Built on the Rock

Luke 6:46 – 49

 

Yesterday was America’s 250^th birthday. On July 4^th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the final wording of the Declaration of Independence formally declaring independence from Great Britain.

 

The majority of the known world in that day, the American colonies and founding fathers included, had what we call today a Christian, or Biblical, worldview. Even if a number of our nation’s founders weren’t professing Christians, they believed in a Creator and viewed the world through a generally Christian lens.

 

The first Great Awakening on American soil took place 30 to 40 years earlier with the Holy Spirit moving through tremendous preachers such as George Whitefield, Jonathon Edwards, and the Wesley brothers. They awakened the spirit of a nation that sought liberty from tyranny.

 

The Bible and Evangelical Christianity laid the foundation for what became our nation and our system of government. Equality and liberty aren’t truths that were pulled out of thin air. These truths are grounded in Scripture, in God’s Holy Word.

 

Despite how hard the people in our nation and in charge of our nation today try, they cannot erase the truth that this nation, was built upon a Christian foundation. And by the grace of our merciful and faithful God, it continues to survive to the glory of God alone.

 

Time changes most everything, so not much ever really remains the same as it once was, but foundations cannot be moved, and the foundations of our nation will not be moved. Time has had its effect though, even here in the communities of Delhi and Hilmar we can see it.

 

In particular, I’ve heard how the building of the freeway, and its subsequent expansion, has really impacted the community. Many long time businesses were forced to close up and get torn down. Houses, including a couple that the Cox’s lived in many years ago are either gone too, or were picked up and moved.

 

I haven’t had to experience much change like that in my lifetime growing up and living in Hilmar, but I did get to witness the moving of a house. There was an old house just off of Lander in that cul-de-sac between Kings Market and West America Bank (used to be County Bank).

 

And that area ended up being developed into apartments or townhomes, and that old house was in the way. Rather than just knock it down, workers came in and separated it from its foundation, loaded it on a big truck, and moved it out to a property on August Ave. west of Washington.

 

That was probably close to twenty years ago now and I remember just being blown away that you could do that with a house. I was surprised that the house even survived the move without its foundation! I mean foundations are key to buildings remaining standing upright, just look at the leaning tower of Pisa!

 

The reality is that the amount of work, diligence, detail, and care that went into picking up and moving that house had to have been tremendous because houses won’t stand very long without a foundation.

 

The same can be said about us. Our lives are also built upon a foundation. As parents, we do our best to lay a solid foundation for our kids to grow up and thrive. As adults, we add to and often rebuild, sometimes entirely, the foundation of our lives.

 

But what if the life you’ve built isn’t standing on the foundation you think it is? In our passage today Jesus doesn’t simply call us to build. He calls us to build on the only foundation that stands. Let’s read God’s Word together: Luke 6:46 – 49.

 

What a question Jesus asks His disciples. Luke already made it clear for us back in 6:20, 40 that Christ’s primary audience is disciples. The very people who should be doing what He says.

 

These aren’t outsiders who came to see something miraculous. These aren’t people who have never heard of Him. These are folks who’ve already come to Jesus, and they know the right words to use – “Lord, Lord” they call Him.

 

The repetition is important, it’s emphatic. It’s fervent and earnest. These are people who mean it when they say it. They’re not being sarcastic. They’re not being casual. They’re using the most reverent title for Jesus that they know. These disciples had declared their allegiance to Jesus Christ.

 

And Jesus looks at them after teaching them about how to be disciples, and asks them a question that should stop every one of us in our tracks. “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” Jesus exposes the disturbing possibility that a person can profess faith in Christ while refusing to submit to Christ.

 

The earliest Christian confession, “Jesus is Lord,” carried with it the reality that every competing authority, including self, must yield to Christ. All of this makes His question here even more penetrating. He’s asking, “If you really believe I’m Lord, why doesn’t your life show it?”

 

Look at the parallel verse in Matthew 7:21, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

 

Jesus isn’t just some good teacher with good ideas. Doing the Father’s will is doing what Jesus tells you. You see here that Jesus’s authority is the Father’s authority, because He and the Father are one. That is a massive Christological claim, Jesus never pretends to be anyone other than God the Son.

 

You see, Jesus never merely points people toward the truth; He is the truth. He presents Himself as the decisive, divine authority that everyone must, and will respond to. Jesus’ teaching is inseparable from His identity as God incarnate.

 

Christianity is never merely admiration for Jesus or agreement with Jesus. Obedience to Jesus is not just following a set of ethical principles, it is submission to Christ’s lordship. It is recognizing Christ for who He is and submitting to the Lord of Lord’s Himself.

 

And if Jesus is Lord, why then do His disciples, us included, not always do what He says? Because we don’t. We try, but we fail. The problem isn’t hypocrisy in the sense of intentionally lying or being deceitful. The problem is inconsistency.

The lips of those disciples calling Him “Lord, Lord,” and ours when we tell the world we’re Christians, confess something that often our lives contradict. They confess that there’s often a gap between professed faith and lived out faith.

 

What Christ is referring to when He asks why they don’t do what He says isn’t a one-off failure. The present tense of the verb means that it is an ongoing pattern of disobedience, of rebellion, not a single failure. It’s a settled life of coming and hearing Jesus’ words, and walking away unchanged.

 

James 1:22, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” Jesus is holding up the mirror of His word to His disciples, and pointing out the danger of the self-deception of merely hearing Him and obeying Him.

 

It’s having enough religion to call Jesus “Lord,” but not enough obedience to take Him seriously. The gap between confessed faith and practice is what Jesus is calling out here.

 

And James 2:18, “But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” Obedience is NOT the basis of your salvation; it is the evidence of it.

 

This isn’t about perfection; it’s about the direction of your life. Genuine faith in Jesus Christ produces the obedience that Christ commands from His disciples, those who profess to be His.

 

So what’s a disciple, what’s a Christian, to do? Look at Jesus’ next words in our passage, “Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words…” Jesus begins describing a disciple who’s doing the right things.

 

Underline these. They come, they draw near to Him, and they hear His words, they’re attentive. They’re in the room, Bible open, and listening.

 

This is where many of us live. We come to church. We hear the sermon. We read the devotional. We attend Bible study. And there’s real hope in that, because those are indeed the things that genuine believers ought to do.

But coming and hearing, by themselves, isn’t enough. They’re necessary, yes, but they’re not enough. It’s not the Jesus’ disciples weren’t showing up. It’s that they are showing up, and nothing in their lives is changing. Coming and hearing are the first step, but they can’t carry the weight of building a foundation by themselves.

 

Jesus wasn’t finished describing the disciple yet. He said that everyone who comes and hears and does is like a builder who dug deep and laid the foundation of his house on the rock. Jesus Himself is telling His disciples, telling you and I, what defines a genuine disciple, a genuine Christian. Circle that.

 

These three verbs in sequence set the pattern of discipleship. Coming, drawing near, approaching Christ is deliberate. This is the full cycle of discipleship. Missing any of the links in that chain breaks it. You can certainly come near and hear without doing, but you cannot truly do without first coming and hearing.

 

Here Jesus introduces the two builders. Both hear and both build. Two houses. Same neighborhood. Same ground. Same materials. Same appearance. And when the storm comes one stands while the other collapses because one builder dug deep and found the rock, and the other never bothered. Surface-level religion is structurally unsound.

 

It’s not a matter of if the storm with its raging river will come, but when it comes. Because I can promise you it will. And when it does it will reveal if there is a foundation built on Christ or not.

 

You see, storms don’t create foundations, they reveal them. And the storms of life: suffering, temptation, disappointment, death, and the final judgement, don’t create your foundation of faith, they reveal it. Sure those things help build it up and reinforce your foundation, but they aren’t the rock.

 

Look at the house of the second builder. Immediately it fell. Not a leaky roof, or windows that let the wind in. The house didn’t gradually fall apart; there were no warning signs. Just immediate collapse. And the ruin was great. Not a crack, not a lean, but devastation.

 

But Jesus doesn’t make that claim and just walk away. He warns us. He tells us the storm is coming.

And He tells us what the foundation is, Himself and His words. And He tells us what happens if we ignore them, if we ignore Him. This is real mercy, the kind that says the hard thing before it’s too late.

 

The second builder didn’t reject Jesus outright. He showed up. He heard. But he never built on Christ. He treated the words of the Lord as mere information rather than the voice of the One who is the foundation.

 

This is the uncomfortable truth: you can’t always tell the difference between a genuine disciple and a false one by looking at them on a Sunday morning. Two people can sit in the same pew, hear the same sermon, sing the same songs, and look the same from the outside, but one is built on Christ while the other has no foundation at all.

 

The most dangerous place to be is within the church body, calling Jesus “Lord,” hearing His Word week after week, and remaining unchanged. Because you think you have a foundation.

 

You think you’re safe. You’ve got the language, you’ve got the routine, you’ve got the religious resume, but the storm doesn’t care about your resume. The storm cares about your foundation. The storm reveals what Sunday morning cannot.

 

The issue isn’t whether you’ve heard, you’ve all heard the Word of God, the very words of Jesus Christ. The issue is whether your life is built upon what you’ve heard, built upon Christ the rock, who is the very Word of God.

 

 Here’s the truth, not only for our passage today but this entire sermon of Jesus here in Luke 6, Christ is the only foundation that stands. Anything else you try to build your life on will collapse into great ruin, either here on earth or in heaven.

 

You must build your life on Christ through obedient faith.

 

The first builder didn’t just try harder. He dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. Not on his own strength. Not on his own obedience. On the Rock. On Christ. On the Words of the one who is Lord. And when the storm came, the same storm, the same raging river, the house stood. Literally, the stream could not shake it.

Not “it barely held together” (though we feel that way sometimes). Not it survived with cracks” (though sometimes we do come out of life’s storms with scars). It was unshakeable because the foundation was Christ Himself.

 

And Luke adds that this house was well built. The same word that was used for the good tree producing good fruit. The house was built well because the builder was good, not morally perfect, far from it even. But genuinely transformed by Christ. The obedience wasn’t mechanical, rather it flowed from a heart and a life that had been changed by Jesus Christ.

 

Christ lived out His sermon. He was poor, he was hungry, he wept, and He was persecuted to the point of death. He loved His enemies, He was merciful like His Father, He didn’t condemn, and He forgave. Jesus lived the perfect life that you and I can’t.

 

Those who fully learn from Him become like Him. By practicing what He preaches, Jesus makes it possible for His disciples to practice what He preached. He gives the love that He calls us to show. He forgives us so that we might forgive others.

 

The obedience isn’t what holds the house up. Christ holds the house up. Obedience is what it looks like to be built on Him. Christ calls for repentance from sin, and genuine faith that submits. He calls for trust that acts. Obedience to Christ flows from already having trusted Him in faith.

 

As disciples we’re called to dig and go deep, the two verbs that were used to describe how the first builder did what he heard. This is real effort. This intentionality. Genuine discipleship born out of genuine faith takes work. And it begins in the hidden places of the heart.

 

So this week, I want you to name the gap between the faith you profess and the faith you live out. Ask God to show you the gap. Where are you calling Jesus “Lord,” while living as though His words are optional?

 

And be specific. Is it his teaching on money? On forgiveness? On how you talk to your spouse or your parents? On how you treat the people who irritate you? Don’t settle for a vague sense of conviction.

Name the exact area where your confession and practice don’t match. That’s where the digging needs to start.

 

Next, dig deep and do one thing you’ve heard. Obedience is the digging. Hearing a sermon, reading a devotional, attending a Bible study aren’t the digging.

 

They’re where Christ places His Word in your hands. The digging begins when you trust what He says enough to obey it. The digging is actually doing something with it.

 

So what have you heard from God recently that you haven’t acted on? Acknowledge, name it, ask God for forgiveness for not having done it, and then go do it.

 

Lastly, remember the storm. This isn’t hypothetical. Suffering, loss, temptation, pressure, and the day that you stand before God are all coming. The storm is coming, not to destroy you, but to test and reveal what you’re built on.

 

This isn’t to scare you, but rather it’s to prepare you. Jesus didn’t tell this story to discourage or terrify His disciples. He told it to warn them, and us, before it’s too late. The time to dig deep is now, not when the water is rising, so don’t wait to take your faith seriously.

 

Believers keep Jesus' commandments because they are committed to him. The one who hears and does, the one who digs deep into Jesus’ words and builds their life on them is not immune to storms.

 

The storm still comes. The water still rises. But the house stands. Not because the builder was stronger, but because a foundation built on Christ is unshakeable.

 

Christ is the only foundation that survives the flood. His Word never fails. His promises never fail. His saving work on the cross never fails. Everyone, including you, will face the flood at some point.

 

The question isn’t: will the storm come? The question is: What are you standing on when it comes? The answer ought to be, on Christ the Solid Rock.