The Tale of Two Houses
Notes
Transcript
Out text this morning is Luke 6:46-49:
“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”
May God bless this, the reading of His holy and infallible Word.
In our text today, Jesus tells a parable of two houses. One built upon a foundation of sand and the other built on a foundation of rock. What He is really talking about is two different types of Christians.
I am very deliberately using the word, Christian; because each of these people are professing faith in Jesus Christ. They each profess Jesus as not only “Lord”, but emphatically proclaim “Lord, Lord”! They are a part of what theologians have called the “visible church”; that is, the church we can see. In contrast, there is an “invisible church”; that is the church consisting in true believers from every generation. In this life, we cannot see this church. None of us knows who is a true Christian or not. It is not without significance that all of the apostates listed in the New Testament were people who were prominent in the church. These are the wolves in sheep clothing that Jesus warns us about.
Consequently, when we look at the visible church, each house (or Christian) looks the same on the surface:
On the Surface, Each House Looks the Same
On the Surface, Each House Looks the Same
The people who Jesus was talking to were very familiar with what Jesus was talking about. In that part of the world there are regions in which the bedrock is covered by a thick layer of sand. Few people in these areas can afford to dig a foundation deep enough to hit solid ground. Consequently, their homes are in danger of collapsing; but here is the thing, these homes built upon the sand look much the same as homes built upon the solid ground.
What Jesus is saying is this: Most people who profess to be a Christian look the same on the surface. Let us just look at the crowd that came to hear Jesus that day:
Each was Professing Faith in Jesus. This is why they came, if not the Messiah, they believed He was a prophet of God. The same is true today; the name “Christian” is the name given to those who profess to be one of Jesus disciples. In Acts 11:26, we read, “In Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.” Each, Jesus says, calls Him not only “Lord”, but “Lord, Lord”! This is an emphatic statement!
Each was Assembling in Jesus’ Name. The people came to Jesus were doing more than “professing Christ’s Name”, they were actually assembling together to be in His presence. These are not mere C & E Christians; that is, Christmas and Easter Christians!
Each in Faith, Sought the Lord’s Blessing: In Luke 6:17, we read that a “great multitude gathered to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases”. How many go to church each week, expecting a blessing from the Lord? Sadly, very few.
Taking all of this together, we have a picture of people who seem very religious on the surface. It is only when we look below the surface that we learn the two houses are built on a very different foundation:
Below the Surface, Each House is Very Different
Below the Surface, Each House is Very Different
According to Jesus, those who profess faith in Him build their faith upon one of two foundations:
One person, builds their faith upon the foundation of obedience.
The other person, builds their faith upon the foundation of disobedience.
“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?
That little word “why” speaks volumes! There is an incongruity between what these people profess, and what is practice. To profess someone “Lord”, is to profess that you really believe they are “Lord”. Moreover, Jesus is not just a lower case “lord”, He is the upper case “Lord”. As the Messiah, the Son of David, Jesus in His human nature is the supreme human authority. As the Second Person of the God Head, Jesus is the supreme authority over all of creation!
There is no conflict between faith and obedience. To say you “believe or trust in Jesus” is to say you believe Jesus is who He says He is and that you believe what He commands you to do is the best thing to do.
Too many people believe they still have veto power over Jesus. If they do not like what He commands them to do, they can veto it!
What such people are forgetting is that the Kingdom of God is an absolute monarchy. There is no House of Lords or Parliament as in England that can overrule the king; what the King commands, His subjects must do!
When it comes to human government, we have good reason to fear too much power falling into the hands of too few, but we are not talking about sinful human government, we are taking about Christ’s righteous government. Jesus is the wisest, most kind King you could ask for. The Psalmists writes:
The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
Before, we move on, there is two things we need to clarify. When Jesus is speaking of a person obeying His commandments, He is not speaking of moral perfection, but rather the trajectory of our lives. This is why he uses the fruit tree analogy:
“For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
A good fruit true will occasionally bear a “bad apple” and bad fruit tree will occasionally bear a “good apple”; but both trees are known by their fruit; so it is for a person who professes faith in Christ Jesus.
This leads to the second thing: What makes a person a good tree is not human effort, but grace through faith. In Ephesians 2, Paul teaches that we all start out as “bad fruit trees”:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Then God makes true believers alive spiritually by grace:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
Now, this is not by our own effort:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Having been made alive, we become fruitful trees:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
As I have been saying throughout this series, Christianity is a supernatural religion. You cannot “work up” within you the desire to obey Christ’s commands, it must come to you by grace. If you are not seeing within yourself a heart that hates sin and desires righteousness, that is an indication that you need to be “born again”. Turn to Christ today for salvation. Only by uniting yourself to Christ in faith can you build your life upon the foundation of obedience.
It is urgent that you do so today, because the foundation upon which you build your life upon will make all the difference:
This Difference, Makes All the Difference!
This Difference, Makes All the Difference!
In the parable, Jesus speaks of floods. These floods are text are “the crises of life and faith” that befall all of us. A crisis of faith can be any number of things—a serious illness, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, even a broken dream. In these times, we question who God and Jesus really are. Why is this? It is because we never knew them. In the Sermon on the Mount, we find a parallel passage:
“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.’
As in our passage today, we have people who on the surface have every appearance of being true believers—they are even casting out demons in Jesus’ Name; but they are “lawless”, that is they do not obey Jesus. In this passage, Jesus says He never “knew them”. We get to “know” Jesus, not by working miracles in His name, but by obeying His commandments! Nothing tests and grows our relationship with Jesus more than obeying Him!
It is not trials and tribulations which cause a “crisis of faith”, it is a rather going into trials and tribulations without the foundation of obedience! Without obedience, Jesus will be a stranger to you and you will be a stranger to Jesus.
As I close, I want to remind you again of what we learned from Ephesians 2, as a part of “salvation”, obedience is by “grace through faith”. Obviously, obedience is something we do, however the power to obey does not lay within us, it comes to us as a gift from God. One of the great promises of the New Covenant is that God writes His law upon the hearts of those who come to Him in faith.