Matthew 7:15 Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. 21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' 23 Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'
24 "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 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. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash." 28 When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29 because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.
Introduction: A storm is coming
A storm is coming. The God of heaven is going to shake this earth with an awesome storm. In fact, it is going to be the Perfect Storm. And everything that is not cemented deep into bedrock will be completely destroyed.
We have spent the last year and a half studying verse by verse through the Sermon on the Mount. It just blows my mind when I think back over all these sermons (I think today is #71), and I consider all that the Lord has taught me through the Sermon on the Mount. And today we come to the very last paragraph. How do you conclude the greatest sermon ever preached? Jesus closes it with a parable about two houses and a storm. So let’s start by taking a look at this storm.
The Storm: Judgment Day
Matthew 7:25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house…
In Luke’s account it came out this way:
Luke 6:48 a flood came, the torrent struck that house …
All that language calls to mind the many times in the Old Testament Scriptures when the Prophets warn of a coming storm.
Isaiah 28:1 Woe … to that city … 2 Like a hailstorm and a destructive wind, like a driving rain and a flooding downpour, he will throw it forcefully to the ground.
Isaiah 29:6 the Lord Almighty will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest
Isaiah 30:30 The Lord will cause men to hear his majestic voice and will make them see his arm coming down with raging anger and … with cloudburst, thunderstorm and hail.
Ezekiel 38:22 I will execute judgment upon him … I will pour down torrents of rain, and hailstones…
So the idea of God’s judgment coming like a storm is a common Old Testament idea. And I think it is very likely that Jesus had that imagery in mind here – especially Ezekiel 13, which speaks of that storm in the context of false prophets.
Ezekiel 13:8 Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign Lord … 10 "'Because they lead my people astray, saying, "Peace," when there is no peace, and because, when a flimsy wall is built, they cover it with whitewash, 11 therefore tell those who cover it with whitewash that it is going to fall.
The word translated “flimsy wall” refers to a stone wall that has no mortar. Mortar is the cement between the stones that makes a wall solid and structurally sound. If you don’t have any mortar, the whole thing will just fall over as soon as there is any pressure against it. Whitewash refers to paint. So the picture is that the people build this wall of protection around themselves – protection from the storm of God’s judgment. They come up with excuses or rationalizations or doctrines that make them feel like they are OK with God and safe from condemnation. But their walls are flimsy. They are a joke. They have no mortar, and so if the slightest little breeze of trouble comes along their walls will collapse. We have a term for this in our vernacular – we call it a house of cards. These people thought they were safe, but what they had built was really a house of cards.
And it would have been obvious that it was a house of cards, but the false prophets came along and painted those walls to make them look like real walls. God’s judgment is on the way and the false prophets come along and tell the people – “Don’t worry about Judgment Day. Your house will stand just fine.” A modern-day example of this is Rob Bell, who wrote the book Love Wins to tell everyone not to worry because there is no hell. All those people Jesus spoke about in verses 22-23 that we talked about last week – the people who get to Judgment Day all excited about Jesus, calling Him Lord, fully expecting to go to heaven, and being sent to hell instead – these false teachers are the ones who deceive those people into thinking they are saved.
The storm is coming. It is the storm of divine judgment, and it is the most lethal and dangerous threat there is. So people build these religious houses to keep themselves safe, and the false prophets paint their flimsy walls to make them look like real walls. But the storm hits in verse 11.
…Rain will come in torrents, and I will send hailstones hurtling down, and violent winds will burst forth. 12 When the wall collapses, will people not ask you, "Where is the whitewash you covered it with?" 13 "'Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in my anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with destructive fury. 14 I will tear down the wall you have covered with whitewash and will level it to the ground so that its foundation will be laid bare. When it falls, you will be destroyed in it; and you will know that I am the Lord. 15 So I will spend my wrath against the wall and against those who covered it with whitewash.
The people and whatever religious ideas or accomplishments they are trusting in, and the false teachers who helped them deceive themselves – they will all be swept away like a house of cards in the perfect storm of God’s wrath. With that as the Old Testament background it is not hard to interpret Jesus’ words here. In the context He is warning about false prophets and people being surprised on Judgment Day and now He talks about a storm. He is still talking about Judgment Day in these closing verses.
But I think it extends beyond the actual moment of being condemned. Scripture tells us of a time of terrible testing and wrath being poured out in time leading up to the Judgment Day. And the rabbis described that testing in terms of a storm as well, because it is part of the judgment. It is all part of the same storm.
And the storm will serve as punishment for the condemned and testing for the righteous – just like the hardships we face right now. Every time we suffer hardship it is a test. The storms of divine judgment through the hardships of life expose how solid your foundation is. That is why two people can suffer the same trial and one is unfazed while the other one is destroyed. And in today’s text Jesus is going to teach us how we can be those who are not flattened when the storms of life hit, and who are not condemned when the Judgment Day storm hits.
The House: Obedience
Card houses
This is such an important passage for us to study because there are so many houses that promise people safety on Judgment Day that will be flattened on that Day. One of them is the house of human religion. Millions of people will duck into the house of church attendance, Bible reading, some denominational affiliation, religious rituals and ceremonies – only to discover all that is a house of cards.
Some people duck into what I call the “Well, at least” house. Conscience strikes and they say, “Well, at least I didn’t do something a lot worse. At least I’m not as bad as most people, who do worse things.” Or, “Yeah, I did that bad thing, but I least I did these really good things to make up for it.”
Other people duck into the house of philosophy. They come up with some ingenious way to imagine that the black marks on their soul are not even really there. They talk themselves out of those evil things even being evil.
Probably the most common house of all is the house of good works. You feel condemnation for something you have done so you go crank out some holy extra credit work to make up for your sin.
Every one of those is a house of cards. It would be safer to hide under a leaf in a hurricane than to rely on any of those houses on Judgment Day. There is only one house with a solid enough foundation to survive the storm of that Day. It is the house that is built on a bedrock foundation.
The Foundation: obedience
And Jesus tells us what that foundation is in verse 24.
Matthew 7:24 everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.
The bedrock foundation is a life of obedience to Jesus’ words. The sand foundation is in verse 26.
26 everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.
Both groups hear His words, but one group does them and the other does not.
The issue is what you do
The issue is what you do. Jesus did not say, “Whoever hears these words of mine and thinks about them…” Or “Whoever hears these words of mine and admires them…” He did not say, “Whoever hears My words and talks about them or debates about them or writes about them…” None of that will make it. Nothing short of doing Jesus’ words will keep the house standing on Judgment Day.
I would have felt a lot better if Jesus had said, “The wise man is the one who hears these words of mine and gives it a shot – tries his best. But Jesus does not just leave it there because that is not the goal. The goal is not to give it a shot; the goal is to get it done. Until Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount are put into practice, your house is on sand.
And that is an emergency that needs to be addressed immediately because when Jesus said the house will fall with a great crash, He means a great crash. That word is placed all the way at the end of the sentence in the Greek for emphasis. The very last word in the entire Sermon on the Mount is megas – huge.
27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and the fall of it was massive.
The fall of those who did not put Jesus’ words into practice will be an epic disaster.
Examine yourself today
And so we need to search our hearts. And notice, please, that Jesus does not point us to the past. He does not say, “You’d better think hard about the day you became a Christian and try to figure out if you really meant it.” If you want to know for sure if you are saved or lost, don’t look back at your conversion; look at your life right now. The test of salvation is always now. Forget about the past. The question is, “Am I putting Jesus’ words into practice today? Am I just hearing, or am I hearing and doing?”
How much obedience?
And of course that brings up the obvious question – how much doing? Does Jesus mean that we have to put His words into practice perfectly? We know He does not mean that because in the beginning of chapter 7 He told us to deal with our own sin before dealing with other people’s sin (remove the log from your eye). How could you deal with your own sin first if you are perfectly obeying everything in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount? There would be no log to remove. He also spoke to people who were genuine children of God (people who know God and are known by God and who are going to heaven) in verse 11 and called us you who are evil. When He taught us to pray He told us to ask for forgiveness on a daily basis. If we are keeping all His words perfectly why would we routinely ask forgiveness? The very first thing Jesus said in the sermon was Blessed are the poor in spirit – those who are utterly destitute with nothing to offer spiritually. I do not think you could say a person is completely bankrupt if he never sins. Throughout the entire sermon Jesus has made it crystal clear that surviving on Judgment Day and entering into eternal glory with Him does not require perfect obedience to His words.
So what kind of obedience does it require? What is the difference between the imperfect obedience that will serve as a solid foundation on Judgment Day and the inadequate “obedience” of those who say, “Lord, Lord” but are surprised when they are condemned to hell?
Encouragement for the saved
Before I answer that I just want to say – I hope this answer is an encouragement to some of you. I realize some of you have walked out of here the past several weeks bruised and bleeding from the sermons. Making it through this closing section of the Sermon on the Mount is no picnic. And if you are someone who thought you were on the narrow road but found out you are on the broad road, or if you have been ravaged by the wolves, or if you were one of those who have a Christ-centered life and call Jesus Lord but you are not really known by Him, or if you were living in a house of cards that could never begin to survive Judgment Day, I hope this series has awakened you. I hope it has terrified you into action to enter through the narrow gate, to forsake false teachers, to come to know the Lord by faith, and to build your house on the bedrock foundation of Jesus’ way.
But there is a danger in all this warning. The danger is that someone who is on the narrow road and who is indeed known by Christ and whose house is built on bedrock will doubt all of that just to be on the safe side. It is a good thing to examine yourself to see whether you are in the faith. It is not a good thing, however, to assume you are lost when you are saved. When God makes you His child, He does not want you to be constantly second-guessing His love for you. You would not want your kids to do that – every day go through a crisis of wondering whether they are truly your child. God wants us to know for sure that we are His so we can come before His throne with boldness and confidence. You cannot have intimacy and closeness with God if you are constantly doubting whether He loves you and is pleased with you.
We need the negative. We need the warnings and the hard words. But Jesus knows we need the positive side as well, so He tells us not only about the foolish man, but also about the wise man. He tells us about both because if you are one who is in for a surprise on Judgment Day Jesus wants you to know that. But if you are one who is going to be safe on Judgment Day Jesus wants you to know that too.
So if the standard is obedience, but He does not require perfect obedience, then what kind of obedience does there have to be in order for us to have confidence that we are saved?
Relational obedience
The answer to that is in verse 23. If we learned anything last week in our study of verse 23 it was that for our obedience to mean anything it has to arise out of a relationship of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and being known by Him. Those who are condemned are condemned because, Jesus says, “I never knew you.” And last time we found that knowing Him and being known by Him refers to a kind of personal relationship where God is pleased with you and allows you to enjoy His presence, and you trust Him and love Him in a way that creates a compelling desire to please Him and to do the things He loves. That is what Jesus means by putting His words into practice. It is a life that is driven in the direction of obedience to Him because of the nature of your relationship to Him. You trust Him and love Him and enjoy being loved by Him and that drives you to say, “I desire more than anything else to obey Him and please Him. I fully intend to give up whatever I have to give up to follow His way. There is no area of my life I am intentionally holding back from Him. And when I stumble and fail in my obedience, as soon as I realize it I repent and turn back to Him.” That is what it means to carry out His words - to do all that as an outgrowth of a personal relationship with Him of trust and love.
And if that is you, be encouraged! If you desire more than anything else to obey Him, and you are resolved to follow Him no matter what, and you long for holiness and nearness to Him, and when you see sin in your life you repent of it and turn back to Him – none of that happens in the life of a fake Christian. If you struggle with assurance, look at the desires of your heart and ask, “Is there any way to explain these desires outside of me having a genuinely new nature?” For example, is the idea of God being pleased with you a motivation for you? If you had to make a choice: Option A gets you an extra $1000 in the bank; option B does not. But you know for a fact that if you did option B God would smile and be pleased with you, but if you did option A He would be displeased – would you be eager to do option B? If so, that is evidence of a redeemed heart. Unbelievers do not care about the smile of God unless it translates into some material blessing.
What about the presence of God? If God announced one day that anyone who showed up here on a particular date and time would experience the most direct fellowship with God and the most profound experience of His presence that they have ever experienced, fake Christians might cancel their other plans and show up but they would think of it as a sacrifice. True children of God would be camped outside the door full of uncontainable excitement and anticipation.
And when it comes to obedience, fake Christians want to get the sin out of their lives so they can be a better person. True Christians declare war on the flesh because they love God’s will and they love righteousness and holiness because they want to be like Christ and be pleasing to the Father.
If that is you, be encouraged. That is the one and only house that will remain standing when the storm of Judgment hits. And that is why I said earlier that good works, in themselves, are a house of cards. You can do good deeds until you are blue in the face, but if they do not spring up from a relational knowledge of Jesus Christ and personal interactions with Him, they are worthless.
Saved by works?
So, what is the storm? Judgment Day – as well as the trouble and hardships that test our faith here and now. And what is the foundation that determines whether your house stands or falls on that Day? -Carrying out the commands of Christ in a way driven by a personal knowledge of Him and a relationship with Him of trust and love. “Wait a minute. It sounds like you are saying here that we are saved by works – saved by obeying Jesus’ words.” Please understand that is NOT what Jesus is saying here. Listen carefully to this: Obedience does not save you, but only the obedient are saved. Obedience does not have the power to save anyone. The only thing that has that power is the grace of God through the cross. Jesus died in our place on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin. And the only way to be saved is to have that payment credited to your account. It is not credited to everyone’s account. It is only applied to your account when you know Jesus Christ personally through faith. When you come to know Him through faith, God credits Jesus’ sacrifice to your account and all your sins are forgiven, and you are adopted into His family as His son or daughter. And only God’s sons and daughters will survive on Judgment Day.
But how do you know if you are truly a son or daughter? What is the marker that proves that? The marker that proves it is a relationship with Jesus Christ that results in you living a life of obedience.
Imagine someone visits an orphanage overseas somewhere, looking to adopt ten children. They go into the place, pick out the ten who seem the most needy, and say, “OK, I want these ten.” At that point the workers in the orphanage put a stamp on the hands of those ten, so they know which ones he chose. He pays whatever the price is to the agency, and comes back a few weeks later to get the kids and take them on the plane back home with him. But when he returns ALL the kids are lined up at the door. Some of them even got markers and tried to draw an image on their hand that looked like that stamp. But the stamp cannot be faked, and only those with the authentic stamp get to go.
Do those ten kids deserve to go more than the others? No. Did they earn the right to go by accepting the stamp? No. Did they make themselves into children of this man by getting that stamp? No. However, the stamp is the marker that shows them to be his children.
On Judgment Day, millions of people will claim to be children of God. But the only authenticating stamp that will prove the claim will be a life of obedience to Jesus Christ that grew up out of a relational knowledge of Him through faith. That obedience does not earn them salvation, it does not make them deserve salvation; it is just the marker that shows them to be adopted into His family.
So the basis of salvation is not our obedience, but rather the cross of Christ. And having the sacrifice of the cross applied in your case depends on whether you know Him through faith. So if all that is true, why doesn’t Jesus point to faith or being known by Him as the foundation?
Why the focus on works rather than faith?
In other places Jesus did emphasize those things as the foundation. But it was also important that Jesus emphasize the obedience that results from faith and knowledge of Him because so many people imagine that they know Him and are known by Him and have faith and trust and believe and love Him and all that – but for some strange reason it just does not seem to have an impact on the way they live. There are preachers and theologians that teach that it is possible to go to heaven without having a transformed life. They say as long as you believe in your mind, then whatever you do in your actions says nothing about whether you are on the road to heaven. That is false. There is one road that goes to heaven and it is the road of holiness. Righteous living. You do not earn your way onto that road, you do not deserve salvation because you are on that road, but still – that road is the only road that goes to heaven. Unless you have a relationship with Christ that causes the direction of your life to be governed by His words – so much so that whenever you stumble or fall short you repent of that and get right back on that road, then your house is on sand. Jesus points to obedience here because He wants to guard us from the error of thinking there is a faith without obedience. Our confidence is not in our works; it is in the cross. But we need to assess our works to discover whether the cross applies to us. You cannot just look to the cross, because the cross does not do you any good if the payment that was made there does not apply to your account. Once you know that it does apply to your account – then you take your eyes off your works and put them on Christ to deal with guilt.
Degrees of obedience
OK, so up to this point it has been black and white – either you are built on sand and you will fall on Judgment Day or you are built on rock and you will stand on Judgment Day. You are either saved or lost, narrow road or broad road, known by Him or not known by Him – no in-between. What I would like to do now is zoom in on those people whose house is on the rock. Speaking now of genuinely saved children of God. Here we all are on this giant bedrock. But we are not all obeying Christ to the same degree, right? We all stumble in following Him, but some of us stumble a whole lot more than others. Some have great faith; others have little faith. Some love the Lord with white-hot, passionate, joyful worship; others need a microscope to see the fruit on the branches of their lives. We have applied this principle in an absolute way between saved people and lost people; but is it legitimate to also apply the principle in a relative way between Christians who have greater or lesser obedience to Jesus Christ? I think the answer is yes. If you know Jesus Christ and trust Him and love Him and as a result you strive with all your might to obey Him, then you will be safe on Judgment Day. But between now and the Second Coming, as we live our lives, we have varying levels of obedience and so to the degree that we are obedient, our house will withstand the tests and trials of life; and to the degree that we disobey Him, the tests and trials and storms of life will cause destruction in our lives. I believe the way Jesus states this calls for both an absolute and a relative application, and I believe the rest of Scripture supports that.
When a Christian is disobedient in some area he makes himself vulnerable to being shaken by the hardships of life. When we disobey the Lord Jesus Christ – any time we take a path other than the one He calls us to walk, we provoke Him to withdraw His blessing on our lives to a degree. He will never totally remove His blessing from a believer, but He will dial it back in degrees when we disobey.
Proverbs 15:10 Stern discipline awaits him who leaves the path
Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man … [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord … 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.
The more you delight in the law of God the more your life flourishes and prospers. Which means, obviously, the less we delight in God’s law the less we have that blessing on our lives.
So when we disobey we make ourselves vulnerable to the storms of life. Two Christians – one walking by the Spirit in great measure, and the other stumbling in disobedience. Then the storm hits. Both of them lose a child in a tragic accident. The one who was walking in obedience suffers terrible sorrow, but the Lord carries him through it and comforts him and strengthens him and gives him hope, and he comes out the other side strong and close to God and with deeper faith and greater joy than he had before. The other guy’s life falls to pieces. He is crushed by the pain, he cannot bear it, he ends up losing his job, his marriage falls apart, and his whole life turns into one giant train wreck. To the degree that you build on sand – to that degree you are vulnerable to the storms of life.
In fact, you can even apply this principle in relative measure to believers – not just with the troubles of life, but even on Judgment Day. Did you know that Judgment Day will not be the same for all saved people? We all build on the foundation of rock, but to adjust the metaphor a little bit – some Christians build with better materials than others.
1 Corinthians 3:11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. 14 If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15 If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.
Conclusion
Well, that brings us to the end of the Sermon on the Mount. And in the next two verses Matthew tells us the people’s response. And it is really kind of sad.
Matthew 7:28 When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29 because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.
That assessment is correct as far as it goes. No question Jesus taught with authority. Those people who try to say, “Oh, Jesus never really claimed to be God. He never claimed to be anything special. He was just a good teacher” – those people cannot possibly have read any of Jesus’ teachings. Certainly not today’s text. Can you imagine if I stood up here and said, “Everyone’s eternal destiny rides on whether they carry out MY words”? Of if I claimed that I will be the one seated at the bench on Judgment Day deciding the eternal fate of every human being? You put the words of Jesus into the mouth of anyone else and you have got a lunatic on your hands. But nobody can accuse Jesus of being a lunatic because He backed up His words with miracles and by rising from the dead.
Jesus Christ is Almighty God, the Judge of all the earth. He is not someone to be trifled with. People hear His demands and say, “I’m just not ready to make that kind of commitment.” That’s a really innocent-sounding way of saying it. But the reality is, the problem is not that you are not ready; it is that you are not willing. If you strip away the euphemism that is really what it amounts to – you are rebelling against the King of kings and you are unwilling to lay down your weapons and surrender to Him. And if that is you, the solution for you is to repent of that rebellion. Let go of whatever it is in this worthless world that you are clinging to, and entrust yourself completely to Him. Do that now, while He may still be found, because it is a limited time offer. Soon it will be too late.
He is an awesome, powerful King, but He is also a delightful Master. If you have been with us throughout this study you know His words are beautiful. And they are true. And they point us to a treasure that is worth any price to obtain. Turn your back on this world, surrender fully to Him, and He will give you abundance of joy in this life, and eternal riches in the life to come. He will forgive you and wipe away all your sins. He will plead your case to the Father and secure for you every blessing imaginable. He will give you a new heart, make you a new person, give you new desires, and enable you to experience and enjoy the very presence of God every day of your life. He will guide you and teach you and encourage you and strengthen you and motivate you and commission you to do great things in His service. And when Judgment Day comes, you will be safe in Him.
Benediction: Matthew 12:28 Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
