Building on God’s Foundation

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Transcript:

Well, as I mentioned earlier, we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 3 this morning. 1 Corinthians chapter 3. And Paul talks about the subject of building in this passage.

And we can tell when something is well built and when it’s not. I told some of you, as we’ve talked about our gardens, how I built a couple of cages out of PVC pipe for my cucumbers to climb up. and I realized that they were not especially well built when the cucumber vines pulled them down and pulled them apart.

So, and I had to go set them back up. I think they are more well built the second time than they were the first time because they haven’t torn them down again. But we know the difference.

We know that the way you build and what you use to build and what you build on makes all the difference. And we can see this when we look at the world around us. And almost everybody in here I’d say is familiar with the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Pisa, Pisa, I don’t know how they pronounce it, but most of you are familiar with the Leaning Tower. They built that as a bell tower for the cathedral there in Pisa in Italy. They started it back in the 1100s, and this bell tower leans now, and the reason it leans is because they didn’t build it on a deep enough foundation.

The work they did on the foundation was shoddy. And when they started it in the 1100s, they built the first two or three stories of it, and then it was interrupted by one of the crusades or something like that. So they didn’t build any more of the stories.

It already started to lean, but that time gave it some time for the ground to settle, because if the foundation was so bad that they think now if they had completed it up to its current height all at once, it would have just toppled over. The ground needed time to settle, but it leaned, it sank, and it still sinks a little bit because the foundation was not deep enough. It was a bad foundation, and even today they have to use counterweights and things to balance it, and they think they’ve got it stabilized maybe for the next 200 years, and then we’ll see how it goes.

That is not a good foundation, is it? And the building has suffered.

And maybe on a more serious note, you know, I didn’t hear a great deal about the fire in London just recently because it seems like, I don’t know when it happened, I was kind of distracted and wasn’t watching the news when I was away in Phoenix, but I heard just a little bit about the fire in that apartment complex, that high rise, and then next thing I know we’re hearing about the shooting in Virginia and I forgot all about the fire until I heard something, some other mention about it on the news and went and researched it for myself and found out that what I heard in the second place appears to be correct that the reason or part of the reason that the fire at that apartment complex in London that killed 70 plus people was so bad was because they had used the wrong kind of building material. Apparently they had used a flammable kind of cladding on the exterior of the building.

They’re not supposed to use it on buildings over a certain height because it catches fire and they’re supposed to use something else that’s more resistant to fire. So they used the wrong kind of building material. I won’t say that caused the fire, but it certainly caused the fire to be a worse situation than it would have been otherwise. And it was all because they used bad building materials.

They used something faulty. And in contrast, we can look at things like the Great Pyramids at Giza. And those things are thousands and thousands of years old.

Now you can tell by looking at them they’re not as young as they used to be. They’re in a little bit of disrepair. Some of the stones off of the face are gone.

They used to be smooth, apparently, and I don’t know if it’s erosion or people have taken them over the years, but most of the structure is still there. As a matter of fact, when we learned about the seven wonders of the ancient world, the pyramids at Giza are the only ones that are still there, and it’s because they were built on a solid foundation. They were built to exacting specifications, and they used a strong building material, something that lasts.

They used limestone and granite. They used something that lasts. And so those pyramids are still there where, you know, things that were just built in the last few years can be gone like that.

What we build on and what we build with and how we build matters, and that’s the whole purpose of what Paul is writing about. You know, last Sunday morning I mentioned that partway through the passage we were studying, he switches from talking about farming to talking about building. And he goes on with the building metaphor where we’re going to be starting in verse 11.

And he says, for other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. And he’d been talking in verse 10, as we looked at last week, about laying the foundation and building on it. And some are Paul and some are Apollos and some water and some plant. And we’ll talk more about that tonight.

But he goes on to say that there’s no other foundation that can be laid other than Jesus Christ. And honestly, you can build your. . .

I’m not saying the Bible’s wrong here. Let me explain to you what he means. He’s not saying that that is the only possible thing that somebody can build their lives on as a foundation.

Jesus himself even talked about the wise man building his house on the rock while the foolish man built his house on the sand. Do you remember that song? I remember that from when I was in children’s church.

The wise man built his house upon the. . .

And And then the rains came down and the floods came. You remember that song? Okay.

That’s not just some clever song that they taught us in children’s church. Jesus told that story. People can try to build their lives, their house on a sandy foundation, and it never works out.

What he’s saying here is there’s no other foundation for the Christian life. If you want to build your life on something that lasts, there is no other foundation than the foundation that has already been laid which is Jesus Christ. So as he’s talking about building the Christian life, he’s talking about building on the right foundation, and it’s Jesus. He says in verse 12, Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man’s work shall be made manifest. For the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man’s work, what sort it is.

That word try means test. He’s saying what we build on the foundation matters. What we use to build on this foundation matters. And he said, if anybody builds with any of these materials, it’s going to become clear.

It’s going to become evident. You can’t hide the true nature of the building for long. If it’s shoddy construction, and it’s full of mold, and it’s full of, eventually it’s going to show itself, right?

If you go buy a car, and it’s not well constructed and well made, or not well repaired, I’m not talking about my experience, but you’re going to figure that out sooner or later. I remember that old episode, I think it was the Andy Griffith show, where Barney goes to buy a car from a little old lady, and she’d put, what was it, graphite or something in the gears to make it run smooth? Y’all remember this, some of you?

They get a few miles down the road, and suddenly the steering column starts coming. You can’t hide that stuff forever. She tried to trick him and say that, hey, this is a well-built car, well taken care of.

Yeah, eventually the true nature is going to shine through. So what he says is you’re going to be tried by the fire. Your works are going to be tested.

And it’s going to become very clear what you’ve been building with. And he talks here about the gold and the silver and the precious stones. But on the other hand, he talks about the wood and the hay and the stubble.

These things will last when they are tried by the fire. These things will not. The gold and the silver and the precious jewels.

When they’re put through the fire, that’s how they are purified. That’s how they get better. I’ve watched these things, how it’s made, and they’ll show you.

I don’t know if it was actually an episode of how it’s made, but it was one of those type of shows where they take all the gold and the goldsmith will dump it in the pot and they’ll heat it up to thousands of degrees and they’ll melt it down and all this fire and all this heat and if you put hay in there, it’s gone. If you put wood in there, it’s gone. Stubble, I don’t even know what that is, but it doesn’t sound like a sturdy building material. It’s gone.

But when they heat up the gold to these thousands of degrees and they put it through the fire, what happens is all the impurities bubble up to the top and they scrape them off. And what they’ve got is pure gold. So he’s giving them an example that they would understand.

You put the gold, you put the silver, you put the precious jewels in the fire and they come out better and stronger. You put the wood, hay, and stubble in the fire, and they burn up and they go away. And so he says, if any man builds with these things on the foundation, in verse 12, if they build with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man’s work shall be made manifest. Verse 13 tells us that the way that we live our lives, the way that we build on this foundation is eventually going to show.

We can outwardly look like we’re doing a great job in serving God, but eventually when we’re tried by the fire, what we’re really building is going to show up. We won’t be able to hide it. For the day shall declare it because it shall be revealed by fire, and fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.

Verse 14 says, If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. He says, If there’s anything left of these building materials, if you’ve built, And we’ll see in just a few moments in verse 17, verse 16 and 17, that what we’re building is a sanctuary, a temple of God, that we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit as believers. And so what we’re building is a life that the Holy Spirit inhabits.

And our building materials, the life that we build, the works that we do, for the Holy Spirit to inhabit us, we want to build it out of the right kind of materials. And when we’re tried by the fire, he says, if there’s anything that remains, then we’ll be rewarded for that. If any man’s work abides.

So if the fire comes through, it burns up everything that’s worthless. If it burns up the wood, hay, and stubble, and there’s anything left, then God rewards us according to that. But if any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss.

So it’s entirely possible, ladies and gentlemen, for us to go through our entire lives working hard and building something that we think we ought to be proud of, but not using the right materials. And I don’t think this necessarily means living a sinful life, because he’s writing to people who are trying to build something. It’s more likely that these are things that are done out of the flesh, and things that are done with wrong motivation.

And you can sometimes do the right thing and do it for a wrong reason. Amen? And those things are going to be burned up when tried by the fire.

He says we’ll suffer loss. Now he doesn’t mean that we’re going to be lost. He says that we’ll suffer loss because our life’s work is burned up. Our life’s work has amounted to nothing.

If it’s not done out of a sense of obedience to Jesus Christ, then our work amounts to nothing. And everything that we’ve built is gone. Everything we worked for is lost. He says, but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.

Now this phrase, yet so as by fire is kind of confusing. I’ve looked at the Greek. That didn’t help because I don’t speak Greek.

I’ve looked at the things that helped me interpret what the Greek means. It’s still kind of confusing. I’ve looked at a few other translations, and my understanding of this is that to put it in our language that we would use today, he’s saying that we’ll be saved by the skin of our teeth.

That’s how we just barely made it. I mean, thank God we made it. Thank God you the fire.

Thank God that he takes you to heaven and you get to escape judgment. He said, but it’s like the one and only time I ran a 5k. There were tons of people that they made it across that finish line.

There were people who ran a half marathon that day and they just still were raring to go. And my dad’s a marathon runner. I ran a 5k with him because he wanted me to.

And he made it across the finish line. He just had energy left to spare. He wants to go, you know, jog back to the car, I made it across that finish line by the skin of my teeth.

I was the last person to finish that 5k who wasn’t in a wheelchair or a stroller. Y’all try to go run a 5k and then laugh at me about that. No, no, it’s funny now.

I thought I was going to die then. That’s what I get for not training. I thought, well, I walk and jog.

I can do, yeah, no, it’s different trying to run, and it’s different when you start out the first K trying to keep up with the group of guys from the Navy. I should have known I couldn’t have kept up with them. Anyway, I digress.

There were people who made it with juice to spare. I made it across the finish line by the skin of my teeth. We know the difference.

There are going to be people who make it across the finish line. There are going to be people who come out of that fire with a whole sanctuary built of gold where they’ve spent their lives in obedience to Jesus Christ, building a life on the foundation that he’s provided and being obedient to him. And then there are going to be others who make it through the fire empty-handed, but thank God at least they made it out of the fire, made it through the fire.

He says, know ye not that you are the temple of God. That is the truth, isn’t it? We are the temple of the living God.

Why is there not a temple today? Because we’re it. And I’m not trying to sound new agey and oh you’re one with God and he’s one with you.

Now I’m telling you what the Bible says that if you are a believer if you’ve been born again through faith in Jesus Christ if you’ve been bought with the blood that he shed at Calvary then the Holy Spirit of God lives inside of you and has from the moment that you were converted. He’s in you right now and if he lives in you then you are his temple every bit as much as there was the temple and the tabernacle in the Old Testament and and the Spirit of God would come and dwell in the Holy of Holies with the Ark of the Covenant. That same God dwells in you today.

Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Bible makes that abundantly clear. You and your body and yourself and the life that you build is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Boy, if we really believe that, that’ll change some things about the way we live our lives, won’t it? It ought to. To realize that, I know sometimes we think, well, God can’t see me right now.

God can see everything. Or if I can just hide, you know. Not only can God see you from heaven, God is in you if you’re a believer.

He knows that thought before you even thought it. But he tells us we are the temple of God. God dwells within you.

And the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. He tells the people at Corinth, don’t you know that? And of all churches for him to write this to, they were the ones, it seems like, who needed to hear it.

Because this church oftentimes acted like, well, God’s thousands of miles away. He doesn’t know what we’re doing. No, God is right there inside of you.

If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are. And I’ve struggled with this verse a little bit over the last week because I know the Bible does not teach that we lose our salvation.

I’ve had that argument with myself. I got that settled for myself about a decade ago. And I know that there are some people smarter than I will ever think about being who believe you can lose your salvation, but I don’t see it in the scriptures.

And so I thought that’s got to mean something else because God’s not going to contradict himself. But when you look at the broader context of 1 Corinthians, what he’s talking about here is that they as the church, as individuals and collectively, they were the temple of God as this body. They’re the temple of God.

And yet there were false teachers around who wanted to destroy that temple, who wanted to destroy them. And maybe they didn’t think about this. Hey, I’m going to lead people to hell.

But they’re teaching things that that’s the end result of. And so what he’s saying is you’re over here building on the foundation. And hopefully building out of gold and silver and precious jewels, but you’re over here building on the foundation of Jesus Christ. And there are people out there who are teaching wrong ideas, who are teaching what the Bible calls damnable heresies.

I didn’t just curse at you. That means heretical views of God that are going to lead people to damnation. There are these people out here who are teaching, not just wrong opinions, wrong ideas, there are things that we probably disagree about, and you have the right to be wrong if you want to be.

But not everything that we disagree, some of you caught that, not everything that we disagree on makes one of us heretical. As I talked about a few weeks ago, we can disagree on the timing of the end times, and it doesn’t mean we’re heretical. We can disagree on, I’m trying to think of examples here. There are any number of things we can disagree on. We can disagree on the timing of the, the timing of Genesis and the timing of Exodus.

And there are lots of people who disagree on that and think Genesis took millions of years and then think Exodus happened just, you know, a short time before Jesus. I think they’re very wrong. Doesn’t mean they’re heretics, it just means they’re a little confused.

But there are also people who teach, hey, there’s another way of salvation. Yeah, that’s heresy. That’s dangerous.

Hey, you need Jesus plus the law. You have to be circumcised in order to be. .

. No, no, no, no, no, no. Grace plus anything else is no longer grace. That’s heresy.

Well, Jesus, you know, started out fully man and then became fully God. No, no, that’s adoptionism. That’s heresy.

Jesus is and always has been co-equal with God the Father. Fully God, fully man. I don’t understand it, but it’s what the Bible teaches.

there are some things that are dangerous because they undermine the truth about salvation. And that’s just a fact. They undermine the truth about salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

And there are people who would teach these ideas and lead people astray and undermine the church. And he’s saying, well, you’re over here building something worthwhile. They’re over here trying to, you know, dig tunnels under the foundation and collapse it.

And he says, and by the way, God’s going to reward them as well. So I don’t read this as a threat saying, hey, by the way, hey, by the way, if you mess up on building the temple, God’s going to zap you. I think this is a warning about the false teachers on the outside who were trying to collapse the temple from within.

So he talks about this whole thing is about building on the foundation that God has provided us. And one very important distinction that I want to make here, before we go too much further, is that the most important thing here is the foundation. Do not take from this that, hey, if I just obey Jesus Christ, I’ll get to go to heaven.

That is not what the Bible teaches. You cannot build this gold and silver and jeweled structure on any old foundation you want to. If you’re not building on the foundation of Jesus Christ, it doesn’t matter what else you do.

So in other words, you could do all the good works you want in this life. You could do all the religious things that you want. You could be kind to people.

You could go to church. You could give money to the poor. You could break for animals.

You could do all the things that we look at and say, well, that’s a great life to live. And if you’re not building it on the foundation of Jesus Christ, it’s worthless. I mean, hey, it’s nice to be nice, but it’s worthless in the sense that it doesn’t get you any closer to God.

All of this building assumes that you’re building on the foundation of Jesus Christ. What’s that mean to build on the foundation of Jesus Christ? If the foundation is Jesus Christ in your life, that means that the life you’re trying to build is based on the fact that you have trusted in Jesus Christ as your Savior. That he’s the cornerstone of all of it.

That I have no relationship with God apart from Jesus Christ. Many years ago, as a young child, I realized that I was a sinner. I realized that I was destined for hell because of my sins. And partly out of fear of hell and partly out of the thought, but I love God and I want to be with Him.

I believed it when my parents, when my Sunday school teachers, when my children’s church leaders, when they told me that the only way to get to heaven was because Jesus Christ died to pay for my sins. That those sins had to be paid for. He paid for them.

He was the only one who could pay for them and He paid for them in full and all I had to do was belief. And that belief is not just agreeing, yes, I believe He did that, but really believing I needed that forgiveness, believing that Jesus paid for my forgiveness and asking him for it. Folks, that was the foundation.

Anything you do before that moment doesn’t cut any ice with God. It’s that foundation that matters more than anything else. Because there are people that he writes about in here who are going to be saved just by the skin of their teeth, who are going to get across the finish line and out of the fire just by the skin of their teeth, even though everything that they’ve done, all their works have burned up because it’s not our works that ultimately matter the most. It’s the foundation.

And if they’ve got that foundation, even if everything burns up, there’s still something there. So I want to make that abundantly clear. Don’t take from this that, oh, he’s just teaching if we’ll be obedient to Jesus, we’ll get to heaven.

No, you can’t be obedient enough to Jesus to get you to heaven. What you need is to realize your disobedience and realize that Jesus died for you and ask God’s forgiveness because of what he did on the cross. Then you’ve got the foundation to build on.

At that point, you’re saved and you can begin building a life of obedience. And then there are others who say, well, yeah, I trusted Christ. I don’t have to do anything ever again. Well, that’s the wrong attitude, first of all.

And if you think, well, I’m saved. I don’t have to do anything because it’s by grace. You might want to check your salvation.

You might want to do some soul searching and see if it was genuine because when Jesus saves us, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell inside of us, as I already mentioned, and the want to should change somewhere along the way. I’ve been trying to explain to my son that it doesn’t make you perfect overnight, doesn’t make you perfect ever on this side of eternity, but there should be some kind of instant change. There should be some kind of change that takes place in our hearts at the moment of conversion, and then God still spends the rest of our lives is molding us into what He wants us to be.

So we’ve got errors on both sides here. One that says, I can just work as hard as I can and be obedient and I’ll get to heaven. Not what He’s saying.

You need the foundation. And others saying, I’ve got the foundation. It doesn’t matter what I build on it.

It does matter. It does matter. Because if you don’t have a desire to build something worthwhile, you need to go back and check the foundation.

But it does matter because who wants to get across the finish line by the skin of their teeth and say, well, I may be empty-handed, but don’t you want to build something that lasts? And not so you can get to heaven and say, look at how wonderful I was in life. But as a believer, as somebody who has trusted Jesus Christ, as someone who realizes what Jesus saved us from, don’t you have a desire out of thankfulness to Him, out of gratefulness for what He did, don’t you have a desire to build something that glorifies Him, to build something that lasts?

The foundation matters. The building materials matter. The building materials are the way that we live our lives.

And I believe it’s acts of obedience. It’s not religious stuff. It’s not good works by themselves.

Because as I said, we can do the right things for the wrong reasons. It’s obedience. And then when we do our good works, it’s out of the heart of obedience.

So as a believer, your building materials are the way you obey Him and serve Him. and the finished product for each of us, as the Bible describes, is the temple of God. What kind of temple are you building?

Because a life of obedience built on Jesus Christ is the only thing of lasting importance. You can spend your life doing a lot of important things. You can spend your life doing a lot of important things, but eventually it’s not going to matter if it’s not built to last. I feel like just before I went to the convention, I was talking about on a Wednesday night where Jesus talks about moths and rust corrupting and thieves breaking in and stealing.

And I said, every car sitting in a junkyard somewhere was once something that people paid thousands of dollars for, just had to have, and they financed, and they messed up their credit. But they threw everything into it because I just have to have it. And I got to thinking about it again.

It’s funny I mentioned that right before I went to Phoenix. That SUV I had was my baby. And now it’s junk to me.

Because I told the people at the dealership, whether they gave me a trade-in or not, it was staying on their lot in Amarillo. It was not coming back with me. Everything that we think matters and has value eventually becomes junk.

I know people who have spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building beautiful homes just the way they wanted them. And eventually there was a fire or a tornado. Suddenly there was just a pile of rubble.

It didn’t last. We spend our lives developing careers, and we want to be at the top of our field, and eventually we get to where we retire, and who are we? Or we get hurt, and we can’t do that job anymore. And who are we?

What do we have left? We spend our lives amassing money and stuff, and it can be gone in an instant. As I’m fond of saying, developing wealth takes time, and losing it happens very, very quickly, usually.

You know what? For that matter, we can even do good works just on our own and be nice people and be beloved by everybody in town. And guess what?

In 100 years or 200 years, probably nobody’s going to remember us. I tell you what, that thought scares me more than dying, is the thought that eventually nobody’s going to even remember I existed. And what was it all worth?

It doesn’t last. The only thing that lasts is what we can stand before God with. Again, not for him to save us. I’m talking about if you’ve already been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ. But what have we done to obey God and glorify him?

A life of obedience built on the foundation of Jesus Christ is the only thing of lasting importance and lasting value. And so this morning, having looked at what the Apostle Paul says about this, what he wrote to the church at Corinth about this, I’m going to leave you with a couple questions. And it’s not anything you have to answer this morning.

As a matter of fact, I’d much rather you leave here and think about it for a little while. over the next couple days. Because I’m sure we’ll leave here and you’ll go have lunch and you’ll forget all about it.

But I’m hoping in a day or two you’ll remember the questions and they’ll rattle around in your brain and bother you as they’ve bothered me and force you to deal with God about it. My first question to you is where are you building your life? Now this is a question I should say that I would love for you to nail down this morning.

What foundation are you building your life on? Are you building your life on the foundation of Jesus Christ or on something else? Because if it’s not on Jesus Christ, nothing else is going to last. This morning, if you’re building your life on some other foundation, you’re trusting in something that doesn’t last. You’re trusting in your good works to get to heaven and they’re not going to get you there.

You’re trusting maybe in who your family was. My daddy was a preacher. My grandpa was a deacon.

That is not going to get you there. You’re trusting in, well, If the good outweighs the bad, maybe God will just let me in. And God’s standard is absolute perfection.

There’s no outweighing the bad that’s going to get you there. If you’re building your life on any other foundation than Jesus Christ, it’s not going to last. And so I would ask you this morning what foundation you’re building your life on. If you’ve never trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, I’ve already laid out for you in the message why that’s important.

We’ve all sinned against God. God is a holy and just judge. and our sin has to be punished.

The punishment is eternal separation from Him in hell because His standard is absolute sinless perfection. To get into heaven, we’d have to be absolutely sinlessly perfect and we’re not. And so the only way to escape that penalty is for somebody else to pay it for us.

And Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross and shed His blood and died as the perfect sacrifice to pay for your sins. He paid for them. He was the only one who could pay for them and He paid for them in full.

And now God offers you forgiveness, eternal life, and a relationship with him because of what Jesus Christ did. If you’ll simply believe that Jesus died for your sins and rose again, and ask God’s forgiveness because of that. And you’ve got that foundation in Jesus Christ to build something that lasts.

And to those of you this morning who are believers, I would ask you to think about what you’re using as your building material. Are you looking at it with the end in mind at the beginning? of saying I’m