't completely connected. The fact that you're a Christian doesn't make the things you pursue Christian pursuits. The fact that you pursue them in a Christian way makes you a Christian. Otherwise, you're a fool, and it will fall. You all kind of chuckled when I talked about don't try that in a small town. But I could go through, this is a worldly example, I could go to a Christian example and say, we're just rehashing old stuff that's been tried and has failed. Martin, come from a revival culture. I mean, will it ever end? Will they ever say, I don't think this is how it works? But they should. But they don't know history. And they're holding on to something that was real at a time.

but its half-life has mounted it to nothing. A lot of the debates theologically about what Christians' commitments should be politically or whether it's Christian nationalism or theonomy or post-mill theology or all of these sorts of things. Guys, talk to me about it if it's gained meaningful traction in 20 years. You're not a believer. You're right. You're right. I don't want to listen to what people have to say. I want to pay attention to what they do. And I want to pay specific attention to what they do when the cameras aren't on. And that takes time. In our text right before this section in Matthew, he tells us that a tree will be known by its fruit. And in time, you can't know whether a house is built on the rock or whether it's built on the sand until the storm comes. Until then, it all looks nice. But when the storm comes, you can see who cut the corners. And you can see who had different priorities. And so storms are unavoidable.

Both houses, both people, Christians and non-Christians alike, face storms. And it's in those storms, like with the Apostle Paul in Acts 27, that the difference becomes clear. Oh, oh, this person, for some reason, is not freaking out like everybody else. This person has not gone along with the sheep. This person loves other people. When Paul broke bread and he prayed, I mean, can you imagine? Would you pray after having not eaten for two weeks and being starving and having thrown stuff overboard and having been in fear of your life? Would you pray and give thanks to God for the bread, for the food? It's just so sweet. And it shows you his commitments, what was important to him. So don't be a fool, which is to say, don't think much of yourself and don't think that you're never wrong. Fools talk and talk and talk.

convincing themselves and trying to convince other people of their wisdom, only to be shown later that they were fools and that what they said didn't stand up. You would think that fools would be obvious, but they're not. Oftentimes, fools have a lot of support. They have a bandwagon and it's going somewhere and everyone's trying to jump on the bandwagon. But you as a Christian, before you jump on the bandwagon, ought to consider where is this bandwagon going? What is its end? Because I don't want to be on the runaway wagon that goes off the cliff. Have you guys ever buried somebody at the beach in sand? Do it, it's fun, right? Depending on how deep the hole is, it can be kind of oppressive if you're the one in the hole. If you lay flat, it's not too bad, but the more vertical you get, the worse it gets when they fill you in. And the deeper you dig and the bigger the hole, even digging in sand can get hard. Have any of you dug through rock as opposed to sand? About a year ago, I was helping dig a grave. And when you dig graves,

South of here, we have this thing in the ground called limestone. Some places it's more like sandstone, but sometimes it's limestone. And graves, you know, are supposed to be six feet deep. Well, at about four feet, we hit a shelf of rock. What were we supposed to do? We had picks and axes, and we were hitting the rocks, and the rocks were sparking as we hit them. And there was, what, a dozen guys? Were you there with me? There were a dozen guys, and most of the guys there, were concrete workers. So they were tough, hardworking. They weren't like, oh, I've got blisters. And they were wore out. They were done digging through the rock. So why do we dig through sand as opposed to rock? Well, because you can understand from those two examples, burying someone on the beach or literally digging a grave through rock, that you have to get down another two feet. Why you'd rather dig in the sand? It's a whole lot easier. It's a whole lot easier.

And so if your life is marked, if you're wondering, am I a wise man or a foolish man? Here's a good diagnostic question. Have you ever dug through any rock? Or do you just prefer to dig through sand everywhere? Doing what's comfortable, doing what's familiar, doing what's easy. Have you ever had the Lord open a door only to realize that you ought not to walk through the easiest door right in front of you, but ought to take a harder path? It always makes me nervous when Christians talk that way. They say, well, when the Lord closes a door, he opens a window. Or when he closes one door, he opens another door. And I'm like, there's no theology of things being hard. Really, the path of least resistance is like, Christians are supposed to just float down that river. Wherever the easiest place to go is, that's where they're supposed to go. What you'll find as a Christian, if you want to obey God, is that you will have to go through hard things.

And you'll have to go through them because you choose to go through them, not because they're forced upon you. Sometimes they are forced on us. Many of the burdens and suffering and trials that we face, we don't go pick them off the shelf and say, I'll have some cancer. But sometimes the burdens and the trials and the hardships that we face are the result of our commitments to following Jesus Christ. And it makes our lives hard. And that's as it should be. Otherwise, it wouldn't have made any sense for Jesus to tell us to count the cost before we followed him. We'd all be like, well, isn't this easy and great?

But he says, it will be great, but it will not be easy. Your sins will be forgiven and you'll have peace with God, but your life will be hard now. And so the fool builds his house on the sand in part because the sand is easy to dig through. And it really won't matter until the storms come. No one avoids the storms and only the Christians bear them well. One of the things that's sweet as a pastor, I think I can speak for, I know our elders would feel the same way. One of the things that's most encouraging to us is to see you guys stand for Jesus Christ when it's costly. To see you do something that's difficult, that's painful, it gives us faith to do the same thing. Or at least you've explained to us by your actions what you expect of us. And it turns out that's really helpful. And we in turn try to do the same things for you. And so we need to be built and rooted in Jesus Christ. If we don't, our lives will come crashing down around us at some point.

And really, that's not the worst of it. The worst thing that can happen to you is not that your life falls apart. Not that you're poor, not that you're homeless, not that your marriage falls apart, not that all your children walk away. As bad as all those things are, that's not the worst that can happen to you. When Jesus says that the house fell and great was its fall, there is this theme running through the end of the Sermon on the Mount that has to do with the judgment. If your goal is that I'm just going to make it through life the best I can, without ever connecting how you live your life to when you stand before God, you'll have done yourself a great disservice. If you don't stand during the trials and the difficulties and the hardships today, if you're not rooted to Christ in this life, what hope do you have of being rooted to him in the judgment? Do you stand now? So when I say, if what you want is the easiest, comfortable, shortest distance between two points, if that's how you live your life,

you should have buzzers going off in your head right now going, do I think that that mentality is going to stand up before the judgment seat of Christ? That he's going to say that was the right way to live as a Christian? That was the right expression of faith in my son who died for you? I'm not telling you to go look for trouble. I'm not telling you to go seek out hardship. I'm just telling you that when it comes, your faith will, or lack of it, will be evident. And here's the other thing I'll tell you. As much as we put on an appearance, I suspect you know whether you have real faith or not. Meaning, I suspect that you have a conscience that says to you, yeah, I'm not going to do the hard stuff when it comes. And you know that before the hard stuff comes. If that's true of you, and I'm not saying that you do it perfectly, that you never fail, but I am saying that there is something that God, through giving us a conscience in his Holy Spirit,

tells us what kind of man we are or what kind of woman we are. And so when the difficulty comes, everyone else might be surprised at how we respond, but we actually have some sense of how we would have responded. We knew. In the same way that the guy who digs through sand versus rock knows the difference. The guy who cuts corners, the builder who cuts corners on your house, guess what? He consciously decided to cut those corners. He knew there was a better way. And he went, no, that's just too much work. It's too expensive. It's too time. I don't have the time for it. He knew. And you know. And if you don't know, if what I'm saying to you is you're like, you mean I should know for certain in every area? I'm not saying that you're going to know for certain in every area, but I am saying if you think I don't know what I would do, I think you should do two things. One, you should look at your past and see what you've done when difficulties come and whether you thought that was the right thing to do or not.

You might look back and say, I really screwed up. I did the wrong thing, and I don't want to do that again. That would be good if what you did was the wrong thing, if you folded, if you flinched, if you stepped back. But it's also true, and especially true as you get older, as a Christian, you'll look back and you'll say, God was faithful to me through that, and I don't know how in the world I would have gotten through that except for the grace of God and his mercy to me because I didn't have the strength to do it. And yet here I am, scars and all, standing.

If that's the testimony, then praise God. To the extent that that's the testimony, praise God. And ask God to give you more of it for when the next storm comes. All of this leading up to the point when you're going to stand before God in judgment and you can stand there upright, blameless, washed in the blood of Jesus Christ. With no shame, even though you've sinned your whole life through. That's what it means to be founded on the rock as opposed to founded on the sand. I don't want you to fall. I don't want to fall myself. And so storms are coming. Ask God to give you strength to stand in those storms. Ask God to bring you to repentance for your fear and for your unwillingness to engage in conflict, for your love of money, and all the things that amount to building in the sand. Lord, help us all, right? Let's pray.