A Faith that is Put into Practice is a Faith Buiilt on a Solid Foundation! (Matthew 7:24-27)

Grace, mercy and peace are yours from God our Father through our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ.

Direct us now, O gracious Lord, to hear aright your Holy Word.

Assist your minister to preach, and let the Holy Spirit teach.

Let eternal life be found by all who hear the Gospel sound. Amen.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, if you’ve ever bought a house, you know the ritual. Before you fall in love with the crown molding or the kitchen island or the man-cave (or the possible man-cave), you have to go down to the basement (or in the crawl space) with that flashlight and check out that foundation. The house might look great on the outside. It might have a beautiful smell. It might have all these beautiful things to look at. But if that basement isn’t squared away, then you’ve got troubles. The foundation is invisible until the day that it is tested.

In Italy, there is a bell tower where the builders forgot to check the foundation. They built it on soft ground and as they built it, this beautiful eight-story marble building with arches on it, it wasn’t on solid foundation. Then it became the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was leaning over for 800 years. In the 1990s, they did a ton of work on it, staking off the ground, and they say that it’s going to last and sit there like that for another 300 years. You know that it might look beautiful on the outside, but if it doesn’t have a sure foundation, then it’s going to crash.

The picture Jesus paints today is that of faith that is put into practice is a faith built on a solid foundation.

Jesus is preaching His Sermon on the Mount and He has a scenario for us to consider. Two guys building houses. If you looked at the houses, they would look exactly the same except the difference between the two is on their foundation. There is also something very important about this parable that is easy to miss. Jesus is not contrasting two different kinds of people who heard two different kinds of messages. Both of the men in His story heard the same words of Jesus. Both of them presumably would nod along with Jesus when He was preaching His sermon. They would both say “Yes, that stuff about anger, I agree. That stuff about loss, yes, I’m tracking it. Loving your enemies, yes, I’m listening.” The difference between these two men is not in the message they heard. They both heard the same thing. The difference is putting it into practice. What did they do when the storms came?

On Christian Education Sunday, that’s exactly the question in front of us, not whether you’ve heard the Word of God. Most of this room could probably say you’ve heard it, whether it’s in church or in Confirmation class or a Christian day school. You were in that classroom learning the Word of God. Or in Sunday school. Maybe we’ve heard it all our lives. The question Jesus is asking you is what is underneath. What is your faith actually resting on?

As we look closely at Verses 25 and 27, the foolish man’s house and the wise man’s house face exactly the same weather. “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house.” That sentence almost word for word appears twice, once for the wise man and once for the fool. Jesus doesn’t say that the wise man got a mild afternoon shower and the fool got the storm. They both got the same storm. They both got the same wind. They both have the same troubles.

That should catch our attention because somehow we assume that if we build our lives on Christ that the storms will somehow pass us by, that it wouldn’t be hard for us. Remember that sermon I had with the “Easy button”? I have that on my desk. It’s a reminder to me that I really wish I hadn’t preached that sermon because every day I’m looking at that and thinking “I really wish I could push the Easy button sometimes,” and that sermon reminds me “Yes, if we’re being a Christian, it may not be easy. Things might be very difficult.”

Sickness comes. Grief comes. Doubt creeps in at 2a.m. Temptation shows up dressed as something reasonable and it doesn’t wait for you to be well rested to take it on. We may have a storm right now. We may not. But it is the simple truth of living in this fallen world. We are going to get the same storms. The storm is not optional. The question is what is holding up your house when the storm arrives?

That’s exactly why Christian education matters and why we don’t treat Sunday school or Bible class or our Christian day school or Catechism as some sort of extra activity tacked on to real Christian life. Kids and their families are going through storms. What is their rock? What is the foundation that is going to hold them up? You can think of it in terms of a fire drill. No school runs a fire drill because they expected a fire that afternoon. They run it so that when the smoke actually fills the hallway on some day that nobody chose and nobody planned for, the body knows what to do before the mind even has time to panic. Feet move, hands reach for the door and nobody has to think because the thinking has already been done on the day when nothing at all was on fire.

That is also what Christian education is. That’s what Christian education is in our homes, in our worship life, in Sunday school, in our Christian day school, in our Catechism classes, in our Bible classes, in our small group Bible studies. We aren’t preparing for a crisis that we expect today. We are quietly building the reflexes of faith so that when the storm comes, and we know it’s coming (and maybe it’s already here), the soul knows where to run. The soul knows where to go.

That’s where Jesus’ parable really looks us hard in the eye. It’s entirely possible (Jesus says very plainly) to hear these words and not build on the rock at all. It’s entirely possible to sit here and worship for decades, to have gone through Confirmation, to sit there through eight grades at our grade school, to know your Catechism, to be able to recite the Ten Commandments, in order even, and still underneath it be building your house on sand, because sand really isn’t the absence of religion. Sand can look very religious. Think of children at a beach building sand castles with towers and walls and even flags on top (hours of careful detailed work), and the water comes and washes it away. You can smooth it out. You can pack it tighter. But it is still sand. That’s the danger. People have heard the Word of God their whole lives. Sand is unbelief. It doesn’t look like unbelief. The sand is trusting in your own hearing or in your own knowledge. The sand is trusting in your own decency and morality, in your own church attendance or your own Confirmation certificate, as if those things were your foundation. It’s very possible to appear to be very religious and have it all sitting on top of sand because the trust underneath it all, when the storms come, you’re not running to Christ. You are running to yourself.

That’s why we put God’s Word into practice. That’s why we don’t just talk about forgiveness like a subject. We practice it. That’s why we don’t just talk about Confession and Absolution. We practice it. We put our faith into practice. We don’t just talk about love. We practice love.

The teachers that we are going to install, our principal, teachers, early childhood director, I am very confident know this very well. They are not prepared to just do devotions or teach Bible stories. They are prepared to live their Christian life, to live their Christian faith, to practice their faith with you and your children. They will encourage you to not just read the Bible but to live it with the foundation in the right place, not in your accomplishments, not in your past, but in your Savior, in Christ.

So where is your foundation? Is it the fruits or the roots? Is it the fruits of faith (the fruits of God’s activity in your life) or the roots (everything in Christ)? When the storms are coming, and the storm may be here, where are we resting it? Are we resting in the things that we know? Or are we going back to the One who knows us? Are we going back to Christ? That’s the difference between a foundation on rock and sand.

When Saint Paul was talking about the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, he says they drank from the same spiritual rock that accompanied them. That rock was Christ. The rock beneath the wise man’s house is not one good decision he made or a good thing he did for eight years or a good thing he did for three years. The rock is a person. It is Christ Jesus. And this rock was not untouched by any kind of storm. In fact, He faced the greatest storm ever—the full weight of God’s judgment against sin, the rain, the flood, the wind. All of it fell on Jesus Christ. He didn’t stand off to one side pointing us to a safe foundation saying, “It’s a good idea that you should really have a good foundation.” No, He became the foundation by absorbing the storm. The very storm that would have swept our house away, He was struck for the house of sin. All the things that we face in life, all the problems, the evils of this world, all the struggles we are facing, our temptations, these are all things that could sweep us away, but Jesus took it all on, on the cross. He absorbed it all so that when anything bad happens, we have the assurance our God still loves us.

When we question why He is doing the things that He is doing, we look to the cross and we say “I know He still loves me, even when I can’t see it right now. That’s my foundation. That’s my rock when the storms are coming.” That’s the Gospel underneath His entire parable. Faith does not build its foundation. It trusts the foundation that Christ has already laid, dug in the bedrock at Calvary, and sealed forever by His resurrection. We know He loves us because He rose from the dead. We know our sins are taken care of because He rose from the dead. We know our God isn’t punishing us for something we’ve done, because He rose from the dead.

The beautiful thing that Jesus is teaching us in these verses is that once that foundation is under you, Christ, living our Christian life comes alive and is not as much of a strain. I’m not going to say easy because that would be the “Easy button” of course. Jesus isn’t telling us “Just hear the words but then really when it comes down to it, just grit your teeth and get to it and your foundation will hold.” In the midst of storms, Jesus says “Go to my Word, to the foundation.”

The doing flows out of the foundation the way that fruit grows out of a healthy root. Jesus Himself said it in John 15. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.”

That’s why on Christian Education Sunday we don’t think of Christian education (whether it’s in a Christian day school, whether it’s our Sunday school, whether it’s Bible class, whether it’s Confirmation class) like it’s icing on the cake. Teaching our children, yes, teaching (period) that is happening in our entire congregation, young and old, is not a nice trim to a foundation that is already fine on its own. It is the way that God sinks us deeper into the rock we already stand in through His work in our lives. Every class, every devotion, every Confirmation lesson, every Sunday school story, every Bible story with the Little Sprouts is God through means driving the house, His family, a little further down into Christ because that’s where He has promised to meet us and hold us there. That is faith put into practice.

God has never promised to build our faith through some sort of burst of religious feeling or some spiritual high that arrives out of nowhere and settles the matter once and for all. Paul says it very simply in Romans 10. “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.”—hearing, teaching, living.

This past summer, the four of us that are left, as I like to joke (because we have a family of seven and three of them have been working full-time at Camp Phillips serving the Lord, so there are only really two of them left, so I say the four of us who are left), went to Upper Michigan for four days. We went across the Mackinaw Bridge, between the two peninsulas of Michigan. I learned something about that bridge. Everyone is focusing on the towers and the cables, but those two towers have foundations that are 210 feet in the ground, through the water, through the mud—210 feet! Nobody takes pictures of the foundation because what they see is up above. Every year people are driving across that five miles of bridge not recognizing that the only reason why those towers are standing there is because of this foundation 210 feet below the water.

Christian education in the life of this congregation and in the life of our children can sometimes feel that way—not so dramatic. Time spent in the Word, time spent in the classroom or in Sunday school or in Confirmation class memorizing the Small Catechism, time spend in Bible study, whether that is in church or in small groups in your homes, none of that gets photographed. None of that feels on any given week that it is holding up a bridge, but it is exactly the kind of work, sinking the soul down past the shifting sands of this world to bedrock, down to Christ, that holds when the storm comes.

Jesus say a very, very short phrase that is a very comforting phrase in our text for today when He said, “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” Your house will stand. Your foundation, your faith will stand, not because your faith is strong enough, not because you’ve heard a lot of sermons or attended a lot of Bible classes or went to school for a long time, but because Christ the rock does not move. He has claimed you as His own, through His Word. And because that rock does not move, we can sit under it patiently. We can read it and put it into practice. We can bring our children to it faithfully. We can renew our commitment to learning it and studying it together. That Word is going to link us to Christ, which is the foundation of our faith. That is going to keep this family, young and old, planted in Christ, who already holds us.

So when the rain falls and the floods come and the winds blow and beat against your house, it can be said, for you and for me, they did not fall, because they had their foundation on the Rock. Amen.

And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7) Amen.