1 Jan 2024
The time is 1.00 am 1st January 2024: I am penning the sharing that the Lord graciously communicated to my wife and me in our reading and prayer before bedtime.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,but only he who does he will of my Father, who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21)
Jesus sets before us, in the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, the radical choice between obedience and disobedience. Of course we cannot be saved by our obedience, but if we have truly been saved, we will show it by our obedience to Him.
First and foremost, Jesus warns us of the danger of just a mere verbal profession of faith in Him (Matt. 7:21-23). “Jesus is Lord” is the earliest, shortest, simplest of all Christian creeds. But if this is not accompanied by the personal submission to the lordship of Jesus, it is useless. We may even hear on the last day the terrible words of Jesus: “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers (v.23).
Secondly, Jesus warns us of the danger of a merely intellectual knowledge. In verses 21-23, the contrast was between saying and doing; the contrast here is between hearing and doing (vv. 24-27). Jesus then illustrates it by the well-known parable of the two builders. It features a wise man who constructed his house on rock and a fool who could not be bothered with foundations and built his house on sand. As both got on with their building, a casual observer would not have not noticed any difference between them, for the difference was in the foundations, and foundations are not seen.
Only when a storm broke and battered both houses with great ferocity was the fatal difference revealed. In the same way professing Christians (both the genuine and the spurious) look alike. Both appear to be building Christian lives. Both hear Christ’s words. They go to church, read the Bible, and listen to sermons. But the deep foundation of their lives are hidden from view. Only the storm of adversity in this life and the storm of judgment on the last day will reveal who they are.
This well known passage focuses on the importance of the reality of our faith and the reality in our hearts. It also points to the need of building our spiritual lives on firm and strong foundations if we are to be stable and to be found standing in the midst of a ferocious storm.
The death of God’s Son on Calvary shows how completely God, in love to mankind, was willing to hide his glory and become vulnerable to shame and dishonour. Now God in love calls men to embrace and boast of this foolish seeming, weak-looking disputable event of the Cross as the means of their salvation. It is a challenge to sinful pride of both mind and heart.
Similarly, God in love, calls us to humble ourselves by bowing to Holy Scripture, which also has an appearance of foolishness and weakness when judged by some human standards, yet is truly His Word and the means of our knowing him as Saviour. God first humbled himself for our salvation in the Incarnation and on the cross and now He humbles himself for our knowledge of salvation by addressing us in and through the often humanly unimpressive words of the Bible. Nevertheless, it is ‘soaking’ ourselves in His Word (the Bible) that we truly build strong and firm foundations in Christ Jesus that would stand us in good stead in the face of adversity, perplexity and persecution.
The Sermon on the Mount ends on the solemn note of radical choice. There are only two ways (narrow and broad) and only two foundations (rock and sand). On which road are we traveling? On which foundation are we building? We cannot afford to make the wrong choice. We cannot be indifferent and not be bothered to work hard and be diligent (in dependence on God and His Spirit) in taking time and effort to build strong and deep foundations in our Christian lives, for we are living in the last days (when there will be terrible times- 2 Tim. 3:1).