Introduction - The Importance of Your Foundation
LAYING YOUR FOUNDATION
Introduction
THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR FOUNDATION
Scripture reading: (from Matthew 7:21-27 and Luke 6:46-49)
“Why are you calling Me, ‘Lord’, but you are not doing the things that I tell you to do?
Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ is going to enter the kingdom of heaven,
but only that one who is doing the will of My Father who is in heaven. Many are going to say
to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out
demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ Then, I will declare (lit. confess) to
them, ‘But I never knew you. Depart from me, you who are doing lawless things.
Therefore, every one who comes to Me, and hears My words, and is doing them, I will
show you whom he is like. He is like a wise man building a house, who dug down and went
deep, and laid a foundation upon the rock. And when the rain came down, and the winds
blew, and a flood arose, the torrent burst against that house but was not able to shake it, and
it did not fall because it had been well built and had been founded upon the rock.
But every one who is hearing these words of mine, but is not doing them, is like a fool
who built his house on the earth without any foundation, and the rain came, and the winds
blew, and the torrent burst against that house, and immediately it collapsed into a heap, and
the destruction of that house was great.”
Shaking is Inevitable
We are living in a day when everything is being shaken. Terrorists are attacking us right in our own land. Tsunamis take hundreds of thousands of lives in a brief moment of time. Hurricanes destroy whole cities. And earthquakes strike without warning. It is tempting to see these things as unprecedented, but the truth is, they have been happening all through history. The plagues of the middle ages, the great fires in London and Chicago, powerful earthquakes – shaking has always been a characteristic of life. It is the nature of human, fallen life to be shaken.
Now, in the midst of all this shaking, God is offering to us a foundation, and a stability, and a restoration to the God who cannot be shaken. But He is offers us that restoration on His terms, by divine revelation, so that when we come to Him on His terms, He will build into our lives a foundation, upon which a lifelong superstructure can be built that will withstand all of the storms that we face in life.
Responding to the Word
God is speaking to us very clearly in these days about the matter of us being active in relation to the Word. Not just knowing the Bible – that’s not enough – but responding to the Word. In the parable above, both men came to Him and heard His words. It is important to our understanding of Scripture to know that when Jesus is contrasting two classes of people as He often does in the four gospels, He is rarely referring to what we usually think of as ‘sinners’ and ‘saints’, but He’s talking about ‘saints’ and ‘would-be-saints’. When He’s talking about wheat and tares, He’s not talking about Christian wheat and unregenerate tares per se, He’s talking about genuine wheat and bogus wheat. The contrast is not between the saint and the out-and-out sinner, the contrast is between the man of the kingdom and the man who presumes himself to be in the kingdom.
We will find the word of God coming to us as Christians sometimes, in some specific area of our life, and challenging us as to whether or not we are properly relating to that word. A man can come and hear the word, and memorize it, and know it, but if he doesn’t do it, he’s not building a sound foundation. A sound Christian life consists, not only of hearing the word, but seeing to it that it has been put into effective operation in the life of the believer. One can come to word of God, and hear it, but not do it.
The foundation determines the nature of the superstructure
The lives of most Christians don’t fall apart because of the wind that blows them over; they fall apart because the foundation won’t hold the building in the wind. A lot of the areas that we all come across sooner or later in our Christian lives that don’t line up with the word of God, are areas that we did not adequately deal with in our initial repentance. Your foundation determines your superstructure.
The man who’s going to build a good building, Jesus says, is the man who digs deep, and builds his house on the rock. The other man doesn’t dig deep at all; he builds his house on the earth. The man who goes down to the rock, goes down, as far as he can go, and he removes all the dirt between him and the Rock. By attending to those gracious things that God has offered us, we can respond to Him, and have our life redeemed, and restructured, so that from now on we can build a sound, solid life that will stand the test of the storm.
Nobody escapes the storm
Storms come into every life. The storm is inevitable. You are going to experience storms. It’s a principle of life. You’re going to be in storms if you’re not a Christian. You’re going to be in storms if you are. If you’re not a Christian, and you have no foundation in God, and all your life is built on is dirt, then it will not stand when the storm comes. But if your life has been cleaned up at its foundation, if the dirt has been removed, if you’ve got your life anchored to the Rock, and then you build up from that rock the whole superstructure of your life, the storm will come – the same storm that hits ten thousand other people, and sends their house reeling and crashing into the surf – that same storm will leave you windblown, and probably bending, but not broken. You will stand, because your foundation is strong.
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