18. The Wise Builder

“Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock.” [Luke 6:47-48]

Not everything that appears rock-solid is. The clay soil of the Judaean hills is a good example. If you were to set foot on it when it’s baking beneath the relentless summer sun, you would agree with Moses’ words in the Old Testament that say “the earth underneath you shall be iron,” (Deuteronomy 28:23b). The ground feels like concrete. Come back during the winter rains and you will find that the “iron” beneath your feet has dissolved into a river of clay. It would be easy for someone who hadn’t experienced the winter rains to doubt that digging down to the bedrock was a necessary step in building a house. Under the unforgiving summer sun, standing on ground that feels like solid metal and is nearly impossible to dig into, it would be easy to convince yourself that you were standing on a solid foundation.

Jesus’ listeners were familiar with all of this. Each of them had likely seen or at least heard stories of stone walls built in haste that collapsed on themselves in the midst of a storm. They were also familiar with the immense cost of digging down to the solid rock to lay a foundation. They would remember hands blistered and bleeding, backs strained beyond belief and seemingly endless hours of crushing toil to dig through the topsoil until they reached bedrock. They also knew the incomparable peace of falling asleep in the midst of a storm, certain that the walls protecting their families were secured into immovable rock, solid and secure.

Jesus’ story of the wise and foolish builders is recorded by both Matthew and Luke. Although we have been studying the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s perspective, we are going to look at Luke’s account. Luke includes a few important details that are left out of Matthew’s story. Matthew writes that the wise man builds his house on the rock, but Luke gives us more detail. He explains that in order for the wise man to build His house on the rock, he has to dig down to find it.

This is the last lesson Jesus spoke to His disciples at the closing of the Sermon on the Mount. As we have studied the Sermon on the Mount the last few weeks, we have only scratched the surface of Jesus’ profound and life-changing teaching to His disciples. Throughout His famous sermon, He presents an entirely new way of seeing the world, an entirely new way of living. And now, at the end of His teaching, Jesus tells His disciples that unless they commit to go out and live the words they’ve just heard Him speak, they will be like people building on unstable ground.

Jesus is the rock. If we want to build our lives on His immovable reality, we have to be willing to dig down to find Him. This makes sense, because the gospel story is downwardly mobile. Although everything in the world around us is screaming at us to live lives of upward mobility, Jesus calls us downward. He calls us away from the upward pull of more—more followers, more likes, more money, more power—more of everything. His life points us in the opposite direction. He’s the God who left everything. He left His throne and His immortal body, His omnipotence and His perfect dwelling place to enter a body of vulnerable flesh and inhabit a world of darkness and sorrow. He came down, and He asks us to follow Him. He asks us to lose our lives so that we can find them in Him.

Digging down to find bedrock might not be so different from digging a grave. In some ways, the process represents death. Building our lives on Jesus means a part of us has to die. It means we have to leave behind our desires, fears, lusts, rights, bitterness, unforgiveness, expectations, entitlements, plans—everything but Jesus Himself. We have to dig past all the “soil” until nothing stands between us and Jesus. And when we get down to this point, where we’ve completely died to ourselves and we are standing barefoot on Jesus and His love, we are finally ready to begin. We’re ready to live a life where we can really do all that Jesus teaches. We will no longer be people who merely hear and speak the great words of Jesus. We will be people who live the great words of Jesus, and no storm will shake our lives from Him.

But here’s the part you have to hear. Even if you have built your life on the soil instead of the Rock, and even if it feels like your life is in the process of caving into the storms, Jesus, the Rock, is still there, right where He always has been. He loves you and He’s jealous for you. He allows the storms to come, not because He wants to punish us for building on the wrong foundation, but so we can start over in Him. He wants us near Him, building our lives on Him—that’s why He created us. So when we get it wrong and build our lives apart from Him, when we find that our lives are crashing down around us, He’s the first one to show up with a shovel to help dig us out. Pick up your shovel and dig in with Him, being with Him has been the point all along.