The Builder

INTRODUCTION

Every now and then, when I am in my hometown, I drive down to the house my dad built at 1811 Capeway Road.

I lived there from age 5 to 13.

That felt like forever when I was a little kid.

The house has been painted. All of the trees in front have been torn down.

The old swing set is gone and the long driveway is mostly paved.

But when I look at it, it is still the house my father built, no matter how much the world around it changes.

No matter how weathered it looks.

No matter how many paint jobs get slapped on it.

It is still the house my father built.

Today, I want to talk to you about one half of one Bible verse.

It comes from Psalm 127. And it is about building a house.

The 127th Psalm is about the value of God’s blessings.

Here is what verse 1 says:

Psalm 127:1 ESV

Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.

We are mostly just focusing on those first thirteen words:

Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

These words are probably not referring to a physical house. It’s probably not even an example.

The original word can translate to “household.”

So this is probably a verse about building a family.

If you are going to build a home, you must build it on the Lord, Jesus Christ.

A man learns from God’s Word and leads like Jesus. Loves like Jesus. Disciplines like Jesus. Sacrifices like Jesus.

And when a man is faithful in this as a husband or a father, it shows the world what God’s love is like. The sort of love that give His only begotten Son.

But we can take this and apply it in a more broad way to all of our lives this afternoon.

Because this principle that can be applied to families, should also be applied to our lives.

It is a principle we should use to check the spiritual dipstick and make sure there is oil on the rod.

Whatever you build in life—if it is not built by, with and through Christ, it is built in vain.

In fact, life itself, if not built on Christ and by Christ, is built in vain.

ROCK AND SAND and JUDGEMENT

Jesus taught this in His most famous sermon—The Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 7:24–27 ESV

“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 on 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.”

A lot of times, when preachers talk about this passage, they jump right to the rock and the sand, but they skip past an important element—the storm.

The rain falls. The winds blow. The floods come.

And the reason people zoom past the rain and wind and floods is because they assume they know what Jesus is referring to.

“Ahhh—that is all about the trials of life that come against us and you better build your life on Christ or you won’t be able to hold up under the stormy trials.”

But that is not actually what Jesus is talking about here. With the storm, He is not referring to something that happens during life, but something that takes place at the end of it.

The storm is referring to the judgment that will come when our lives come to a close and we meet God face to face and we are called to account for our lives.

Hebrews 9:27 ESV

And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,

Now, you might say— “Well, how do you know He is talking about judgment?”

Because that is how the sermon flows. Right before that He is talking about how many will face Him on the day of judgment and He will send them away because they don’t know Him.

Instead, they know the sin they spent their lives indulging in.

Matthew 7:21–23 ESV

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

So then, Jesus is challenging us with these words and He is saying:

You are building your life. Day by day. Moment by moment. One day, God will judge the life you have built. Is your life going to withstand that judgment?

In earthly courtrooms ruled by earthly judges, we hold trials and judge men with earthly laws.

When we stand before God one day we will be judged by His eternal law.

Have we loved Him with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength?

Have we loved our neighbor as ourselves, or are we guilty of lying, stealing, adultery, coveting and other things that hurt God and our fellow man?

If God looks at the foundation of our lives, will He find that we have built our houses with sins like these?

The reality is that the world is filled with people who are building the houses of their lives on all sorts of things.

Some of them have been fooled into thinking that life consists of owning an abundance of things.

We see that all around us in the world. There are those who think that by possessing things, they will find peace and happiness.

And in truth, money does fix some temporal problems and it can remove a lot of pain and inconvenience if you have enough of it.

Like just practically speaking, a lot of things in my life would be easier if I had a few million dollars.

But money doesn’t fix depression.

You can buy the best therapists and counselors, but if your soul is busted up, your soul is busted up and until you find peace, you don’t have it.

All those years ago The Beatles said, “Money can’t buy you love.”

A study posted on the popular professional site LinkedIn recently said that those who are more wealthy tend to be more lonely.

They don’t know who to trust.

They don’t know who is sincere.

They don’t know who is after their money.

And they end up wealthy and lonely.

Meanwhile, I have been to youth prisons in El Salvador and seen some of the poorest of the poor and they couldn’t stop laughing with one another.

Those boys laughed together like they had need of nothing.

Recently we buried my wife’s grandfather. He was a Christian man. Within 48 hours of his death, all of his wealth had been distributed and his stuff had been given away or thrown away.

Another reminder of the fact that we can’t take it with us.

You came into this world naked and you will go out naked and God will judge the life you built based on His law—not based on what you own.

Luke 12:21 says that is is fool who “lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Others have been fooled into thinking that they can build their lives on religious works.

They recognize that something has gone wrong in them and they are trying to make up for it with good works.

They think that God can be satisfied with the equivalent of spiritual community service.

If we do enough good works to outweigh our bad works, He will still accept us.

ILLUSTRATION: But let me ask you this—imagine your friend is about to buy a house and he send you to inspect it for him.

You come back and you tell him, “Look man—they’ve done a lot of work, but every room has this mixture of beauty and mold. Fresh paint and termites. They place is falling apart and they are just slapping some renovation work on it.”

If your friend said, “Sounds great, I’ll take it.”

You would say, “No—listen…they are trying to make it look good, but it is rotten on the inside!”

This is what the house of a man’s life is like if he thinks he can rely on good works.

He is rotten from the inside out and God must judge His sin according to His law because God is good.

However, he thinks that by doing good works, he is slapping fresh paint on his life and fooling God.

But in truth, God is not fooled. The Lord sees all.

Hebrews 4:12 ESV

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

God will judge us by His Word and His Word gets down all the way into the intentions of our souls and our thought lives.

There is no hiding. There is no fresh coat of paint.

God will judge us and if we have broken His law at any point, regardless of our works, we are dead in sin.

James 2:10 ESV

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.

ROCK AND SAND AND LIFE

But notice that there are two sorts of people who are listening to this sermon.

Some of them are building their lives on the sands of sin and they are in danger of God’s judgment. The storm of judgment will come and wash their souls away.

Then there are others who build their lives on the rock by hearing Jesus’ words, taking heed and obeying them.

The words he is referring to are the words of the Sermon on the Mount.

A sermon all about what your life looks like if you are a follower of Christ.

You can tell who follows Christ by what they do and say.

You can tell God has done a work in them by what comes out of them.

They are poor in spirit—not proud

They are mournful over the state of the world—not comforted by it.

They are easy in spirit—not dominating, pushy people.

They are merciful, not brutal.

They are peacemakers, not hurtful, harmful, warring people.

They suffer for the sake of Christ and seek a reward in heaven, not on the earth.

You can tell who they are because they are a light to the world like the Savior who has changed their lives.

You can tell who they are because they love God’s Word.

You can tell who they are because they are not controlled by anger and lust.

You can tell who they are by how they love their spouses and how they honor God with their words.

You can tell who they are because they leave vengeance in God’s hands and they do not seek revenge.

They love their enemies.

You can tell who they are because they give to the poor and they love the needy.

They pray to God in worship and in need.

They pray to God for forgiveness for themselves and others and help in temptation.

You can tell by how they depend on God and honor Him in private.

You can tell by how they do not have an unhealthy love of money.

You can tell by how they are not anxious and they seek God’s Kingdom first, trusting that He will meet all of their needs.

And you can tell by how they treat the people around them daily:

Not harshly judging them

Treating them as they would want to be treated

They judge prophets by their fruit

And maybe you hear all of that and you say, “I want that. I want that life!”

I am with you. I want it too.

And Jesus’ point in talking about the houses on the rock and the sand is that we can have it.

We can have it by listening to His Words and hearing them. We must heed His message, which was the same from the start:

Matthew 4:12–17 ESV

Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.” From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

From the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He called on people to repent and believe in Him—the King.

REPENTING AND BELIEVING IN THE KING

This is how you build your life on the rock.

You reject the sands of this world and its principles as an acceptable foundation for your life.

You agree with God that a house like that will never withstand His judgment.

So you turn away from all the building on the sand you have been doing.

You turn away from your sin.

That is what repentance is.

Agreeing with God that sin is evil and turning away from it with the intention of practicing it no more.

But that is only one side of the coin when it comes to our response to Christ.

See—you are guilty of your sin. Just like me. We have broken God’s holy laws in how we have failed Him and our neighbors.

We deserve death for how we have broken God’s law.

So God so loved the world that He sent His only Son to come and live an obedient life for us and then die in our place on the Cross.

When He died there, He received the death we deserve for our lawbreaking.

He walked into God’s courtroom and took our punishment in our place.

Then He rose from the grave on Easter Sunday to prove:

He is the Son of God

That God accepted His death in our place

That He hold the victory over sin and death

And now He offers forgiveness and eternal life to us.

And we receive that life by faith.

We believe all these things I just said about Jesus and we confess faith in him as the Lord of our lives.

And what happens is that when we put our faith in Christ, we are united to Him:

Our sins are forgiven because of His death

And we have eternal life in Him as well

John 11:25–26 ESV

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

DON’T BUILD IN VAIN

So then we go back to where we started this afternoon—Psalm 127:1...

Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

Satan would love for you to spend your life, building your house in vain.

He would love for you to fall for the myth that money could make you happy and have you spend your life chasing it by any means necessary

He would love for you to think you can work your way to salvation

He would love for you to spend your days believing anything other than the words of life that are given to us by His Son, Jesus Christ.

He is the Resurrection and the Life.

The Lord desires to build your life on Him. On His Words.

When you put your faith in the Lord and His Spirit leads you to repent of your sins and you are forgiven, God places Christ in your life as the Cornerstone.

700 years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah said these words:5ei

Isaiah 28:16 ESV

therefore thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: ‘Whoever believes will not be in haste.’

The Apostle Peter wrote his first letter to Christians who were scattered by persecution in the Roman Empire.

He told them that this prophecy was about Jesus. Jesus is the cornerstone of the church.

And Jesus is the cornerstone of our faith.

The Lord wants to use His Word to build your life on Christ.

Will you believe His Word? Will you take whatever you have built in vain and say to the Lord, “Knock it down and start over. My life is yours. I believe in Your Son. Build my life on His Words. I will obey Him.”

This is a prayer of repentance and faith. This is the sort of prayer that starts the Christian life.

CLOSING

But the Christian is not perfect.

The Christian might have days or months or seasons where they drift very far from the Lord and they forget their first love.

The Christian comes back and confesses sin and is forgiven again.

The Christian is still a work in progress.

But the Christian life is the house built by the Word of the Lord.

It is not built in vain.

And weathered and beaten as the Christian may be—you see that they are still the Lord’s house.

The Spirit of God is given to them and dwells in them from the time they believe.

And throughout our lives, He leads them away from the vain building they did before, and He teaches them to love the Lord and His ways.

And one day, they will stand before God and He still see them as totally righteous because they are united to His perfect Son in faith.

Their souls are a house built upon Christ and His Words.

Maybe you have built in vain for years and you are tired of that.

Today is a day to place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. A day to agree with God about your sin and to turn away from your sin and be saved.

We have men with us who can talk to you about this today. They would love to talk with you about how to build your life on Christ and His Words.