Hey, church.  How are you doing?  My name is Chris Freeman and I am the middle school pastor at Ginghamsburg.  Today Nick Cunningham, the high school pastor, and I both have the privilege of sharing a message with you, so please open your Bible to Matthew 7.  Today we’re coming to the conclusion of a several month-long study on the Sermon on the Mount.  We have gained some great wisdom and some great insight into how we can actually live the life we were intended to live in this series.  We are now at the grand finale of Jesus’ message.  In Matthew 7:24, Jesus tells us, “Everyone who hears his words and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  When the rain came and the storm blew and beat against that house, it didn’t fall because it was built on the rock.”  But then Jesus tells us, “That everyone who hears his words, and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who builds his house on the sand and when the rain came and the storm blew and beat against that house, it fell with a great crash.” When we read this passage, it seems to be pretty clear that there are two parts to what Jesus is saying.  The first part has to do with hearing his words and the second part has to do with putting them into practice.  But the one constant we see is that the storm is coming either way.  There’s no where we can go to escape that.  What we can do is make sure that we’re building our house on the rock so that when the rain and the storm does come, everything won’t come crashing down.  Here’s the good news.  I get to focus in on the first part, the part about hearing Jesus’ words, which I would consider being the fun part. Then, in a few minutes, Nick’s going to come up and share about putting those words into practice. 

I want to spend a little bit of time focusing in on hearing Jesus’ words, but when we read this passage it seems to be obvious that Jesus is talking more about just hearing his words.  At its roots, he is dealing with the issue of truth.  Jesus is essentially saying if we ever want to live our God-intended life, if we ever want to build our house on the rock, then we have to start by knowing, believing and trusting that these words are absolute truth and they’re worth building upon them.  So, all throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us this is more than just a good idea.  This is the way we were meant to live.  This is what it means to be truly human.  He’s telling us that his words must be our foundation.  But here’s the problem, most of us in this room, even those of us who call ourselves Christians, still struggle with some doubts.  We still find ourselves asking the question, “How do we know if that’s true, how do we know that this is the absolute best way to live?”  My Mom always told me when I was a little kid, don’t believe everything you hear.  I would say that even from a very early age we are all conditioned to doubt, and most often for good reason. 

I can remember when I was about four years old; my Dad went off to fight in the Persian-Gulf War. Right before he left, he asked me if there were anything that he could bring back for me. I told him, using my four-year-old reasoning skills, “Since you are going to a desert, I would love a camel. Please make sure to grab me a camel. That would be great. He went off to war, and the whole time he was over there he would make cassette tapes for me and my brother.  He would send them home, and my Mom would play them for us, which I thought was so awesome.  And on each one of these tapes, my dad always told me, “Son I’m working on bringing you back that camel.”  I got more and more excited as time went on. Finally the war ended, and my dad got to come home.  I can remember, we went to go pick him up at the airport and we were waiting for him to come walking down the terminal. As soon as he turned the corner and I saw him, I started to cry.  My dad came over, picked me up and asked me why I was crying. You would think the obvious answer was that I was crying tears of joy because my Dad came home from war.  But the reality was  I was crying because there wasn’t a large furry camel with him. So I asked him, “Where the heck is my camel?”  And without missing a beat, my Dad said, “Son, you wouldn’t believe it.  I got that camel and I flew him all the way home; but he was just so big we couldn’t get him off the plane.”  And he said, “But to make up for it, I got you this instead,” and he handed me this little toy camel.  The cool, kind of funny and little bit sad part about this story is, that it took me about seven or eight years before it finally hit me.  If my Dad had such a hard time getting that camel off that plane, how did he get him on the plane in the first place?  You hear what I’m saying.  We have good reason to doubt.  I mean, even my dad who loves me as much as anybody in the world told me something that wasn’t quite the truth. 

We find ourselves asking what is true and what isn’t, and that’s a good thing.  That’s a part of what makes us human.  So when Jesus tells us that these words are more than just a good suggestion, we are forced to question him too. To make matters worse, the stuff Jesus says isn’t so easy to swallow.  The Sermon on the Mount isn’t comfortable.  When Jesus tells us not only to love our neighbor but also to love our enemy, that’s not so easy to digest.   These words are powerful, challenging and life altering.  If we are ever going to live that way, then we must move from Jesus being an option to being the only option.  We must move from Jesus being a way, a truth, and a life to Jesus being the way, the truth and the life.  We must be absolutely convinced this is the best possible way to live.  We must believe that Jesus’ words are the only solid foundation for us to build on.  And that brings us back to the big question.  How do we know?  How do we know that these words are true?  Well, the best way to find out is to test it. 

The ancients used to say, “The proof is in the pudding.”  I can remember when I was in kindergarten; my teacher was going to have us work with paint for the very first time.  She was up in front of the class explaining that when you mix certain colors together, they make a new color.  She told us that when you take blue and mix it with yellow, it makes green.  I remember when I heard her say that, I thought she was nuts.  I just couldn’t reconcile this fact in my mind until she came over and put a plate on my desk with some blue and yellow paint on it and told me to have at it.  What happened next completely changed my understanding of truth, at least when it came to paint colors.  I took my finger and mixed those two paint colors together, and it really did make green. I thought that  was amazing.  I was so excited.  I wanted to stand up on my desk, hold my finger up in the air and yell, |”I created green.”  I still do that.  In fact, I just did that in my office the other day; I never grew out of that phase.  My point is this.  When I put my teacher’s words to the test, they proved to be true.  If we want to prove that Jesus’ words are true then we have to put them to the test.  I’ll be honest with you; one of the coolest things about student ministry is that we do this sort of thing all the time.  We have even created a sort of science lab where our students go and put Jesus’ words to the test.  It’s called Urban Plunge.  You’ve heard about it before.  Each week of Urban Plunge we send a different group of students into the city of Dayton where they eat, sleep and serve in the community.  One of the ways our students found themselves putting Jesus’ words to the test this summer was when we woke them up at 5:30 in the morning to go serve breakfast to the Target Dayton Homeless Ministry.  I don’t know if you’ve ever woken up a teenager up at 5:30 in the morning before, but it’s a little bit scary.  It’s also kind of funny.  They give you that look of death, and then they grumble and complain for the next ten or fifteen minutes about why they have to be up so early.  Our response came right out of the Sermon on the Mount, “We are putting Jesus’ words to the test.”  In Matthew 7 Jesus tells us, “Do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” If I’m going to eat breakfast when I’m hungry in the morning, that means I have to make sure I’m taking care of the hungry people around me too.  The amazing thing about this experience is that our students were begging us to let them come back again the next day, in spite of how they grumbled and complained that morning on the way there.  If you would ask our students now about that experience, they would not be able to stop talking about how awesome it was to do, something as simple as to serve a hot meal to a homeless person in need. 

When we put Jesus’ words to the test something starts to change.  The words start to become more than just a good idea.  Our students realized that the best possible way for them to live that morning out was by giving up their own selfish desires and choosing to do unto others as they would have them do unto us.  Here’s another example.  New Year’s Eve, just this last year, I was sitting around with a group of students; we were blowing up balloons for our New Year’s Eve party.  We were talking about how nobody keeps New Year’s resolutions.  So I challenged these students to actually spend a year hearing Jesus’ words by reading a chapter of the Bible every day.  They agreed to it, and I told them I was going to hold them to it.  One of the students named John came up to me a couple of months later, and he told me how he had been reading Jesus’ words and how they were affecting his life. He told me how he wanted to share this with his friend Evan.  So he started inviting his friend Evan to church, and when Evan heard about the challenge, he jumped in on it and started hearing about Jesus’ words too. He came up to me a couple weeks later, and he told me what was happening in his life.  He said that since he had been reading Jesus’ words the things he cared about started to change.  He started to love his family more.  He started treating his siblings better.  He started to care about kids at school that he used to completely ignore.  The list went on and on, but it didn’t stop there.  Evan told me that his family started to take notice.  They were so intrigued by what was happening to Evan, they came and started their own faith journey.  Evan also told me that even though his Dad wasn’t much of a Bible reader before, now he and his Dad are reading a chapter of the Bible together every night.  Do you see the effect that Jesus’ words can have on our lives?  Isn’t it obvious this is the foundation we have to build on?  I think most of us in this room would say yes. If we say yes, we are left with a choice.  Do we choose to hear Jesus’ words?  I mean really hear them or do we choose to walk away and say, “That was a great message; how about Applebee’s for lunch?”  It is so easy for us to give the illusion that we actually follow Jesus without ever allowing his words to penetrate our lives, without ever building our house on the rock.  Church, one of my greatest fears is that we would go through our entire Christian lives listening to Jesus’ words and never actually hearing them.  I’ll be honest with you; we can do that for a time.  We can go back to Applebee’s for awhile.  We can fake it for only so long. But, if we are not completely convinced of Jesus’ words, when the storm comes, everything will come crashing down. 

[Nick Cunningham] Chris is onto something.  This is some honest truth hearing the Sermon on the Mount but its like Chris said earlier; that’s not all of it.  You can’t stop there.  Jesus is offering us life-changing wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount. But the thing about wisdom is, it’s only as helpful as the extent to which you use it. Chris, you of all people should know that, right?         

If you didn’t know, Chris is actually training for the half marathon over at the Air Force base in September.  A half marathon means this guy is going to run 13 miles without stopping. Who does that?   Middle school pastors.  When Chris was starting to get into his training, he realized he was going to need to upgrade his running shoes.  So he went to the store and bought a fancy pair of kicks.  The lady there actually gave you some really good advice, didn’t she? 

Chris:  She did.

Nick: Tell the people what she said.

Chris:  She told me that if I’m going to wear these shoes to run in, I had better make sure to break them in really well before I go for a long run.

Nick:  You didn’t do that, did you?

Chris:  No, I did not.

Nick:  No, Chris being the excellent middle school pastor that he is decided to do things his way and immediately went out and ran 7 miles.  Now, I don’t know about you but I would classify that as a long distance.  Good advice is only as helpful as the extent to which we use it, right Chris?

Chris:  Yeah. 

Nick:  Chris wound up with huge blisters. Now, they’re not such fancy shoes any more, are they? 

The truth is Jesus isn’t just offering us some really good advice in the Sermon on the Mount.  He’s not some super-spiritual Dr. Phil making casual suggestions about how we should live.  This is God in the flesh; this is God with skin on.  He is showing us how the world really works.  He’s teaching us the deepest eternal truths, and he’s pointing us to what it means to be a human being.  And he finishes the greatest sermon ever preached with a parable that forces his listeners to wrestle with the question; so what?  What are you going to do about everything I just taught you?  Are you actually going to hear my words, put them into practice, build your house on the rock; or are you going to hear my words, do nothing about it and build your house on the sand?  Because in the end, there is a storm coming, and that storm will reveal the house’s foundation.  Jesus’ words are of absolutely no use to us if we do not put them into practice.  But it’s like that with a lot of things.  I used to be notorious for buying books and never reading them.  I’ve gotten better about this, but I used to hear people talking about an incredible book, how it changed their life and all the insight they got out of it so I would get excited.  I would buy the book, and the book would sit on the bookshelf and collect dust.  That book and all its insight and wisdom would do me absolutely no good if I didn’t read the book.  You don’t get smarter from having the book.  You actually have to read it.  What about exercise equipment?  How many people have good intentions about getting healthy and so they buy this really expensive piece of equipment, like a Bo-Flex, only to watch the Bo-Flex turn into a really expensive clothes hanger?  You don’t get healthy from just having the Bo-Flex.  You have to actually use the Bo-Flex.  This is what Jesus is saying in this parable in the Sermon on the Mount.  “My words are of no use to you if you don’t actually put them into practice, if you don’t actually build your life on the rock.”  Here’s God’s truth for us today.  The reality of us living the life, the reality of us experiencing all that God has for us, encountering life the way it was always meant to be lived is directly related to our commitment to follow Jesus as Lord.  I’m going to say that again, so you can write it down.  See the reality of us living the life is directly related to our commitment to follow Jesus as Lord.  Simply put, if you want to live the life, then you’ve got to live the life. 

If we are going to get anywhere today then we have to be brutally honest with ourselves.  The truth is that many of us in this room, including myself, are so good at hearing what Jesus has to say and recognizing that it’s true.  We are so good at realizing that the rock is the right place to build the house, but we don’t build the house there.  We build the house in the sand.  We are so quick to agree with Jesus, to realize what he is saying is true, but for whatever reason we fail to put it into practice.  And then the all too familiar storms come, the disappointment, the frustrations, and the betrayals.  They hit us like a ton of bricks, and everything falls apart.  We know the rock is the right place to build the house, but we keep trying the sand.  I’m not sure it’s possible to hear this message and not be convicted, because what Jesus is saying at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in this parable cuts to the heart of one of the biggest issues in American Christianity.  Somehow, the American idea of salvation, of what it means to follow Jesus Christ, of what it means to follow him as Lord and Savior, has somehow been reduced to a mere intellectual decision instead of a life-changing relationship.  Somehow, it’s been reduced to this decision you make with your mind and then it stays up there.  It never spills over into how we live.  Sometimes, being a Christian in America is as easy as checking a box on a job application.  I had the hardest time with this coming out of high school, going into collage and wrestling with the faith that I’ve grown up with my whole life.  Because to me it just sounded like, ok you want to be a Christian, here’s what you do: say this prayer, make this decision and then when you die you’ll go to heaven instead of hell.  That just left so many unanswered questions for me.  What about this life?   What about right now?  What does Jesus have to say about the time in between?  Somehow our idea of salvation has been reduced to this intellectual decision instead of this life-changing relationship.  There’s a profession of faith, which is necessary and great, but there’s usually no reality to it.  There is no correlation between what we say we believe and how we live our lives.

I can honestly say the majority of the unfriendly hand gestures - the one finger salutes - I’ve had pointed in my direction while driving my car have been from people with a fish on the back of their car.  What about Facebook?  How many profiles go on and on and on about Jesus Christ but then when you look at the photo albums and the status updates, they tell a completely different story?  What about people who profess Jesus Christ but are more than okay with every single relationship in their life being an absolute mess?  What about people who can quote scripture after scripture, they never miss a church service and have 1,500 Christian t-shirts, but they treat everybody like crap? Don’t they care about what’s wrong with the world? Or what about the fact that Jesus Christ teaches us to be radically generous, but the average church attendee tithes less than 2% of their income?  It doesn’t make any sense?  Our idea of salvation, of what it means to follow Jesus Christ, has been reduced to this mere intellectual decision, something that stays in our heads.  It never spills out over here so there is this dichotomy between what we say we believe and how we live our lives.  It’s why Jesus says in Luke,” Why do you call me Lord, and not do what I say?”  It doesn’t make any sense to claim Jesus as Lord but not submit our lives to him.  It’s kind of like two people deciding to get married.  They have a wedding  ceremony, profess their love to one another, say their vows and then that night, they start dating other people.  And they live like they are single.  Listen to me!  Salvation, following Jesus Christ, is not just an intellectual decision.  It starts here, but it’s a life-changing relationship.  Am I the only hypocrite in the room?  I’m really good at recognizing what’s wrong but then not doing anything about it.  It’s like in June; we took the high school students to Jamaica for a week-long mission trip.  One morning, I decided because I was in Jamaica, I’m going to get up early, I’m going to go down to the beach and I’m going to have me some one-on-one time with God.  It was beautiful. There were these limestone cliffs all around me.  There were waves crashing against the rocks and the water was aqua clear blue.  How could you not feel close to God there?  But as I started to look around, I noticed all kinds trash. There was human trash all over the beach, and  it just broke my heart.  If there was one place on this earth where there shouldn’t be garbage, it was right there.  And I’m thinking, “This is awful, somebody should do something about this.”  And  what did I do?  I went up to the cafeteria and got breakfast.

I’m so tired of recognizing the areas of my life that need to change, the areas of my life where I have built my house on the sand.  I’m tired of coming back to the same piles of trash, repeating the same mistakes over and over again.  I’m tired of recognizing what’s wrong with the world and then not doing anything about it.  I want to see things change, and I want to change. The only way that’s going to happen is if I not only hear Jesus but I actually take his words and put them into practice.  If I not only recognize the rock is the right place to build the house but I build the house on the rock, if I put my entire weight on Jesus Christ.  That’s the only way it’s going to happen.  See, our idea of salvation, what it means to follow Jesus Christ is not the biblical idea of salvation.  The biblical idea of salvation is a life-changing relationship.  It’s something you start based on a decision, but it doesn’t stop there.  It spills over into how you live your life.  It’s life with God.  It’s a commitment not only to hear Jesus but to actually do what he says.  It’s a commitment to live the life.  It’s like Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “The kingdom of God isn’t a matter of talk but of power.”  In other words, don’t just recognize that the rock is the right place to build the house.  Build the house on the rock! 

This is exactly what student ministry is all about here at Ginghamsburg church.  We are about exposing our students to the depth and the truth of what it means to follow Jesus Christ.  We say all the time, we’re not your average youth group.  We’re not about pizza parties and lock-ins.  Now believe me, we have our fair share fun.  Last weekend we made a 60 foot slip and slide and had an egg fight.  Who doesn’t think that’s fun?  But, why do you think so many high school students drop out of the church when they get to college?  If all we have done is expose them to pizza parties and lock-ins, what have we offered them that they can’t find somewhere else?  Where can’t you find a pizza party or a lock-in in college?  We want to expose our students to what only Jesus Christ has to offer.  And we do that through things like cell group communities, through corporate worship at Riot and Gathering, through actually making a difference in the community through In Town and Unban Plunge.  Bottom line is, parents, pick up a class guide.  Get your students involved.  You do not want them to miss out on what God is doing here.  And you know what else, parents?  We need you involved too.  Please don’t take a passive role in this.  We need you, we want you with us.  I want to take a second right now - young men, men period, we need you.  We are in desperate need for some good men who actually care about teenagers.  I know you’re busy, but guess what? We are all busy.  This generation of young men desperately needs positive male role models.  So please  serve with us.  We can find plenty of opportunities for you.  Women, we love having you serve too.  Please come serve with us.  If you want to get involved, talk to Chris and me after the celebration. 

Jesus finishes the parable with an ominous warning.  There is a storm coming.  But we knew that, didn’t we?  We are pretty familiar with those, with the disappointments, the failures, the frustrations, the betrayals.  We know about those.  But here’s the thing.  The storm is what reveals the house’s foundation.  Those two houses looked identical until the storm came.  How we respond to these difficulties, trials and frustrations reveal what we have built our lives upon.

So, what do you do when someone eats your left-overs, out of the refrigerator?  Don’t act like that’s not a big deal.  That drives me nuts, especially when my name is clearly written on the to-go box.  That’s my chocolate cake. Or what do you do when a moron cuts you off on the highway?  It usually depends on if my wife is in the car or not.  Or what do you do when you find out they have been talking about you behind your back?  How do you respond then?  What do you do when they betray you, what happens?  What happens when there’s a break in the relationship?  What’s your response to that?  What happens when you lose the job, when the income is suddenly gone, what do you do then?  How do you respond when the doctor comes and delivers news you didn’t necessarily want to hear?  What’s your response?  The way we respond to these things reveals what we have built our lives upon.

 I want to tell you about a student.  I’ve had the privilege of serving as Anna’s youth pastor for two years now.  She recently graduated.  She is in her freshman year at college in Dayton.  This girl is such a solid example of someone who not only hears Jesus’ words but actually puts them into practice.  This is such an example of someone who has built their life on the rock, and believe me this young girl has faced her fair share of storms.  It all started when she was in middle school.  She was diagnosed with scoliosis.  She had two curves in her back and had to wear a back brace for 11 months.  Now you can imagine how hard this would be for a middle school student, to go to school every day with a back brace on.  She said it wreaked havoc on her self confidence.   A month after she got out of her back brace, her Mother was diagnosed with cancer.  She said it was like a punch in the gut.  She was terrified: she didn’t know what to expect next.  Well, thankfully after some treatment, her Mother’s cancer went into remission.  Storms didn’t stop there.  It wasn’t long after that she found out her parents were actually separating, which we know is so difficult for a teenager to go through.  But here’s the thing, throughout all these storms, these difficulties in her life, Anna never lost touch with her foundation.  She never let go of her faith.  And I asked her, “How did your faith serve as a foundation for you through these difficult times?”  And she said, “You know what, it’s the one thing I could count on.  It’s the one thing that never changed.  It’s the one thing that brought me peace.”  And then she said something that I thought was so profound, especially coming from a college freshman.  She said, “You know what, after a while I stopped seeing these storms as a reason to feel sorry for myself, and I started to feel a sense of honor because God obviously thought I was strong enough.”  Anna is the first to admit her life has not been a walk in the park but she has this strange gratitude for these difficulties in her life because she knows that God has made her a stronger person through them.  But she also has this up close personal understanding of how big God is. 

If we take this very seriously, if we get this right, if we actually build our lives on the rock, if we not only hear Jesus but actually put his words into practice, if we place our entire life upon him, then guess what?  When the storm comes, and believe me it’s coming, the house won’t fall.  In fact, if we build our lives on the rock, when the storm does come, it moves from being a destructive force to just being an illustration for how big God is, for how strong our foundation is.  See the reality of us living the life is directly related to our commitment to follow Jesus as Lord.  When you actually start that relationship with Jesus Christ, when you actually enter into that relationship you submit to him as your Lord, God spares no expense.  Jesus Christ died for your sins, for your sins.  Not only that, but he was resurrected from the dead granting you personal victory over your own sin and personal victory over death.  But not only that, God actually gives us his Holy Spirit to come dwell inside of us, to push us on to perfection, to mold us into the likeness of his Son.  How can this not change the way we live?  Christianity is not just an intellectual decision.  It’s a very practical faith.  It’s supposed to change the way we live.  Do you not see how close we are?  What hasn’t God done in order for us to be able to live this life?  The life is right there.  It’s right in front of us.  It’s at our fingertips.  But it’s lived one decision at a time, to not only hear Jesus but to actually do what he says, to actually build our lives on the rock. 

Here’s what I want you to do.  When you get home, I want you to read back through the Sermon on the Mount.  You can find it in Matthew 5-7.  I want you to commit to reading back through these words, and then I want you to pray, to invite the Holy Spirit to come and convict you of the areas of your life where the stuff Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount is just an idea.  It’s just some fancy idea.  That yes, you like it but it’s not a reality.  Pray for the Holy Spirit to come and convict you.  Maybe there’s someone you haven’t forgiven.  Maybe there is somebody you really enjoy hating.  Pray for the Holy Spirit to convict you. On the back on your message map, we came up with some reflection questions to help you.  So when you go home, please commit to doing this.  But you know what?  I can imagine there are some people in this room right now who have never actually made that decision.  That relationship hasn’t started yet.  You know what I say?  Why not today?  Why not right now?  The life is right there, but the reality of you living the life is directly to your commitment to follow Jesus Christ as Lord.  I’m going to pray, and if you’ve never started that relationship, if you’ve never made that decision, then do it right now.  It’s a simple as you saying, I need you, Jesus.  I want this to happen, I want my life on the rock.  Let’s pray.

God, we thank You so much for being concerned with this life.  Thank You not only for the promise of eternal life, of resurrection, but thank You so much for the promise of abundant life right here, right now.  Lord, I pray that right now Your Spirit lays thick over these people.  Lord, convict us of the areas of our lives that need to change.  Areas, Lord, where Your words are just an idea, not a reality.  I pray for anybody in this room who has not given his/her life to You, who hasn’t started this relationship, I pray right now that happens.  We pray for drastic life change.  We don’t want to be a church that just talks about how great You are.  We want to be a church that shows people how great You are.  So, Father, use us.  We love You so much.  We give You all praise and glory in Jesus’ name.  Amen!