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We’ve all sensed it—a choice that seemed perfect in the moment, but leaves us listing further down the road. Matthew 7:24–27 presents two builders, two houses, nearly identical except for what lies beneath, and asks which foundation will hold when the rains come.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the Leaning Tower of Pisa to illustrate how a weak foundation creates ongoing, compounding problems. What “foundations” in your own life might need examination? Where are you tempted to build on “soft soil” because it feels easier or more promising in the moment?
Jesus says we need to “exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees” to enter the kingdom of heaven, yet the pastor emphasizes that none of us will get this completely right in this lifetime. How does understanding this tension—between the impossibility of perfect righteousness and the call to genuine change—affect the way you approach your faith?
The sermon mentions “whitewashing”—covering cracks in a wall with plaster to hide its weakness. Where do you see yourself (or the church) tempted to layer God’s Word over sins or compromises we’re unwilling to address, rather than letting Him rebuild the foundation?
The pastor contrasts modern concrete (which cracks and deteriorates) with Roman concrete (which self-heals because of volcanic minerals), then says our lives need “crucifixion concrete”—the healing power that comes through Christ’s sacrifice. What does it practically look like to build on that foundation rather than your own strength or worldly success?
The sermon challenges: “What about the change?” If someone who knows you well looked at your life over the past year, what evidence would they see that you’re genuinely following Jesus’s blueprint—rather than just adding Christian elements to a foundation built on the world’s values?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
If you recall, all the way back at the beginning of meeting in person—so not all of you have been able to be here for all of it, and that’s a good thing—we as a church have been praying for you before anyone was sitting in these chairs and continue to pray for those who will come who aren’t yet here. But for those who were here that first night or you’ve gone back and watched our first night, you know that we began the very first in-person sermon series in Matthew chapter 5, which is the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed like a good place to go. What could be better if we’re going to start thinking about what it means to be as a church than to go to the sermon that we have from Jesus, the most famous sermon from Jesus, the most complete one. We have three chapters of Jesus’ preaching. And think about what he says the kingdom of God looks like. Because we’re the church, we’re called to bring that kingdom into this world. And if that is the case, then to look at Jesus and what he has to say about that is to start to understand how we ought to be the church.
And so a year and a half or so ago, we started, we went through Matthew chapter 5, then we took a break, then we came back to Matthew chapter 6 later last year, about this time last year. Went through the additional teaching that we find in that part of the Sermon on the Mount. And then now in this last few weeks, really basically through the fall up to this point, we went into Matthew chapter 7 and we started to think about, well, how does Jesus wrap that up? And he’s been challenging us in all sorts of different ways, challenging us to think about sort of our natural inclinations and how we interact with people and how we proclaim God’s kingdom or try to, and what we’re actually called to do. How do we naturally interact with God and what are we called to do? Because the thing is that we can easily slip into all sorts of different patterns that are unhelpful, that ultimately are not beneficial to ourselves, and yet they seem pretty good in the moment.
And so as we’ve been doing this last series, Blueprint Church, thinking about the blueprint for what a church should look like and how we’re watching here at Little Hills God building a church, what is he calling us to do? And as we wrap that up tonight, as we conclude this series that’s gotten us through this first portion of being in a church that meets in person, what is Jesus going to challenge us with? You see, a couple weeks ago we looked at, and Jesus challenged us to compare what people say and what they do. And to think about false teachers, for example, or people who do great works. We looked at last week—maybe they do miracles, they heal people—but are they actually doing the works of the Father? And we say, ah, okay, so people who are prophets, people who are spectacular miracle workers, people who claim to be teachers, we need to make sure that they’re in accord with God’s will.
But if I’m just going to listen to them, I’m off the hook, right? What Jesus wants us to know tonight is that we’re not off the hook, that all of us are challenged. Are we going to be responsible? Are we going to take up the responsibility that he is challenging us to, to actually live according to his blueprint? That sounds really easy to do and it’s very, very hard to do, but he’s challenging us to think about that. Because our natural choices often seem promising in the moment.
I was reading about a tower, a beautiful tower, a tower that’s still standing today, incidentally. This beautiful, tall building that was built almost a thousand years ago. It was built in the 12th century, or they began to build it in the 12th century, this beautiful tower. And so it was designed, so long ago people can’t even agree on necessarily who came up with the original plan. It took 199 years to build. So whomever it was that came up with the idea to build it didn’t get to see it to completion, but they kept building it, and at first it seemed really good. All this ornate stonework and so on, it’s beautiful, and they start building it up, they go up several stories tall, and then it received what would be the thing that happened to it that gave it its name. It became the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
And yes, there it is, it sort of looks like it’s peeking out, doesn’t it? Like it’s trying to photobomb the other building there, “Hey, I’m still here!” But it’s leaning, and over time it started to lean more and more. Why did it start to lean? Because of two factors. First, whoever planned it initially didn’t build a deep enough foundation. I think it only goes like three meters into the ground. So you’re talking this massive tower that only has a foundation that isn’t even as tall as a lot of buildings that are one story tall today. It doesn’t have a big enough foundation. The other problem, though, is they built it on soft soil, the kind of soil that will sink. And so it is that you have this tower that for years has been listing. And you might say, “Wow, wow, but look at how it was built, it’s still there.” And yet the problem was, and they realized this over time, it was continuing to tilt and tilt and tilt, and at some point it was going to topple. And so plans had to be hatched. How are we going to keep the leaning tower from leaning too far? So that the very reason that we know about it all around the world today wouldn’t be also the reason why it met its untimely demise.
Thankfully, it’s still there. And the current remediation they’ve done, they’ve done all these different things, put lead weights on it and tied cables to it, poured concrete underneath it. They’ve done all this stuff. Thankfully, after doing all that, it looks like we might be able to enjoy it for a few hundred more years. Some people were saying 300, some were saying 200. However, the one thing that’s very clear is that even after all that effort, that initial bad choice to build it without a good enough foundation and to build it in soil that couldn’t support that foundation means that it’s always a ticking time bomb. Even though it’s staying put at the moment, it won’t forever.
Jesus wants us to think about the towers that we’re building in our lives. And as we choose to follow him, we pick up some of the things and we get these beautiful, ornate pieces, this carved stonework, and we start putting it onto our lives and it looks pretty good. And he says, “But are you thinking about where you’re actually building your life? Because you can put a lot of pretty stuff on it and you can go up several stories into your life where things are coming together and it looks like it’s coming together, but is it going to start to list?” And too often we don’t realize it’s starting to list until we are listing, and then we think, “Now what?”
Well, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, as we continue to think about the blueprint of a church and we continue to think of where God wants us as a church, let’s be challenged to think about the foundation we’re building this church on and each of us is building our lives on.
As we do that, let’s go ahead and come before God in prayer.
Father, it’s so hard for us to know what we’re even doing. We read your Word, we want to apply it, then we get confused, then we run into challenges trying to do it. We think we have it all solved, we come up with our own way of working around the problem, and yet we continue to list.
Lord, as we read these words tonight from your Son, we pray that you would guide us, that we would choose the firm foundation, the one that will stand through everything that will come, that we might stand firm for you, for your glory. Pray this in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
We need to be awakened. That’s what we’re asking God to do, and that’s what His Word here is doing for us. We need to be awakened from our comfortable sinking. Because I would imagine even as that tower started to sink, they didn’t realize at first it was sinking. It had to get to a certain point before they even noticed it, and too often in our lives we have to be leaning pretty far before we realize, “Whoa, wait a second, I really shouldn’t do that too much or I’m going to topple over.” I didn’t even realize I was going and now I’m on the floor.
Let’s take a look at Matthew chapter 7, verses 24 to 27.
Jesus says, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Great was the fall of it. Isn’t that interesting? You have two houses, and by every indication that we have, those two houses are built about the same, except how they started. What did they found their strength on?
We need to understand is that Jesus is calling us to a life of service, a service to his kingdom, a service to do his work, and to do it both when it’s comfortable and it’s joyful and we’re celebrating together, like we’re singing songs together tonight and it feels good to be together with the body of Christ and we’re singing it, and also to do it when it’s not comfortable, when we realize, “Wait, the ground that I just purchased to build my life house is not good soil for a foundation, and I need to reconfigure, I need to replan things.” That’s uncomfortable, but Jesus calls us to that because if we keep building, we’re just going to keep tilting further and further. And being a disciple of Jesus, truly being a disciple—not being someone who does some of his works like the people we were talking about last week who say, “Didn’t I prophesy in your name? Didn’t I do these things? So how can you be saying that you don’t know me, Lord?” Not like those people, but to actually be a disciple of Jesus means to turn and to live as Jesus has called us throughout our lives.
When we think about the Sermon on the Mount, everything we’ve looked through, and that’s why I wanted to kind of just jog our memories and think about what we’ve looked at over these past couple of years, everything that Jesus has been talking about is a portion of how we live that. Called to having a heavenly focus. I mentioned last week on Steadfast that I have a hard time sometimes with that. I get really focused on what’s going on in the world. I really love following the news, and so suddenly I’m very much earthly focused. I’m not thinking about where God’s taking us. I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow the news. I’m not saying we shouldn’t know what’s going on. But where’s our focus?
We’re called to a life of kindness and mercy, of forgiveness, a life where we’re eager to care about the people around us, to show the kind of love that God shows to us. A life that flees from anger. A life that flees from seeking what’s good for us and not what’s good for others. We’re called to purity in our lives.
I remember last year, Jim talked about this shelf. Remember that illustration? It was a great illustration of a shelf, and sometimes we know those things. We shouldn’t pull off that shelf, but we keep pulling off. Are we being chased in whatever station of life we’re in, whether we’re single or married? What are we allowing our eyes to see? What are we choosing to watch? What are we putting ourselves into situationally? Are we choosing to follow God’s good, moral calling for our lives? Our society doesn’t want us to, but keeps calling us to other routes. But what are we doing?
Are we coming to everything that we do with humility? It’s easy not to have humility. It’s easy to find ways to build ourselves up. Even if we beat ourselves up, we can have so much false humility. We talk about how we’re not very good at things, or we talk about the things we’re struggling with so that people will pat us on the back and really put us in the station we think we should be in. Are we doing that?
How are we approaching prayer? Are we approaching prayer where we’re coming to God with the sense that, “God, I am doing the things that you’ve called me to, and so now God bless me unlike those other folks?” Are we coming to God and saying, “Father, I can’t get … We’ve been going through this list. I already know all kinds of things I messed up, and God, I don’t think I should even be here, but I know I should because you have called me. You’ve called me as your son or your daughter, and you love me, and that’s why I’m here, not because of how great I am, because of how great you are.”
We saw right in the center of the Sermon on the Mount, as Jesus talked about the Lord’s prayer, and he talked about how we approach our Heavenly Father. We approach him as Father. We understand that’s why we’re coming to him, not because we’re great, not because we have everything figured out, but because he loves us.
That’s a lot that I’ve just listed out, and I started—I thought, I’m going to mention every single key word from every single sermon we’ve looked at in this series, and I realized, well, then I really wouldn’t say anything else in this sermon tonight because there’s so much that we’ve covered, but that kind of sums it up if you think about it, and I encourage you, we all should go back to the Sermon on the Mount on a regular basis and say, “God, help me to see the places where I am falling short on this,” because here’s the thing: I think we all know if we really allow ourselves to reflect, none of us are getting this right. Not entirely.
Jesus talked about how if we didn’t exceed the righteousness of Pharisees, who were the most righteous people that anyone at that time could have been looking around and looked to because they knew all the laws, and they did all this stuff according to the law, and they created new laws so they wouldn’t break the existing laws, and so on. If they didn’t exceed the righteousness of those people, they couldn’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
And in that, Jesus is calling us right to that point that we come to our Heavenly Father and say, “Father, I need your help. I need your help for provision. I need your help for forgiveness of my sins. I need you to help me to forgive others. I need you, God.” And in that, we get the starting point of all these other things.
How am I going to live a life of humility? I’m going to live a life of humility by recognizing that the only reason I’m here at all, and the only reason I can do anything good at all, is because God’s working in me.
How am I going to be kind to others? How am I going to live in purity? How am I going to keep my eyes focused on Heaven? How am I going to do all these things? I can’t do it on my own. I’m going to do it because God, even though He, in His righteousness, should just wipe me off the face of the earth, He instead chooses to show me His love.
I was thinking about an old contemporary Christian song. It feels weird to even say it’s old. It still feels sort of like it shouldn’t be. I remember when the CD came out, it said, “Listen to what’s new.” It was from Steven Curtis Chapman. It was on his album, Speechless, and the song was called “The Change.” And part of it goes, “What about the change? What about the difference?” And he’s just sung about all the things he has. He has the Jesus bracelet on, and he has the Jesus shirt on, and he has all this stuff, but what about the change? Does his life look different?
I think that’s a question we should ask ourselves continually in life, because here’s the thing that we know: while we are living and breathing in this lifetime, we should be able to see change. Because the moment that we became a Christian, we didn’t get everything right.
And if we had someone here who was a Christian for all of his or her life, and was now 95 years old, and we went to that person, and we had a genuine saint here, someone who had been reflecting for more decades than any of us have been alive on what it means to follow Jesus, I truly believe that person would say, and I still haven’t gotten it all right. Because if we are really reflecting on what God’s called us to do, that’s what we’re going to see, and we’re not going to get there in this lifetime.
But that can’t be an excuse to stop changing, and too often that’s what it becomes. We say the Sermon on the Mount, and rightly so, theologians have said over and over again, coming up to the Reformation next week, Martin Luther pointed this out, that this is God’s hammer, it smacks us over the head, and we realize, “Wait a second, I am so unworthy of God’s grace.” Luther lived in a time where a lot of people thought they could become worthy of God’s grace, and Luther read words like this and realized, “No, no, there’s no way I can,” and he eventually realized there’s no way anyone can.
And so we can stop there, we can say, “Oh, okay, well, if I can’t do this, that’s great, this is an impossible standard, I’ll just say, God, help me out,” and then I can just take my Bible, I can close it, and I’m good. Jesus gave it to us for more than just that, yes, he gave it to us to help us to see how we fall short, but he also gave it to us because it matters. He doesn’t want us to list, and yet every day we choose those places where we are going to start building more and more of our life on soft soil.
And the world calls us into, the world says, “It’ll be so much easier this way, it’ll be so much happier this way, it’ll be so much more comfortable this way, it’ll be, it’s impossible any other way, you can’t afford the land that has a nice, good, solid ground to build on, just live with the soft soil that you’ve been given.”
And we walk out into it, and it’s maybe a dry day, and you say, “Feels pretty solid. I think this could work.” And so we say, “Well, you know, God said I should, I needed rocky soil, but this soil feels—let me get a shovel, it’s really hard, I think this is solid enough, it will do.” So we start building.
Say, “Yeah, some change would be good, I can’t get all the change that God wants me to have.” And for a while, it works, but it doesn’t keep working. And what God is saying is, you may not realize now why it’s going to be that you’re going to sink here, but you need to understand that you are going to sink here.
And the one thing that we can say that is true is that God’s word is true and is faithful from cover to cover. Everything that we find in here is true and will not become outdated.
Yesterday, my dad and I decided to tackle a project. We were going to install a microwave. And I’m happy to report, I’m not going to spoil the story, we did install a microwave. Over the range, thank you, thank you very much, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did good, yeah, really good. My mom joked, as we wrapped up, when you could actually start joking again, it was actually maybe somewhat amusing again, that maybe we should have filmed the whole thing so that all those easy YouTube how-to guides that you can watch and it looks so easy, we could have put the seven-hour edition up. Because this microwave was delivered at 1:30, and I believe it finally was turned on at 8:30.
You know, microwaves are surprisingly heavy. I think it’s 85 pounds, something like that.
Anyway, so it’s an over-the-range microwave, and it has this little clip that goes on the wall. Actually, so Jeff and his son-in-law, Mike, and I, we put this one in over here a few months ago. It seemed pretty easy. Everything was straightforward. And here’s the thing that you appreciate about a good foundation. These cabinets were well-situated for a microwave to be installed. They weren’t recessed. It was just, it went in right, you put the template on, you drill the holes, boom, done. Not the case on the project yesterday.
You see the cabinet came down, and so you had to put these filler blocks in. And then we, some of them were already in from the previous microwave, so we put the template over that and tried to get it all measured out, and everything seemed to measure out. We put a couple more filler blocks in because it needed more screws. Pick up this microwave and heft it up there, get it, it gets on this little clip on the wall, this 80-pound thing that if it comes crashing down, not only will you not have a microwave, you won’t have a stove either. Get it up there, push it up, and so then I climbed up on a chair, and my mom’s holding one side, my dad’s holding the other side, I’m trying to go down from the top and screw in the screws.
I get one screw in, ah, this is satisfying, and I screw in, second screw in, clunk, I’m just hitting the metal top of the microwave on the third screw. I’ll do the fourth screw, I’ll come back to that. So, clunk, we used the template! So we lug the microwave off, set it down, put the template back out. This time, my dad came up with a great idea, we made a wood template, put it up, everything fits, redo a couple things, pick up the microwave, put it back up. And only one screw goes in.
Three times, seven hours later, finally got all the screws in, but I’ll tell you what was really tempting in that process, because this was a hard process, it wasn’t a fun process to keep lifting and lowering that microwave. It was awfully tempting somewhere in there to say, “You know, two should be good enough. Maybe one screw. There’s that thing on the wall holding it up, it doesn’t need a lot of screws. Why do they have you put four screws in it?”
Because it’s 85 pounds, and some engineer presumably has done a lot of analysis, and while it may have stayed up with one screw, that one screw as people are walking around it, so one would probably start to crack and bend, and eventually, eventually there would have been, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not a year from now even, but at some point there would have been this awful crashing sound as a microwave destroyed the stove beneath it, and possibly the people next to it.
You need the right foundation. One right foundation I’ve discovered is, make sure the template actually fits properly. It seems like the paper on the template didn’t quite match up. Anyway, that’s a long story, but here’s the thing that we know with God’s Word.
God’s Word is a template for our lives that always matches up. It always matches up. If we put this up, sometimes it looks like it doesn’t. We hold it up, and we’re trying to, like we were holding up here, and it’s kind of hard to see, and you’re trying to figure out where the holes should be. We’re looking through it, and we’re in crisis in our lives, and so it feels like we’re holding God’s Word up like this, trying to read it, and it doesn’t feel like it fits, and we say, “God, maybe there’s a better way,” but God’s Word always fits, and that’s the thing that we can know about His Word that we don’t know necessarily about that template, or any other template, or any other instruction we get, all those helpful YouTube videos we can tune to. We don’t know if they’re perfectly right. We don’t know if they skipped a step. We don’t know if they got a slightly different model, but we know here that we’re picking up the template for our lives that’s exactly for this model, and not only is it the template, it’s also the foundation, that weirdness about the cabinetry that we had to deal with.
God’s foundation is provided here, too, and sometimes we take that template of God’s Word, and we layer it over something that’s already bumpy because we’re putting it on all the sin in our lives. We’re putting it on all the things that we want to hold on to, we’re not ready to let go of, and it’s like if I try to set my Bible right here, it’s going to fall off, and then we say, “Well, see, God’s Word doesn’t work,” but the problem is we’re still holding on to things that we shouldn’t, or we’re sticking other things under there that we shouldn’t.
It comes back to that question, what about the change? Am I changing? And the temptation is, again, to say we can’t do it all, but when we say that, we’re like that second man, and everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house in the sand, and the rain fell, and the flood came, and the winds blew, and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.
I bet the house looked really nice, it was a beautiful house, nice stonework on the front, great curb appeal, some of the hosts from HGTV came in and decorated it, it looked beautiful, picture perfect, until it rained, and then it collapsed. That’s often how our lives are, our lives can be picture perfect, we achieve everything that people say we should achieve in life, everything that society says is a mark of success, we’re achieving it, we have it under control, the only problem is we’re not building it on that rock.
For those of us who have trusted in Jesus, we started on that rock, but we say, “Well, the house needs to be a little bigger,” and we start to build off of the rock into the soft soil, when God’s actually calling us to build upward, even though it’s harder. And so part of our house starts to fall off, we have plenty of people telling us to do it.
Take a look here, this prophecy. It says:
“Precisely because they have misled my people, saying peace when there is no peace, and because when people build a wall, these prophets smear it with whitewash, say to those who smear it with whitewash that it shall fall, it will be a great deluge of rain, and you, O great hailstones, will fall, and a stormy wind will break out. And when the wall falls, will it not be said to you, where is the coating with which you smeared it? Therefore, thus says the Lord God, I will make a stormy wind break out in my wrath, and there shall be a great deluge of rain in my anger, and great hailstones and wrath to make a full end. And I will break down the wall that you have smeared with whitewash, and bring it down to the ground so that its foundation will be laid bare. When it falls, you shall perish in the midst of it, and you shall know I am the Lord.”
That’s the message that God gave Ezekiel to give to the people of Israel, because here’s the thing they were doing, they were building on that soft soil. Maybe not entirely, they said, “We have God’s temple, we have these sacrifices, we’re on solid rock,” but they said, “But the other nations seem to be doing better than us. So we’re going to add some of their stuff on.” And they built next to it, they added this beautiful annex, and they attached the solid part of their lives to that annex, and they worshiped idols, and they cut corners with their treatment of other people, and they did all these things thinking they could go ahead and just sort of pull the strength of God over into it.
That whitewash phrasing, Jesus uses that, and you can see here, Jesus is probably expecting the people to be thinking of this prophecy as he’s speaking here, about the rains falling and so on.
What does God say about that? Well, to better understand it, we need to understand what he means by whitewash, and it’s not just the cliché we use it today, it’s more like maybe some people have suggested maybe we should translate plaster over. So what do you do if you build a wall that isn’t very solid? You’re trying to keep an invading army out, and you build a wall, and so you build that wall, and you take plaster, and you cover it so they can’t see all the cracks, and in all the places the stones didn’t really fit, and suddenly it looks much stronger than it is, but it’s not really strong because it wasn’t built well, it just has a nice covering on it.
And as Christians, sometimes that’s exactly what we do, we plaster over all the cracks, and then when the wall starts to tumble down, we don’t say, “Oh God, you’re showing me where I need to clean up my life,” we say, “God, why hasn’t your word held for me? Why doesn’t the template work? I don’t understand.” Because we put plaster over our own choices, we’ve taken God’s word and we’ve laid it over the sins that we want to hold on to, the ways that we don’t want to follow what God said, the ways that it would be easier, the ways it’s awkward to be a Christian, because it’s awkward. Our culture doesn’t typically live in the way that God calls us to live today, and we stand out when we do it, and people will make fun of us when we do it. And we say, “Well, can’t we just plaster over some stuff and make it, kind of, get the best of both worlds?” But when we’re doing that, we’re doing ourselves the constant fight towards collapse.
And you think about that leaning tower, if it weren’t leaning, none of us would know about it. So we have to say that about it. But if the goal is simply to build a structure that will stand the test of time, in some sense they’ve failed miserably, because it requires constant effort to avoid it collapsing. And at some point, I remember about 15, 20, maybe 30 years ago, there was a lot of talk, we don’t know if we can even save it, it may actually just come tumbling down. And here’s the thing that I think is agreed upon, someday it will tumble down much sooner than it would have if it weren’t leaning.
But as we build our lives, and we take God’s Word, and we’re building on top of things that we shouldn’t, those things become so dear to us, the flaws in our life become so dear to us, the ways that we try to fit God’s Word inappropriately, and try to somehow still put that veneer of Christianity on it become so dear to us that we start spending our energy trying to hold that together, rather than actually running after a better foundation.
And I’m certainly not advocating we tear down the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I am not advocating that. Any historical preservationists that might have tuned in tonight, or if any of you are in the historical society, don’t come afterwards and stone me to death with stones you took off the Leaning Tower, don’t do that, I would be so sad if it collapsed. But we shouldn’t be so sad if the Leaning Towers in our lives collapse. We should ask God, knock those towers down, bring an earthquake, shake them away, yes it’s going to be painful, but God, plant me on the rock instead. I don’t want to be building on something that’s going to collapse, even if it seems promising in the moment. Even if at the moment I’m only a couple stories up and it seems to be holding just fine, God take that away because I don’t want to be headed in a direction that later in my life it’s not going to work, or I’m guiding other people to do this, to make similar bad choices that sometime is going to cause their tower to collapse.
We can’t get there on our own, and we can’t get there all at once, but here’s the thing that we know if we turn our focus heavenward consistently.
Beloved, we are God’s children now. What will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Everyone who hopes in him.
Notice what John says there, he’s not saying everyone who finally gets it all right, everyone who is perfectly righteous right now will someday enjoy that pureness of him. No, everyone who trusts in him, everyone who hopes in Jesus. If we turn ourselves to Jesus and truly say, “Lord, I want you to be my Lord, tear down my bad foundations, rebuild me for the long haul, rebuild me to be yours,” God will honor that prayer. If we’re constantly anticipating that Jesus is going to return and living as if today Jesus might very well return, it changes how we live, it changes us towards moral purity, towards faithfulness, towards love for others.
We’re going to talk more about this tomorrow night as we return to 2 Peter chapter 3 in our Steadfast series, and I encourage you to jump on over onto that at 7 p.m. tomorrow because this is a repeated theme and I think it’s really helpful to see how it keeps coming together.
But the heart of what Jesus is calling us to do here is to anticipate God’s coming judgment. And what Peter is saying is anticipate God’s restoration, the new heavens and new earth. And as we look towards the future, whether it’s the short-term future, because consequences of sin can happen even if the world goes on for thousands of additional years, or if it ends tomorrow, what do we want to do? We want to have every single day be anticipatory, looking towards what Jesus is going to do. And as we do that, if that’s where our focus is, if our focus isn’t on how do I achieve success in this moment, how do I get respect in this moment, how do I get people to appreciate me in this moment, but instead our focus on how do I please God, how do I bring Him glory like we’re going to be talking about in our catechism question tonight, how do I do that? We start to want to do the things that actually do that, and God’s Spirit honors that question and He works in us.
So often in the moment it all looks the same. Our worldly choices look just as strong as the choices that God has called us to. But will it last? Will it weather the storm?
I was reading a few weeks ago about a new scientific study on Roman concrete. Think about this for a moment. If you’ve been driving around this area at all, and probably most parts of the country, but certainly I can say conclusively here in Missouri, if you’ve been driving around our streets over the past few months, you’ve noticed an awful lot of bumps because every winter it gets cold, we have snow and ice and salt and so on, and the roads, those concrete roads, they spend so much money putting in.
What happens? You get the giant potholes, right? Going down 44 a few weeks ago, I think I encountered more potholes than I ever remember in my life. It was horrifying. Just terrible. All these potholes. And you think about it. Most of the roads we drive on, if not all of them, have been built in, what, the last 50, 60 years, and most of them have been rebuilt in that period of time, and they still have potholes. And yet the Romans poured concrete, and that’s what the study was looking at. They poured concrete and they built concrete structures, buildings, they built roads, they did all this stuff with concrete thousands of years ago and it’s still there today. It looks pretty much the same, you have concrete and you have concrete. How did they do it?
And one of the things that they’ve discovered is there’s something about the volcanic rock that they incorporated in their concrete that made it different than what we use. We have this wonderfully refined process for making concrete, and yet after a few years or a few decades, it’s crumbling. And yet you can look at a building like the Pantheon with a concrete dome on it. Think of this, a several thousand year old concrete dome you can still go under safely and not expect it to collapse on you because they built it and it stays.
And what’s the difference? And they said this volcanic rock they put in it has minerals that as cracks form in the concrete cause it to turn into essentially a new concrete, and it’s self-healing, it heals itself. And so the very damage actually strengthens the Roman concrete. Our concrete doesn’t do that.
And a lot of times when we build nice solid things in our lives, it looks like we’re pouring a solid concrete foundation, we’re building solid concrete walls, tornadoes aren’t going to knock it over, hail isn’t going to knock it over, it’s going to be great, yet a few years later it’s starting to chip and we say, “Well, God said just pour concrete and if it worked over there, why doesn’t it work over here?”
And what we’ve missed is that God has an even more important element in his recipe that we miss. Just like it took that destructive power of a volcano to strengthen Roman concrete, the concrete of our lives needs something destructive in it too, it needs a crucifixion in it.
God took the destruction. The most cataclysmic eruption ever to happen in the history of history happened as Jesus went to the cross unjustly and bore our sins, but in that, as we live in him and we live in what he has called us to, he builds something that heals. And as our concrete in our lives cracks, if we’re building with the concrete of Jesus, he continues to heal us and strengthen us.
Time for us to decide, and church, it’s time for us to decide as a church. We have to do this over and over again. We have to commit.
Are we going to choose God’s blueprint? Do we want that healing power of crucifixion concrete in our lives? Are we going to take the world’s concrete that looks strong enough in the moment? Are we going to step into that and assume it will stand? Because, friends, it won’t, and that’s God’s challenge for us today.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we come before you, and it’s hard, Lord, to choose your concrete. It’s hard to choose your template. It doesn’t always fit the way we want it to fit. It doesn’t fit the ways our lives are already nuanced. It doesn’t fit the things that the world says are good. It looks like we can choose something else, and it will hold, and it will keep us sturdy, and for a while it does, just like that tower did for a while.
Lord, we come before you and ask that you would show us the places we’re building on soft soil, those places that we’re building with lesser concrete, those places where we’re holding up the pattern of the world rather than your pattern. Lord, would you take those places away, would you make us strong in you and you alone? We pray this in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.
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