Matthew 7: 24-27 New Revised Standard Version
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”
Sand & Stone Foundations
This whole discourse about houses built on sand versus stone pertains to the whole Sermon on the Mount. We would do well to say that it has to do with all the sayings of Christ from all the gospels with equal strength. The point is this: Jesus words are meant to be acted upon.
Hearing doesn’t mean merely hearing; it means hearing unto action, not hearing for the sake of hearing. And let’s be clear: the wrong kind of hearing is very popular. We can call it the aesthetic of leaning, and I, for one, am totally guilty of it. The aesthetic of learning is that pleasure we get from Bible study. Learning new things, discovering new insights, and savoring the “ahas” of understanding God’s Word.
The aesthetic of learning is the kind of spirituality we gain from our readings, or listening to Christian podcasts, or Christian radio—through all of it we feel our Christianity encouraged and bolstered—but this is mere aesthetics, the pleasure of artistic appreciation, and I’m saying that it is woefully insufficient. The words of Christ are not for our entertainment, but for our obedience.
In Omaha, when I was a junior higher, my family lived in a two-story house. Normal communication involved my sister Sally yelling out to me from the kitchen while I was blissfully minding my own business up in my room. “NO-WOOL!” she’d yell. I’d ignore her and listen to her calls get louder. “NOOO-WULLL!” Finally, when I relented and answered with an extremely put out “Whaaat!?” she would say, “Why didn’t you answer? What, are you deaf? I’m not calling you just to hear myself!” She was right—when she yelled, it was to get me to come downstairs.
Hearing that doesn’t result in obedience is the same thing as not hearing at all. No matter how much we study and learn, no matter how uplifted or anointed we may feel from a book, song, podcast, or Bible study; if it does not translate into action and behavior—obedience—it is all built on sand.
Jesus says the one who hears and obeys has their house on rock. And so we see that the commands of Christ must necessarily be central and reprioritize every aspect of our lives.
The Sermon on the Mount in Review
With that, I thought it might be good, here at the end of our walk-through of the Sermon on the Mount, to review Jesus’ teaching from the beginning.
We started with The Beatitudes, which didn’t so much give us commands as they did assure us of God’s love and favor for the humble, the meek, and the hopeless. This great love of God that comes to us in spite of our inability to deserve it serves as the foundation for our putting all trust and confidence in God.
Then we learned of salt and light, and of God’s expectation that we would be in the world to carry God’s blessings forward to all people. We are blessed in order to be a blessing.
Next, we heard of the new code of Christ. Christ, like the new Moses, delivers the new law to God’s people, but Jesus’ words are themselves God’s words, and those who would follow Jesus must abandon all other codes—especially the ones we elaborate and invent for ourselves. The new code is Christ Himself, and righteousness comes through Him alone.
After that, we hear Jesus’ command to love, and love in a way no one had ever imagined, for we are commanded to love our enemies and to pursue a life of constant forgiveness of others. This is the high bar of obedience: we are to love as God loves.
Next, Jesus tells us to keep our piety private, doing it for Him alone with no worldly audience. Let the hypocrites impress each other, virtue signalling in public, but we are not to be like them. We have a real relationship with God that we pursue for His eyes alone.
Jesus teaches us to pray humbly from the heart—“brief, intense, and frequent” in Luther’s words—and Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer—the perfect prayer to pray.
He directs us not to live for this world, but to live in this world serving the Kingdom of God. We are in the world, but not of the world, and our hopes are pinned to God’s reign and power becoming complete in all things.
We are therefore commanded not to worry about shallow things—food and clothes, but instead to live deeper lives trusting in God and seeking that kingdom of God.
We are commanded not to pass judgment on others, but to share God’s view of each, which is infinite love, and we are to allow God’s judgment to be sufficient. As for us, we are to love all and serve all.
Next he speaks of the narrow gate, which is Jesus Himself, and we recounted all the ways that we wrongly try to secure our own salvation instead of trust in faith.
And last week, we heard Jesus warn us against false prophets—those who serve themselves instead of the Lord in their work—which is a command to be discerning, thoughtful, and critical of all who use His name. Grapes are not gathered from thorns, nor figs from thistles, so we should not expect God’s Word to be represented by the selfish, the self-seeking, and certainly not the vile or the violent.
Hearing Means Obedience
All these things—and Jesus’ teachings elsewhere—are not there merely to be studied, or casually perused for our enjoyment, but these are words to be obeyed to the terror of our comforts. To be perfectly and obviously clear: we are meant to DO these things! If we don’t, then we haven’t heard, though we may think we have.
So how can we really know we’re hearing God’s Word? I would say when we feel disrupted, challenged—perhaps even terrified—because it is then that we recognize that we can’t avoid responding with who we are, what we have, in short, our entire lives.
I know I’m hearing God’s Word when inside, in all honesty, I’m thinking, “Oh, NO! This is going to mess up everything! All my plans, my cherished treasures, all the things I want or may want to do—ALL are to be jettisoned, and I am going to have to live a very different life starting right now!”
The Gospel of Jesus always reveals a fork in the road—one we approach at 100 miles per hour—we must choose to obey or ignore. The Word of God comforts us in our suffering and in our repentance, but it disturbs us in many of our comfort zones.
Karl Barth said it simply: “The Word of God is a two-edged sword that undercuts our every self-security.” That idea is a central theme of the Sermon on the Mount. We must end the idolatry of propping ourselves up with the crutches of churchianity, of trusting any earthly means of securing our heavenly salvation, and it means abandoning all the little security blankets that we cling to—because all these things keep us from the full, abundant life of trusting in Jesus and serving Him alone.
When I was a child learning to swim in swim class, I remember the swim coach teaching us to tread water, and that terrifying moment when we were commanded to push away from the side of the pool into deep water. No place for the feet to touch, no gutter to hang onto—just the risk and adventure of having to keep one’s head above the surface—this is like the call to faith. Anything that keeps us stuck to the side of the pool or in water so shallow our feet can touch—needs to abandoned or we will never truly swim.
The Deeper Water
We tend to think that following Jesus is supposed to make everything easier, and in some ways, it does. Like learning to swim, we develop confidence in our ability to traverse the open waters, but we’ll never get there if serve our fears and easy comforts.
The goal, it seems to me, is to find our comfort in the open waters—to desire that dependence upon God that makes it our pleasure to obey.
I think a lot of people have this idea about church in general—that it is a place to come where you can avoid the toughness and complexities of life. People who never go to church think we are one, big, comfort zone—designed only to feed people a kind of sedative as relief from the big, bad world outside. I can see where they might get that idea, but you and I both know they only see surface things. Church-going is, in fact, dangerous.
Writer Annie Dillard says it very well. Upon visiting a church in a new town, she says:
‘In general, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.’
She’s right. The church can be like a school of fish who think they’re squirrels. They spend all their time and energy trying to swim up onto the beach so that they might climb a tree and collect nuts. They can’t do it, and every time they make it up into water shallow enough get caught, it is a near disaster. Jesus calls fish to the other direction—into the deeper water. Jesus means to take us out to the deep waters where we will find that we were made to swim, and to swim at depths we can’t possibly imagine from the shore.