Speaker 1: Let yourself imagine with me for a minute because I want to tell you a story.
Speaker 1: It's the middle of the night and it's in an underground bunker just outside the Russian city of Moscow.
Speaker 1: The year is 1983, and in 1983 the Cold War was going on.
Speaker 1: And so this was the US and the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: They weren't actually shooting at each other, but there were a lot of tensions and it always felt like they were just on the edge of nuclear war and that one wrong move could were just on the edge of nuclear war and that one wrong move could push everything over the edge.
Speaker 1: And there's a Soviet officer and his name was Stanislav Petrov, and he was on duty and he was looking at these early warning systems and they were meant to tell the Soviet Union if the United States had fired a missile first.
Speaker 1: And so he's just watching these things, business as usual.
Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden these alarms start going off and bright red lights start to flash, and all of a sudden his screen showed that there had been five nuclear missiles launched from the United States and they were on their way to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: And the protocol here was clear he was supposed to report the attack immediately.
Speaker 1: And if he did more than likely, the Soviet Union's military would have launched a full-scale retaliation nuclear attack.
Speaker 1: Hundreds, thousands of missiles, millions of people, tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of people would die instantly.
Speaker 1: But he was wrestling with it because something didn't feel right.
Speaker 1: Why would there only be five missiles?
Speaker 1: Why would there not be more?
Speaker 1: If you're going to start this, you would have probably gone for the kill shot.
Speaker 1: And then why?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 1: Is this a glitch?
Speaker 1: Is it a false alarm?
Speaker 1: But all of the sudden, the weight of the world rested on this guy's shoulders because he had received information so important that it demanded a response, and that's a real story, by the way, that it demanded a response and that's a real story, by the way.
Speaker 1: And thankfully, obviously, he chose not to fire and it turned out that that alarm was triggered by the system catching the reflection of the sun off the clouds.
Speaker 1: But why do I tell you that tonight?
Speaker 1: It's not just a great story, but that's where we're at as we wrap up our Sermon on the Mount series, and we're going to be in Matthew, chapter 7, verses 24 through 27,.
Speaker 1: If you want to go ahead and flip there, if you have your Bible.
Speaker 1: Jesus has just told his disciples in this crowd and we've walked through it over the past few weeks, this whole semester about what life in the kingdom looks like and what it means to be one of his followers, to be one of his disciples.
Speaker 1: And so he ends this sermon, the same way that we see a lot of sermons today being ended with a call to respond that what he just told his disciples is so important that they have to do something with it.
Speaker 1: They have to respond.
Speaker 1: And the thing is, because it's so important, everyone who hears it responds.
Speaker 1: Even choosing to ignore it and move on is a response.
Speaker 1: And so he tells a parable to flesh that out and to help make an image.
Speaker 1: And with this parable he's going to say either you build your life on what I've just said or you ignore it and face the consequences.
Speaker 1: And he gives us a look at the consequences of either one of those decisions.
Speaker 1: And so, if you have your Bible, go ahead and flip open with me Matthew, chapter seven, 7, verse 24.
Speaker 1: It says and so Jesus closes this sermon with what we said earlier was a parable, and a parable was a story, kind of like we use an illustration Sometimes.
Speaker 1: It was meant to kind of actually intentionally confuse.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to get the point that Jesus was trying to make, you had to ask some questions.
Speaker 1: You kind of had to search for it, and that was the point he's trying to get.
Speaker 1: Hey, how bad, do you really want to know what I'm trying to tell you here?
Speaker 1: But in this one he's trying to illustrate a spiritual truth with an earthly image.
Speaker 1: How we do analogies, like I'm trying to explain something to you in a sermon, I say, hey, it's kind of like this.
Speaker 1: And so in this parable there's two different builders and each one is building a house, and the only difference is they choose a different foundation to build on.
Speaker 1: And so, in this parable, the house is symbolic of someone's life.
Speaker 1: Right, both of these builders have heard what Jesus just preached, they've heard his words, and they're choosing to build their life one way or another.
Speaker 1: The strong foundation is on Jesus and the sand is on everything else or anything else, and then there's the storm coming, or the storm that comes, and it's symbolic of all the trials, of the life, hardships, suffering, temptations, and so Jesus is then going to show us the results of each of those builders' efforts.
Speaker 1: So, that being said, we're going to dive into each of the two.
Speaker 1: The first one, if you follow along, is the wise builder.
Speaker 1: Jesus says the wise builder is someone who hears his words and then he puts them into practice.
Speaker 1: And this is the wise builder.
Speaker 1: Jesus says the wise builder is someone who hears his words and then he puts them into practice.
Speaker 1: And this is the person who hears the word of God, hears what Jesus has to say, and then he goes and he builds his life around it.
Speaker 1: And the imagery here is important because what Jesus is not doing is just telling them to modify their behavior.
Speaker 1: He's not trying to give his disciples a list of rules that, hey, if you follow these, you're going to turn out all right.
Speaker 1: Because if you think back to what we've been walking through past all of these weeks, sure, there's been some commands in there and Jesus has told his followers some specific things, but it's been so much more than that.
Speaker 1: He's been telling them how to view the world around them, how to view everything in it, about how to view their entire life.
Speaker 1: And so when he's saying to build your house on his teaching, he's calling you to live according to his view of the world.
Speaker 1: He's calling you to live according to the truth, capital T, truth, right, he's saying, hey, you need to build your life on my understanding, which, if God's understanding, and it means it's reality.
Speaker 1: You need to build your life on my understanding, which, if God's understanding and it means it's reality.
Speaker 1: You need to build your life seeing things the way that I see them, the way that I made them To view money as a resource to bless and use for others, rather than just a tool to make yourself more comfortable.
Speaker 1: To view relationships as a way to point others to Jesus and show Jesus to the world through love and mercy, rather than just finding somebody to use to complete you.
Speaker 1: Or to view work as a calling, joining God in cultivating the world and creating beautiful things and helping people and helping society and viewing that as a calling rather than just a necessary evil to make a check to pay the bills one day or to buy the things you wanna buy one day.
Speaker 1: To view conflict, when we argue, as an opportunity to show God's love and mercy rather than an opportunity to be right.
Speaker 1: And look, I know in the world that we live in, actually living that way and viewing those things sounds kind of like you know, idealistic, like too good to be true at best, and maybe for you, corny, at worst.
Speaker 1: But here's the deal.
Speaker 1: Time and time again, the Christian way of life has been proven to lead to flourishing.
Speaker 1: It's been proven to lead to life, and life to the fullest.
Speaker 1: Statistics even show it.
Speaker 1: The Barna Group found that practicing Christians are significantly more likely to say they are very satisfied with their life compared to the general population 61% to 43%.
Speaker 1: Prayer and scripture reading has been shown to reduce anxiety and increase peace.
Speaker 1: A Harvard study found that people who attend church weekly are 33% less likely to die of despair, suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism.
Speaker 1: Couples who attend church weekly have a 30% to 50% lower divorce rate than those who don't.
Speaker 1: And a study by the Journal of American Medical Association found that women who attended religious services more than once per week had a 33% lower risk of dying over a 16-year period.
Speaker 1: And so that's a lot of statistics.
Speaker 1: But the point being here is hey, even though it might sound foreign, even if you go down to the statistics, following Jesus and adopting his way of living and his way of existing in this world has led to flourishing, and I can testify.
Speaker 1: Y'all have heard a lot about how I had a long history of absolute dumpster fire relationships in high school and I was the common denominator and I tell that part a lot but I don't always tell this part.
Speaker 1: When I get to college I'm in a group called Stonehouse and this is men's discipleship group, where we meet once a week, we have mentors, one-on-ones, all that sort of stuff, and the first semester we take a class together called Foundations and in this class each week we could cover a different topic and one week we covered dating and we went through Ben Stewart's single dating, engaged, married.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that's what it was at the time, but it was, and so I go through that and I get absolutely wrecked.
Speaker 1: I realize that I've been doing so many different things wrong when it comes to relationships.
Speaker 1: I've been treating those girls like they owe me something, like they belong to me, like they need to complete me.
Speaker 1: I've been basically trying to play marriage, like all these jacked up things, and I really start to submit my view of relationships to God.
Speaker 1: I don't do things the way Garrett thinks about doing things anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do them the way God calls me to do them.
Speaker 1: And sure enough, the next person I meet is Christine, and you know, I'm not saying that if you read a book and go through a class, you're going to marry the next person you meet.
Speaker 1: But everything about our relationship was completely different.
Speaker 1: There was a peace, there was a joy, and now we're married and have two kids.
Speaker 1: And look, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I'm not telling you that if you live according to the Bible, that everything in your life is going to go perfect.
Speaker 1: Things get hard, the storm comes for each of these builders, life gets difficult.
Speaker 1: But I do believe that God has designed life and his design for life is good, even if sin has come in and twisted and warped some things.
Speaker 1: God knows how life is supposed to be lived, because he created it, and so when you live according to his word, you will generally see things fall into their proper order.
Speaker 1: God kind of knows what he's talking about when he talks about how to use your money, because he created the concept of money.
Speaker 1: He kind of knows what he's talking about when he says how to be married and how to have relationships, because he created marriage.
Speaker 1: He kind of knows what he's talking about when he says about how to have conflict, because he is the God of peace.
Speaker 1: He's the opposite of conflict.
Speaker 1: And so, guys, what I'm trying to say here is that God's design for living is not a bunch of rules to try and keep you from having fun.
Speaker 1: It is a way of life.
Speaker 1: It is life, true life that's created for you to find peace and joy and fulfillment, and when the storms come, you'll actually have a foundation to stand on.
Speaker 1: Not that things will always be easy, but you'll have a peace when you get that phone call, when you deal with that chronic injury or illness.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make those things go away, but you can look it in the face and say I have hope, knowing that this is not the end, this is not my identity.
Speaker 1: There's something on the other side of this, because of the God that I know, and you can stand on that, even in the storms of life.
Speaker 1: But, that being said, there's another builder in this story and if we think back to last week's message about the wide and the narrow path, this is the wide path.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more people who identify in this room with this second builder and that's the foolish builder.
Speaker 1: And Jesus says this is the person who hears his words and doesn't put them into practice.
Speaker 1: And see, the interesting thing is here, both of these builders hear the same words, they're in the same room, they get the same message, but they decide to do different things with it.
Speaker 1: This is the person who did nothing with it.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is the person who grew up in church, went to VBS, went to camp, had some experiences, maybe even went on a mission trip, but their response is not to build their life on Jesus.
Speaker 1: It's more of like the hey, yeah, that's cool and all, but like I'm good, like I'll go on Easter, I'll go when, like it seems fun enough and I don't really have any other plans, you know, I'll.
Speaker 1: You know, read my Bible.
Speaker 1: You know, if there's like the whole tag thing, like somebody tags me in a say, yeah, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, like I mentally acknowledge that God is real, but if you look into their life, there's no actual evidence that that's what they believe.
Speaker 1: It's just lip service.
Speaker 1: It's just an Instagram bio, it's just a cross necklace.
Speaker 1: There's no meat to it.
Speaker 1: And Jesus is trying to lovingly provide a warning here that if you build your life on anything else, you're going to be disappointed, right?
Speaker 1: If you try to live your life according to any other truth, it's going to let you down.
Speaker 1: A lot of you are taking tests right now.
Speaker 1: Who took a test today?
Speaker 1: Like a big test Star, I think AP English 4 was today, eocs, all the things.
Speaker 1: So imagine this, your wildest fantasy.
Speaker 1: You sit down and you're about to take that test, right, so you got your pencil out.
Speaker 1: Actually, everything's on computers today, right?
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: God bless your souls.
Speaker 1: That sounds awful.
Speaker 1: That's absolute torture.
Speaker 1: I would hate to do that.
Speaker 1: So you sit down at your computer, you're about to take the test and your teacher walks up and says hey, you know, I really want to see you do good on this test.
Speaker 1: Guys, are y'all paying attention back there that row?
Speaker 1: Cool, thanks, I really want to see you do good on this test, and so I'm going to give you the answer key.
Speaker 1: Here's the answers what would your response be?
Speaker 1: Like score.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: I can't believe it.
Speaker 1: I'm going to ace this test.
Speaker 1: Now imagine what if your response is like hey, thanks for that.
Speaker 1: Appreciate the answer key.
Speaker 1: Sure, you know what you're talking about, but kick rocks, right?
Speaker 1: I like my answers better.
Speaker 1: I don't really care what you give me or what you say.
Speaker 1: You know that might be the answer key, but I think I can do a better job of this, so I'm going to answer it my way.
Speaker 1: How do you think that would go?
Speaker 1: Terribly right?
Speaker 1: Horribly Big thumbs down and we laugh and we can think about just how stupid that would be to do that.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing If you have heard the word of God and decided to do nothing with it, you have done the exact same thing, because the reality is like we said earlier God designed the world and everything in it and we call it God's created order.
Speaker 1: It's a whole theological thing, but the main point is that we, as created beings, are meant to live under the authority of our creator, god, and that's not a harsh authority.
Speaker 1: That's an authority where we can actually find love and peace and joy and fulfillment, and we get to enjoy everything that he created for us to enjoy.
Speaker 1: As long as it is in its proper place.
Speaker 1: We get to enjoy things like money and relationships and all that sort of stuff work.
Speaker 1: They're meant to exist in a certain way and when they do, we get to enjoy it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like buying furniture from Ikea, except honestly, I truly believe that living according to the Christian life is more simple than putting together something from Ikea, because I hate putting together furniture, but it's like putting that together.
Speaker 1: There's instructions and there's a specific way to do it and there's a right side up and if you build it according to the instructions, it will go well generally.
Speaker 1: But if you try to build it your own way, it might hold for a minute, but ultimately it's going to break and collapse.
Speaker 1: And that's an incredibly important thing, because we live in a world that loves to say that truth is relative, and what that word relative means is that you can make it up.
Speaker 1: You decide what truth is.
Speaker 1: You decide how you want to live your life and you might not be into philosophy, but you've heard that on Netflix, social media, instagram.
Speaker 1: You do you Be true to yourself.
Speaker 1: Follow your heart, don't listen to the haters.
Speaker 1: That is all relativism.
Speaker 1: Whether you realize it or not, it's caked in there, it's baked in there, and the truth is that it's just not that way.
Speaker 1: That's not how things work and we know that.
Speaker 1: Pretend that.
Speaker 1: My truth is that I can fly.
Speaker 1: I can fly like a pretty butterfly, flap my wings and soar away.
Speaker 1: What happens?
Speaker 1: Yes, just like that, cooper.
Speaker 1: What happens if I climb up to the top of the Tower of Americas and jump off.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what my truth is.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hit the reality of gravity and the cement at the bottom.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing, guys you going to hit the reality of gravity and the cement at the bottom.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing, guys.
Speaker 1: You can try to live your life the way you want.
Speaker 1: You can try to do things how you want to do them.
Speaker 1: You can try to go about relationships the way you want to do it.
Speaker 1: You can try to use your money however you want to.
Speaker 1: You can try to climb the success ladder, regardless of how you treat the people around you, and you might make it for a little while, but I'm telling you it's not going to take you where you want it to.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that to be fire and brimstone.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that to be harsh or cruel.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that because I truly, in my DNA, in the heart of my heart, believe that to be true.
Speaker 1: And if that is true, that is the most loving thing that I can tell you To get off the hamster wheel, to get off the path that's going to lead you to destruction, to stop building your life on sand, because it's not going to stand.
Speaker 1: And so, in summary, there's two things that you can build your life on Jesus and literally anything else.
Speaker 1: Those are the categories, and if you build your life on Jesus, you will have life to the fullest, the good life.
Speaker 1: And if you build your life on anything else, eventually that's going to collapse.
Speaker 1: And so that leaves us tonight with the same question that Jesus left that crowd with that day what are you building your life on?
Speaker 1: Because the assumption that's underlying everything that's been said here tonight is that everybody is building their life on something, specifically a set of beliefs.
Speaker 1: Here's the reality what you believe will shape what you do and who you become.
Speaker 1: And I'm not just saying, like what you say you believe.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying what your parents told you to say when someone asks you what you believe, or what I told you to say when someone asks you what to believe, but what you truly believe in the deepest of your heart.
Speaker 1: If you were honest with yourself for a moment, if you stopped living that lie that you've been living so long that you're starting to believe about who you are, about the world that you live in, about how you're supposed to act, about how you're supposed to treat people.
Speaker 1: What do you believe, honestly, because the answer to that question is going to shape everything else in your life and that might be a really big question to wrestle with.
Speaker 1: So let me rephrase it in a way that I think is manageable and, if I can be honest, has wrecked me in recent weeks.
Speaker 1: Ask yourself this what do you think you need to be happy?
Speaker 1: What do you think you need to be happy?
Speaker 1: And don't give me the rehearsed Sunday school answer that you give everybody else.
Speaker 1: Be honest, what do you think you need to be happy?
Speaker 1: Because if we're real every one of us that's probably a little bit of a loaded question, I know.
Speaker 1: For me, I realized fairly recently that deep in my heart I had a need to be seen by people as impressive.
Speaker 1: I didn't really need to be impressive, I didn't even really need to be liked.
Speaker 1: I just needed people to think that I was smart or intelligent or a good preacher or a good pastor.
Speaker 1: And you know all that did for me.
Speaker 1: It suffocated me.
Speaker 1: It forced me to keep people who love me and care about me at arm's length.
Speaker 1: It caused me to hate myself every time I hit the reality of the fact that I don't have all the answers.
Speaker 1: I'm not that good.
Speaker 1: All the time I mess up, I make mistakes, and I know there's some of you sitting in those chairs tonight who feel the exact same way.
Speaker 1: Would you just let yourself be honest for the first time in your life?
Speaker 1: Maybe?
Speaker 1: Maybe for you it's not being liked.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's I need to have a relationship and I'll be happy.
Speaker 1: You're going to use every single person that you get into a relationship with.
Speaker 1: Desperation leads to exploitation every single time.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's I need to have a lot of money.
Speaker 1: You're going to be a slave to that job and it's going to steal you from your family.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's I need to be successful.
Speaker 1: You're never going to be successful enough.
Speaker 1: You're always going to view yourself as a failure.
Speaker 1: If you build your life on anything other than the person and the work of Jesus, it's sand.
Speaker 1: It's going to collapse.
Speaker 1: So my invitation to you tonight is what would it look like to build your life for the first time tonight?
Speaker 1: Maybe?
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a recommittal thing, I don't know, but what would it look like to build your life for the first time tonight?
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe it's a recommittal thing, I don't know, but what would it look like to genuinely build your life on the person of Jesus, on the truth that God created this world and everything in it.
Speaker 1: He created us to know him, to have a relationship with him.
Speaker 1: Yet we chose to go our own way, to try and be our own gods, to take authority.
Speaker 1: We disrupted the order and brought sin in, and sin colored and killed everything.
Speaker 1: Yet God, in his mercy, had a plan from even back in the garden to redeem us, to bring him to himself, to bless a family and, through that family, bless all the nations, and we're some of those nations.
Speaker 1: And so, ultimately, you skip past a whole lot of the Bible I don't have time to cover tonight.
Speaker 1: But he sends his son, jesus, who lives a perfect life.
Speaker 1: God in the flesh, the invisible, divine made visible, lived a perfect life, earned heaven, the one man to have actually earned heaven.
Speaker 1: Yet at the end of his life he was drugged, he was whipped, he was nailed to a cross where he suffocated to death, and it says that that wasn't on accident.
Speaker 1: In that moment he became our sin.
Speaker 1: That God punished him for our sin.
Speaker 1: That God has to punish sin because he's just.
Speaker 1: We want him to punish sin, but what happens when we're the sinners, and so he punished Jesus for that, so that God doesn't just sweep your sin under the rug or look the other way.
Speaker 1: He looks it in his face and he says I paid for it.
Speaker 1: And if you place your faith in that, you'll be saved, you'll be set free, you'll become his child, you'll have access to a heavenly father.
Speaker 1: You know how groundbreaking that is for us to try and wrap our minds around what it looks like to have a heavenly father who's perfect and loves us.
Speaker 1: I know that father language trips a lot of you guys up.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you it's real, even if it takes us a minute to get it.
Speaker 1: And now you have a hope and a future.
Speaker 1: And this is where the storm part comes in, because when things happen in life, when you lose a loved one, when you fail that test, when you don't make that team, when your family goes through hard things, there's more than just the present.
Speaker 1: There's a hope.
Speaker 1: There's something in the future, there's something coming.
Speaker 1: Every wrong will be made right, every tear will be wiped away, every illness and every broken body will be made right.
Speaker 1: Every tear will be wiped away, every illness and every broken body will be made whole, and I will see my creator, god, face to face, and everything will be right.
Speaker 1: Every sad thing will come untrue, and that's offered you tonight.