I’ve titled my sermon this morning, “Foundations”. The reason for this is that God has impressed on my heart the deep-seated need for this generation of Americans to understand a key difference in how we look at things, how we approach our daily lives and the decisions we make. The foundation that I am going to focus on this morning can be illustrated with a question, speaking about literature. Who here can tell me what kind of a book begins with the words, “Once Upon a Time”?
If you said a fairy tale or made up story, you would be correct. I suggest to you this morning that during the generations represented here in this church, our society has increasingly insisted that the book we claim to be the inspired, inerrant word of God actually begins with “Once Upon A Time”. It is that very concept that I want us to consider this morning because the foundation of your Christian religion and belief system hinges on that very subject, does the Holy Bible really begin with the words “In the beginning, God. . . “, or have we determined as a people and society and even as a church that it should read, “Once Upon A Time”? Is your foundation really on the solid rock of God or on a fairy tale?
If you will, please turn with me in your Bible to the book of Matthew chapter 7 where we will focus this morning on a portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount that deals directly with the foundation that we choose to base our faith on. We will begin reading at verse 15 and read through the end of the chapter.
Matthew 7:15-29
A Tree and Its Fruit
15 "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. 18 A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.
I Never Knew You
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. 22 On that day many will say to me, ’Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ’I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Build Your House on the Rock
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."
The Authority of Jesus
28 And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, 29 for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. (ESV)
While laying out the character and beliefs and behaviors of true believers, Jesus took a moment to elaborate on a key principle dealing with foundations. He said that what you build your faith on has as much or more to do with your true identity in Him as does your outward behaviors. I don’t know if you realize this or not, but a person can have all the outward appearance of Christianity and never have a saving relationship with God. A person can demonstrate many of the attributes that Christ talks about in this Sermon on the Mount and never really know Him. He warns his listeners of this fact in verses 21 – 23 and the goes on to tell them that it matters what is at the base of your belief and actions as to whether or not you are truly one of His own. Building a house on the wrong foundation will ultimately result in a broken house.
If you’ve kept up with the local news you may have read about a local concrete company who was using some inadequate materials in their mix. Because of this, the people buying concrete from this company were building foundations for houses and lots of other things with defective concrete. After a while, many of the unsuspecting customers began to notice that their foundations were cracking and that some of their walls were settling and cracking in their house. Are you beginning to see how important a solid foundation is?
No matter how nice the house may be, or how much time and money and effort has been spent on building it, if the foundation is defective, the house will not stand and cannot withstand the storms that will come throughout its life.
The point here is this: it is of absolute importance that your foundation be solid, made of the right materials and trustworthy.
I believe that when Jesus was talking about building our foundation on the Rock, he was speaking of the Gospel message, the good news about Himself – not just the cross, but all that He represents from the beginning of Creation. Can I tell you something this morning, the Holy Bible doesn’t start with the book of Matthew and neither does the Gospel message. The Bible starts with the book of Genesis and the Creation of the world. Do you realize that Jesus was directly involved in the building, the establishing of the foundation of Creation – the foundation of all that is? It is Him, the Word that is at the foundation of our faith – and His truth begins in the book of Genesis, chapter 1.
John 1:1-3 - 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ESV
I believe that John knew what Jesus had been speaking about when He was giving His Sermon on the Mount. The problem is, I don’t think that our churches and pulpits are filled with people that really understand or believe what Jesus was talking about when He was saying that what we build our house on will make all the difference in who we are and where we are headed. I think this is evident when you consider that, nationally, less than half of all adults (41%) believe the Bible is totally accurate in all it teaches, according to a Barna Research Group study from 2001. It’s no wonder that our society is experiencing the decay that it is. In addition to that, consider the recent Gallup poll that said the average Christian in the United States looks no different than the average non-Christian. Could it be that somehow, we have begun to build on a faulty foundation and that our walls are beginning to bow and crack? Jesus warned us plainly as we read in Matthew 7:15 that a bad tree will bear bad fruit, just as a bad foundation will bear cracked walls and fallen beauty.
What has been added to the mix of our foundation that is causing our church to look just like the world and is causing our message to fall on deaf ears because it isn’t taken seriously by at least 59% of the U.S. population?
I believe that a primary key is found in the churches’ attempt to accommodate the claims of naturalistic science with God’s Word. Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s a new revolution in “thought” was really catching on and gaining momentum in this country, and it’s rallying call was “millions of years of evolution”. Philosophers such as Nietzsche were saying that “God is dead” and were promoting the facts of natural science to show that God was not necessary and was not responsible for our existence. It was a time when public schools were changing their texts to teach Darwinian evolution and the natural formation of all that is. It was a time when it became en vogue to question the Word of God and its legitimacy. This hot bed of new enlightenment has prevailed in large part because it became the pet of the media, which was also new and quickly grew to grate influence in every household in the form of TV and radio and movies, all in color!
Questioning God’s Word didn’t start there, though. You have to go much further back to find its beginning. From the time just after the Creation, we have had an enemy trying to “enlighten” us to what we are missing out on or telling us that we are ignorant for trusting God. Look in Gen 3:1 - Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, "Did God actually say, ’You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?" ESV; The NIV says, “Did God really say. . . “
Just as Eve gave into temptation when Satan questioned her as to whether or not God really meant what he said, I believe the church has largely fallen into the same trap in the past several decades. Here in the United States, especially in the past 50 years-or-so, we have been taught in our public schools to ask questions like,
“Does God really exist?” - (see Romans 1:19-20)
“Did God really create the earth in six, 24-hour days?” - (addressed momentarily)
“If God created the first day before the sun, how could there really have been day and night?” – (Genesis 1:4 – the glory of God provided the light just as it will as mentioned in Revelation 21:23.)
And, these are just the beginning of the questions that we hear. The problem is that many Christians have never figured out that you can and should answer “yes” to these questions. There are millions of people in this country that need to know that they can trust the Bible when it says things like “In the beginning, God”. And, that they can believe that God is capable and in-fact did create the earth and all that is in six, approximately 24-hour day as Genesis 1:5 says, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”.
Let’s talk about the term “day” for just a minute. The Hebrew word yom is the word used for day in the Creation account. Some will say, “Well, it means something different in Genesis chapter 1 than it does elsewhere.” Oh, really?
The word yom, when associated with a number as it is in Genesis 1, is used in the same way approximately 410 times outside of Genesis 1. Can you guess what it means in each of those 410 occurrences? It means a day just like the days that you and I experience today. That reminds me of a video I watched a while back as part of a course called, “Marriage on the Rock”. Jimmy Evans, the teacher of the course, was doing a bit on what women say and what they mean versus what men say and what they really mean. You know, like when your wife says to you, “Are you going to pick up those dirty socks?” She doesn’t mean to ask a question, she really means, “pick those up, what are you three?” Or, if she asks, “do I look fat in this dress?” That’s when a man has to really think hard about what he is about to say, because typically a man will say what he means without thinking – for better or worse.
Part of the problem is that, over time, we have allowed the influence of Greek philosophy and human-based, naturalistic science to make us feel that we need to compromise our beliefs or be considered ignorant and un-enlightened. As early as the 1960’s, Creation Scientists were presenting trustworthy theories of Creation and its related proofs and refuting the trustworthiness of Darwinian evolution, but by that time, the momentum of Darwinian evolution and new, enlightened natural science out-shouted and out-maneuvered their research. That was about the time that television and movies were really getting popular in American homes, and guess which theory the media paid the most attention to?
It is only today, when Darwinian evolution has failed to provide proof of evolution by failing to find any true transitional form from one species of life to another that Creationism is finally beginning to build the momentum needed to overcome a secular and biased media and the ignorance of naturalistic science. Darwin, himself, said that unless a true transitional form was found, his theory of evolution had no basis. What we have found is that there are variations within a species, revealing that God designed us so that we can adapt to our environment as necessary. What we have not found is a true ape-man or a true half-anything because there is no such thing as a change from one species of animal to another. Take the dog, for instance. Even secular scientists have decided that every type of dog you see today likely has a common ancestor, which probably, resembles something like a wolf. So, every breed of dog out there could have come from two – I wonder, could they have been the ones saved on Noah’s Ark?
Gen 6:19-20 - And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort {kind/species} into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive. ESV
So from two dogs came all the varieties we have, but to date natural scientists have yet to provide an example of a cat-dog (you know, half-cat, half-dog).
Oh, and don’t get me wrong, science in its most honest sense is really just observing and documenting things and trying to draw conclusions as to why and how they happen and exist. The problem with much of naturalistic science is not in the method but in the presuppositions involved at its foundation. You see, we’re back to foundations again. Everything that we and secular-scientists base our beliefs on is found in what foundation of history we place our faith in. If you trust the Bible and believe that God inspired it, you will find yourself trying to understand where you are today and how things work, based on a belief that in the beginning, God created everything, and that he did so as the Bible says – not as an allegory, but as a factual account. If you want to avoid God, altogether, as do many who do not want to submit and be accountable to Him, you have to figure out how all this came about without God – which involves a factually un-supported theory and long, long amounts of time. The good news is that Creation scientists have plausible and fact-based answers to the problems of Carbon-14 dating and evolutionary change. There are answers to why we find fossils of fish on mountains and of land animals under water and how the geological strata were formed in a cataclysmic flood rather than over billions of years. We really are living in an exciting time when God’s Word has the potential to take its rightful place, particularly in our churches, of being understood and known as the inspired, inerrant Word of God, and as Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 - All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. ESV
Unfortunately, many who would believe in God if they could just trust the Bible have been reared to doubt the Bible and its truths. Let’s talk concrete again. If you were planning to buy a home and you noticed that its foundation was cracked and that its walls were beginning to bulge, you probably wouldn’t feel that it is a trustworthy structure. That’s the way many today, who have not been reared in church (and even some who have) are looking at the Bible and religion, in general. They see a foundation that is cracked because those responsible for its care have allowed impurities and bad materials to get into the mix. Many in the church and in the pulpit today have compromised what the Bible says by allowing millions of years to be poured into the mix and simply saying that it doesn’t matter as long as you trust in Christ. The problem is, if the foundation is defective, the structure will not hold together. If the first part of our Bible is not trustworthy as it is written, then who is to say how much of really is trustworthy. Jesus, Himself, said in John 3:12 - If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? (ESV) Please understand the point here; I am not saying that if you believe that a day in the Bible is not necessarily a day as we know it that you are not a Christian. What I am saying is that your witness to those who are skeptical of the Bible is like a cracked foundation – it’s not consistent and it leads to the suspicion that, if the first part of the Bible is allegory or made up stories, how do you know that the rest is not?
So, just how important is this whole foundation that is in the book of Genesis? If you consider that almost every doctrine that the church holds true has its root in Genesis 1-11, it becomes extremely important. The same Jesus that we are to repent of our sins and trust in is the same Jesus who was responsible for the Creation. He was in the beginning and, since he is the only eyewitness to the event, I believe Him to be the only trustworthy source for what I believe about the creation. Ultimately, the foundation, not only of our faith, but of all that is and ever was is found in the person of Jesus Christ. This is the Jesus who we have historical fact of his existence, historical fact of his death and over 500 eyewitnesses that he was raised from the dead after having been executed on a cross and placed in a borrowed tomb. This is the same Jesus whose words are quoted in the passage we read earlier from the Sermon on the Mount.
In the beginning and in the end, who you are, who we are, and where you and I are going to spend eternity hinges on whether or not our foundation is on Jesus Christ and who He is as revealed by all of Scripture. Jesus not only told his hearers that their foundation must be on the true rock of salvation – but also that it is important what you do with the Word of God. Looking at Matthew 7:26 and following, again, Jesus said, “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. 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.” And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. I hope that you realize we are truly living in an exciting time. The truth is being preached, we’re getting our message out, lives are being changed, Christ is still on His throne and we are gaining momentum. If you’ve been praying for revival to come to our nation, don’t stop now – as many others have said, I believe we are just beginning to feel the birth pangs of a revival in this land.
Yes, there is still sickness and sadness and pain – we still live in a fallen flesh, but the promise of Heaven is growing ever sweeter and God’s grace continues to shower those who look to Him and trust in Him. In the beginning was Christ, through whom and for whom everything that was made has been made. What have you based your foundation on and, if you find your foundation cracked this morning, will you do what is necessary to fix it?
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Bibliography:
"The Answers Book" by Ken Ham, 2006.
