This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Well, if you would keep your Bible open at that passage, it would be ever so helpful.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, as you taught your disciples, and we read of it in that passage, we pray that you would teach us now this morning, each one of us. Amen.

Now, if you've come this morning expecting a sermon on shipwrecks, as it says you're going to get, well, you're not.

Rocks are not a good idea in a shipwreck. They have more use if you're building a house. I don't know where the title came from, but I'm sticking to the passage.

Also I was thinking you might have come because you didn't go to the 9:30, it having been a sort of all age thing and you probably imagined that there you would have to do songs with actions and that's why you're here this morning. But don't tell anyone.

A song with actions based on this passage was part of many of our upbringings, I expect. What happened? Very good. The rain came down and the. And the house on the rock.

You are a well educated congregation, aren't you? And what about the other house? What happened to the house on the sand? It fell. Very good.

I'm told an American version says splat at that point. Got more feel to it, hasn't it? That's as near as you're going to get to an action song this morning.

The danger of that is that we see this story as for children, that this story is just something like a fairy tale, a folklore sort of thing, and we then miss what it has to tell us, which is much more important, much more powerful, that can really affect us. It's a story with deep theological roots and I hope we can dig into that a little this morning. There are two versions of it. The one we perhaps hear more is the one that is the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters five, six and seven. This is a version that Luke recorded with some of the same material, though here it says that he was on a flat place, not up a mountain.

So what is this about? Well, let's start by looking at verses 46 and 47.

Jesus says to the crowd around him that some of you say, lord, Lord, and do not do what I say. He says, these are people with a contradiction in their life. They say one thing, Lord, Lord, then they do nothing about it.

And so he tells them this parable, this contrast between two men, one who was building his house and dug deep. We'll come back to that. The other one was building a house just on the ground. And it's this contrast which is at the heart of the passage. It's about the choice we have to make.

Is it just words, our life, good intentions, our image? Or is our life about how those words can change us, can go deep into us and turn us into something which is different from how we started?

Well, now, if you were going to build a house for yourself in the 21st century, you'd probably first of all give Kevin McLeod a ring and ask the Grand Designs team to come and help you. Do be aware that's going to nearly double your costs. I always wonder about that. Do the team. Does the BBC?

Is it BBC? I can't remember. Do they put the extra money in? I'd be very upset if they didn't. Next, you'll need an architect and he will want a quantity surveyor.

He'll. You'll want someone who can do digital images and you can then fly through them. You'll need to approach the local authority for planning permission. If you live in the conservation area, like the rich part of the village, you'll need even more permissions. You'll need to have an environmental survey done.

Are there any bats involved? Are you still with me? Maybe you've given up. Then you'll need a building contractor. They will need to bring in JCB's, earth moving equipment, cement lorries and a host of other things.

Then they'll go in for the first fit and the second fit they will want a positive army of tradespeople. How's your bank balance doing at this point? You'll need people to fit wires, people to fit plumbing. It could go on and on for years. Just to encourage you, if you're planning on building a house, if, on the other hand, you were building a house in the first century ad, you would need a shovel, some kind of pickaxe or an alternative, and either a wheelbarrow.

Now, I'm not absolutely sure wheelbarrows were invented at that point. Maybe you'd have to depend upon people carrying in baskets. It would help, therefore, to have family members to help. And what you would have to do is dig.

I wonder which you would prefer. Well, let's turn to our passage and see what else lies in it.

We've seen in verses 46 and 47, there's a choice to be made. Are our words going to be matched by our actions?

Well, the first man we meet in verse 47 and 48, he's a man in Matthew, he's called the wise man, who Comes to Jesus, hears Jesus and puts his words into practise. He's the one who is both hearing and doing. And Jesus says, he's like a man who's building a house. And he does three things. He digs down, he lays the foundations, and those foundations are on the rock.

Now, if you were building in Galilee where Jesus was saying this, you would find that there's different types of land. In some, the soil is only three centimetres deep. In others, the soil is three metres deep. And the wise man knows that whichever it is, he has to dig down until he hits the rock, the solid ground.

Therefore choose the right place to dig in.

Now, when Jesus says dig deep, this parable has got a meaning for us. Perhaps when we first hear the words of Jesus and we're attracted to him, then the first thing that we have to do is to dig deep. Some things in our lives may need to be taken away. We've just sung all I once held dear Built my life upon all this world Reveres and wars to own those are the things that we're going to have to dig down to get rid of. Maybe old habits have to be faced, old thoughts, old patterns of thinking that we've lived with perhaps for a long time.

Old priorities may have to change. All of that is part of the digging deep that Jesus is talking about. And having dug down until we've met the rock, then it's time to lay the foundations. What has to be put in in place of what has been dug out?

Well, Jesus is talking, isn't he, about putting in what he teaches.

The word of God which Jesus brings is the rock on which our life in him depends. We need to listen to His Word. We need to spend time reading God's word, the Gospels, obviously, to hear what Jesus himself taught. But we need then perhaps to go back into the Old Testament to find out how God had dealt with his people and how that had led up to Jesus. To understand Jesus, you sometimes need to look into the Old Testament.

Let me show you that about this very passage In Isaiah, chapter 28, there's a similar story about people and what they're going to build on. It's quite a complex passage, so I'm not going to deal with all of it. But in verse 16, Isaiah says, this therefore says the Lord God, behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone of a sure foundation. Whoever believes will not be in haste.

Before Jesus time, the people of God did indeed look towards Zion. That's Jerusalem and the temple that had been built there in the time of Solomon. And indeed, in that temple, there was a particular stone a little bit proud of the floor that they thought of as the foundation stone. That's what they looked to rely on and all the system of sacrifices that went on in that temple. Now, Jesus in this passage is saying something quite incredible.

He's saying we can move away from that because now I am a rock. We've moved from a building to a person. So what we build our foundations on, if we are to be his followers, is him, not a building. Buildings are lovely. I love it.

But what matters much, much more is that we are building our lives on the foundation of Jesus and his teaching. We look back to the Old Testament, we look on to later in the New Testament, and we hear how the first Christians lived out their lives because they had encountered and met Jesus and he became their cornerstone. There's another passage. Some of you will know where that whole thought is built upon. So if we're to build our foundations on Jesus, we just spend time with him in the Bible, perhaps alone, perhaps with others here, Sunday by Sunday, as the Word is preached.

All those are ways in which we can put down new foundations in His Word.

And then we can build our new house. And then when the storm comes and the floods come up, our house will stand. Nothing can shake it. We won't be protected from storms. Everyone has storms in their lives.

But our house, if we have dug out the old and put in the new, will stand in those floods.

But then Jesus much more sadly goes on to talk about the man who had built it says here on the ground, Matthew, who perhaps knew Palestine a little bit better than Luke, who had come from probably somewhere in Asia Minor. He knew that there was an alternative to building on the rock. If you didn't feel like lots of digging, you would probably find that where the rivers came down, they cut down and deposited lots of sand. And that's what Jesus is talking about in the summer. Those rivers, wadis they're called now, aren't they, are empty of water and very attractive flat lands.

It's really a bit like local authorities and floodplains, but I think that's a bit contentious. I won't go there. But if you saw this lovely flat space, nice easy digging, nothing too hard, wouldn't you be attracted to shift away a bit of sand and throw up a quick house? Obviously, that was what Jesus was talking about. They wanted an easy option.

But they were in the wrong place. They were people. Jesus Says who heard his word but did nothing about it? Verse 49. The one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built his house on the flat ground on the sand.

Now, when the flood comes to him, then you know what happens. Water begins to trickle down the wadi. He's perhaps a bit worried, puts a few sandbags out. We've seen people doing it, haven't we? And then it gets more and more as winter comes and eventually there's a torrent coming down that wady.

Do you remember those video images of Boscastle in 2004, 20 years ago, when the whole village, it's a narrow Cornish village, two rivers and a vast amount of water in about three hours up on the moors came flooding down and swept nearly all the village out. 70 cars were carried out to sea. Fortunately, I don't think anyone lost their lives. Other such floods have been much more dangerous. But that's what this is like.

Torrents of water coming down and sweeping away the house he'd built.

Well, now, I wonder which of these images is a better description of your relationship with Jesus. You've come, you've heard, now are you acting upon it? Is it changing your life? Have you had to dig down and got rid of old patterns in your life? Have you then had to put in new foundations, new thinking, new knowledge of Jesus and his Word?

I hope so. There's a lovely old hymn which I don't think we sing very often, which is describing this.

I'm not sure I can remember every word of it, so I printed it out. It's this. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ My righteousness I dare not trust the sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus name and here's the key point. On Christ the solid rock I stand all other ground is sinking sand. Very interesting.

The man who wrote that was called Edward Mote. He grew up in a completely non Christian background. The earliest part of the 19th century. He lived in a pub which his parents ran. When he was 18, he heard the gospel and came to faith and then spent the next 30 or more years working as a cabinet maker in the city of London.

He wrote this hymn, he wrote others, but this is the one that's known and put it in his pocket. Then that evening he went to visit a lady in her family who was dying and he'd left behind the hymn book he'd meant to take. So he took this out of his pocket and he shared it with them. The last verse says, when he shall come with trumpet sound O may I then in him be found in him my righteousness alone faultless to stand before the throne when he came to the end of his working life and was in his late 50s, he was called to be the pastor of a church in Horsham, a strict Baptist church there. And there he was the pastor for 25 years until he died.

When that last verse, which I've just read, was something, it's known that he said his life, starting in a pub as a working man, a carpenter, but then turned around and rebuilt on a new foundation, was the rock he depended upon on Christ. The solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. Can we say the same ourselves? Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we praise your name that you sent your son to come and live here on earth and to be the foundation stone for the new kingdom of God which you were inaugurating. May each one of us depend on that rock for every part of our life. Amen.