Categories
Bible Study Cross-Centered Life

How to Build Your House on the Rock (Matthew 7:24-27)

Perhaps, like me, as a child you often sang the cute little song based on Matthew 7:24-27

The wise man built his house upon the rock

The wise man built his house upon the rock

The wise man built his house upon the rock

And the rains came a tumblin’ down…

But when Jesus tells us at the end of the Sermon on the Mount to “build our house on the rock,” what is he referring to?  How do we actually do this?

Here is the whole passage…

24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 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. 26 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. 27 And 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.”

I’m not sure where my early understanding came from, but for a long time, I thought that the rain and the floods and the wind that beat on the house were the storms of life–the trials  and struggles that all of us go through.  But if you look closely at the context here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about the final judgment.  The beating storm that the house must endure is nothing less than the judgment that Christ himself will render when he evaluates our lives on judgment day.  The question at hand, then, is whether or not we will “enter the kingdom of heaven” (v. 21), or hear the awful words, “I never knew you, depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (v. 23).

In order to enter the eternal kingdom and live forever with Jesus, we must be like the man who built his house on the rock.  And Jesus states very, very clearly what that means in verse 24.  “Everyone then who hears these words of mind and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”

Although it is very true that we must obey everything that Jesus says, when he speaks of “these words” he is referring to what he has just taught in the Sermon on the Mount.  And it is not enough just to hear those words and appreciate them.  We must do them (remember James 1:22-25 and the man who looks at his face in the mirror).

So what does “doing” the things that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount entail?  Well, to be honest, it entails a lot more than you and I are capable of.  What makes Matthew 5-7 so stunning (in the sense of feeling numb like you’ve been hit on the head with a crowbar) is that Jesus doesn’t only endorse what God had already revealed in the Old Testament, he deepens it and makes it a matter of the heart.  So it isn’t enough to just “not murder”, we must also make sure our hearts aren’t harboring bitter and angry thoughts.  It isn’t enough to just “not commit adultery,” our thoughts have to be pure.  We can’t just “claim our rights,” but we must be willing to suffer injustice at the hands of others.  Religious duties like fasting, prayer and giving must be done with a right heart… This is only a partial list of some of the words that we have just heard from Jesus in the sermon on the mount.  Jesus has shown us that a true keeping of the law is so much deeper than just external behavior, it is the description of a life that springs from a pure heart.

Now, depending at what stage you are at in life, you will probably respond to this in one of two ways.  1)  “Well, I guess I better buckle down and get started.  Let’s see, what part of the sermon on the mount will I work on today?”  or 2) “Can I just go back to bed?”

You see, when Jesus says that the one who builds his house on the rock, “hears my words and does them,” it is like being told that you need to build the Biltmore House (click if you’ve never seen the Biltmore House) on your $20,000 a year salary in order to get into heaven.  There’s no way you can do it!

The problem is that the gospel of Matthew is filled with such passages.  Matthew presents the “gospel of the kingdom” that Jesus came preaching: a description of what life under King Jesus is like.  And as glorious as that picture is, and as much as we would like to live it, it can seem unattainable when we look only at this Biltmore House of a life that Jesus talks about and realize that we can’t begin to measure up.

But the gospel of Matthew doesn’t consist only of the “gospel of the Kingdom,” it ends with the King himself dying on a cross and then rising from the dead.  So what is the connection between the message of the King about the life that he wants us to live, and the death and resurrection of the King?

Although there are some clues scattered throughout Matthew, it isn’t until after Jesus ascends to heaven and the apostles, through the Holy Spirit, explain to us in their writings the significance of Jesus’ death that we begin to see how Jesus’ death and resurrection make it possible for us to build our house on the rock.

The only way possible for us to “hear Jesus’ words and do them” is to be united with Jesus in his death and resurrection.  His death becomes our death, and his life becomes our life, and the house on the rock that stands against the storm of God’s judgment is nothing less than the exquisite mansion of Christ’s own life that he builds for us through the Holy Spirit who indwells us.

So, summarizing, how do you build your house on the Rock?

Admit to Jesus your helplessness to build anything that stands a chance of surviving his end-time judgment.  Every day look to his death on the cross, and see there the death of all your attempts to make yourself acceptable to God.  See at the cross as well the forgiveness for all your failed attempts to do what Jesus says.  Receive by faith the resurrected Jesus into your life and ask him to fill you with the Holy Spirit.  And then go out and in the power of his indwelling Spirit, listen to his words and do what he says.

Categories
Ministry

The Reproducibility Principle Reconsidered

This post may be more relevant to those who are involved in cross-cultural Christian ministry, but I think it can also apply to those who are seeking to reach those of their own culture with the gospel.

The principle of “reproducibility,” as it is usually presented, states that in missions, we should evangelize, disciple believers, and plant churches in such a way that the methods and practices we are using to do the work can be easily reproduced by those within the culture we are trying to reach.

Usually the focus falls on the methods and practices that we employ in ministry.  For example…

A mission is trying to reach a people group that is primarily poor, unskilled laborers, so they decide to build a first-class hospital where the people can come to get medical care that is not normally available to them.  The patients experience the love of Christ through the Christian doctors and nurses, hear the gospel proclaimed and become believers.  Discipleship classes are hosted at the hospital’s excellent facilities and hundreds if not thousands of people’s lives are touched every year.

Hospitals are a wonderful means of spreading the gospel and have been used by the Lord with great results through the years.  But this is not a reproducible method. In other words, the poor, unskilled laborers reached through the hospital are not able to take this same method and use it to reach others. They have no medical expertise.  They have no resources to build excellent facilities.  It is a good method, but it is not reproducible.

An example of a reproducible method, on the other hand, might be Evangelism Explosion.  I was trained in E.E. as a young pastor and was very impressed at the potential this method had to unleash an ever-increasing number of evangelists.  an E.E. trainer takes two others under his wing and teaches them a short, memorized presentation of the gospel that they can use to share with others.  Once they are trained, each of them can then train two others, who in turn then each train two others… and on it goes with a multiplication effect that essentially is limitless.  It doesn’t cost anything, it is simple, and within the North American culture it was designed for, it is very reproducible.

These are examples of the reproduciblity principle as it is normally understood by missiologists.  But here is the important “reconsideration” of reproducibility that I am proposing:

The power of reproducibility lies not in the ministry methods or practices used, but in the divine life that is at work in God’s people as the kingdom of God grows.

We cross-cultural workers who are seeking a reproducing movement that is constantly producing new believers and new churches must never forget this.  While it is certainly not wrong to apply the reproducibility principle to methods and practices, we must realize that methods and practices and strategies and tools in and of themselves are not capable of containing and generating divine life.

It is God’s divine life that reproduces itself in the lives of people and is spreading to fill the whole world with his glory.  This is why Paul so often refers to the Church as the Body of Christ that is growing and pulsing with Jesus’ divine life

Ephesians 4:15-16

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

In Colossians 2:19 we are told to hold fast to…

“…the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.”

Could it be that in our attempt to discover and perfect reproducible methods we sometimes cut ourselves off from the power of this divine life that God has provided to give us fruit in our evangelistic, discipleship and church planting efforts?  By trying to find just the right reproducible method, we unintentionally blind ourselves to the need to seek the  life that is in Jesus himself and that is able to generate incredible growth and fruit as it flows through whatever method or practice God in his wisdom and sovereignty chooses to bless.

I realize that the reproducibility principle as it is applied to methods and practices does not exclude a dependance on the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through believers who are filled with him and living in the power of his life, but I think we need to remind ourselves that God is under no obligation to bless whatever methods and practices seem most reproducible to us.  He may very well choose to bypass them and to work in a way that is counter-intuitive to us just to show the greatness of the power of his life as it flows in his body.

1 Corinthians 1:27

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;

I have observed God’s power and divine life flowing through methods and practices that were very far from being “reproducible”, and I have also observed many excellent and reproducible methods and practices that just were not producing fruit.  The lesson to be learned is NOT that it is wrong to ask God to show us methods and practices that are able to be used by the people we are trying to reach, but to think that these in and of themselves are sufficient to bring about the multiplication that we desire to see.

As divine life is passed from those Christian doctors and nurses to the patients whose lives they touch, reproduction takes place and the Kingdom of God grows.  God can use a very un-reproducible method to grow his church.

On the other hand, if E.E. is seen as being “the answer” to reaching people with the gospel and is taught simply as words to be spoken and passed on to others, a very reproducible method will have no power at all to make any eternal difference in the life of a single person.

  • So is it wrong to get excited about promising new methods or practices?  Absolutely not!  They may very well be God’s good gifts to us to enable us to do his work in the power of the Holy Spirit.
  • Is it wrong to evaluate methods and practices on the basis of their capacity to be reproduced by the people we are trying to reach?  Absolutely not!  The desire to use reproducible methods springs from a desire that the power of God be glorified.  When God chooses to use a world-class hospital, it can be tempting to say that it was the hospital that brought about the conversions, but when God uses simple, reproducible practices, it is usually more apparent that it is his power that produced the fruit.
  • Is it wrong to use non-reproducible methods?  Not if we receive specific instructions from “the Head” to do so.  I would not stand in the way of any Christian worker or organization who is following what they believe to the clear leading of the Holy Spirit.  The trick is to make sure that we are hearing from him and not depending on fleshly resources to do spiritual work.

Zechariah 4:6

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.

Categories
Ephesians

Ephesians 3:14-21 Knowing a love that surpasses knowledge

14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 20 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Here is a brief recap of my study thus far of this prayer for the Ephesian believers:
Like some people who like to read the last chapter to see if the book is going to be good, I started near the end of the request-portion of Paul’s prayer to see where he was heading. The end result of Paul’s prayer, should God in his grace grant it (and he will because he inspired it!) is that we are “filled with all the fullness of God.” This phrase points to the completion of God’s work in us as he forms in us his very image and we become like him in all his moral perfection and beauty. Wow!

But how will he get us there? Paul prays first that we will experience the love of Jesus for us as the Holy Spirit reveals to us in our inner being that we are loved by him. This experience of Jesus’ love has a rooting and grounding effect in our lives. But here is where things start to really rev up!

There is more to a plant than the root and there is more to a building than the foundation. Having experienced Christ’s love through the indwelling Holy Spirit, there is still infinitely more yet to be experienced. The root is going to blossom into a full-grown plant someday and the building will one day be complete.

Here is where some of the teaching on the fullness of the Holy Spirit often leads people astray. Some believers put so much emphasis on the initial experience of being filled with the Spirit and the experience of Christ’s love for them in that moment, that they forget that it is only the beginning! It is only the root! Paul goes on to pray…

“…that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge…”

Paul knows that to reach our goal of being filled with all the fullness of God, we need to have a constantly renewed experience of the love of God. In the words of C.S. Lewis in his final book of the Chronicles of Narnia…. “Further up and further in!”

Commentators do not all agree on what the four dimensions mentioned in v. 18 refer to, but I think the best interpretation takes them as referring to the love of Christ mentioned in v. 19. After all, what is the “breadth” of God’s love? What is its length? What is its height and its depth? Can it be measured at all? How does one measure the love of the Father in sending his Son to take the penalty of death that we as a rebellious race deserved for our sins? None of us has grasped the dimensions of God’s love that was displayed toward us at Calvary. As v. 19 says, it “surpasses knowledge”

We can’t fully grasp God’s love because we have never seen the depths of our sin. We may believe that Jesus died for bad people, or even for really bad people or even really, really wicked people, but we have no idea what is in our hearts apart from the grace of God. This has been a long-term search for me personally. I want God to show me the depths of my sin so that I can more fully appreciate what Jesus did for me.

We can’t fully grasp God’s love because we can’t fully see the infinite glory of God. We have no idea whom we have scorned in turning away from God to follow our own ways. If we knew, truly knew, the God we reject every time we sin, we would fall on our faces and call for the mountains to fall on us. And we would see so much more clearly the condescension of his love in saving us through the sacrifice of his Son.

Let me backtrack a bit and talk about two important words in the text that support my premise that what Paul is asking God for in this prayer is that we might experience God’s love for us in Christ. In v. 18, he prays that we may be able to “comprehend” the love of God. And in v. 19, he prays that we may “know” the love of Christ. The word translated “comprehend” is a strengthened form of the verb “to grasp” and means to “fully understand” The word translated “know” can mean simply “to understand” but it often is used to denote a knowledge by experience–a knowledge of things as they really are.

Paul certainly is not just praying that we will have an intellectual and theological understanding of the love of God. Word studies aside, the context cries for an understanding of these verbs as relating to an experiential knowledge of the love of God. Besides, how else (other than experience) can one know something that “surpasses knowledge”? Paul desires that we will have an ongoing, deepening, broadening, lengthening experience of a reality that we will never exhaust–the love of Christ.

I have a theory regarding the words “with all the saints” that I would like to throw out for your consideration, and if anyone is still reading by this point, perhaps you could leave me a comment with your take on this interpretation (I haven’t found it in any commentary).

Could it be that Paul prays that the Ephesians will be able to comprehend “with all the saints” because he knows that it is only in heaven that all the saints will have this experience that he writes about in verses 18-19? In other words, only in heaven will this prayer be answered fully, and it will be answered for “all the saints.” We will all be filled up to all the fullness of God as we experience the love of Christ flowing to us with the same intensity with which it flows among the members of the Trinity, and that for all eternity.

It is a glorious thought, and I could write a lot more about this glorious prayer, but I have other responsibilities beyond writing for a blog!

So let me conclude this four-part study of this wonderful prayer with this comment: Pray this prayer for yourself and for the believers you fellowship with and for all of us as God’s children. Pray that God would grant us all the faith to believe that by His Spirt indwelling us we can have fellowship with Jesus that is even more intimate than the apostles experienced when they were walking with Jesus in the flesh. Believe that God wants to bless you with this kind of closeness and intimacy with Jesus, and no matter what your experience or lack of experience has been in the past… he is “able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us…”