Is What You’re Building Built to Last?

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I want to start this morning by showing you a photo that popped up in one of my social media feeds this week. It may be a little small, but if you can’t see what’s going on here, it’s a picture of Gerald Ford’s refrigerator. No, not literally his, but it is from the 70s.

And it says above it, 2022 appliances break within two years. 1970s refrigerator. I will outlive you and everyone you love.

I am eternal. I am time itself. and some of you know that to be accurate I know that to be accurate we have a or we we did up until recently have a deep freeze that belonged to my great grandmother and when she passed away my grandmother ended up with it and my grandmother wasn’t using it I asked if I could have it and we had it for several years it still worked I just didn’t have the will or 30,000 Hebrew slaves to move it again. And so when we knew we were coming here, we hauled it as far out as I cared to take it, which was to the curb, and it now has a new owner and a new home.

But that deep freeze, as far as I know, still runs. It will probably outlive me. We’ve all seen things like that, that things that are built well will continue to last. They’ll continue to work.

They’ll continue to go on. And that’s the sort of thing that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, that things that are built well, things that are built properly, going on and continuing and lasting and standing the test of time. And Paul describes how the lives that we’re building, the things that we’re building with our lives, they are either going to last or they’re going to perish.

Now, to be very clear off the bat, what we’re looking at this morning, Paul is writing to believers. He’s not talking about heaven or hell situations. He’s talking about, for the believer, what remains at the end of this life?

What have we done, what have we built that remains? And he poses that question for the Corinthians, and it’s an important question for us to consider as well. Are we building lives that, not to make too much light of it, are we building lives that are like this 70s refrigerator?

Or are we building lives that are like the stuff that they build now that’s supposed to last two years and then you have to buy another one? So we’re going to look at 1 Corinthians chapter 3 this morning. And we’re going to start where we left off, where he talked last week about those who are workers, those who are servants in God’s work, and how they tended to take men like Paul himself and like Apollos and put them up on a pedestal. And Paul made the point that really we’re just servants here working for the Lord.

He uses the example of planting and growing for them to understand. Now he moves into another metaphor for them to understand because he said we are God’s building. And he’s talking about what God intends to be built on our lives.

And so we’re going to look at that this morning in 1 Corinthians chapter 3. If you haven’t turned there with me already, please do so. If you don’t have your Bible with you or can’t find 1 Corinthians 3, that’s all right.

It’ll be on the screen. but once you have it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to look at verses 10 through 15 this morning. He says, starting in verse 10, According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder, I laid a foundation, and another is building on it.

But each man must be careful how he builds on it. For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident, for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward.

If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. And you may be seated. Paul here is talking to the people at Corinth because as I’ve mentioned to you before there was so much that was going wrong in the church at Corinth the church was just infested with worldliness some of that is because of the life that they came out of some of that is because the world around them was so pagan and so worldly in Corinth it was a place that was known for its decadence and so when you come out of a lifestyle like that it takes a while sometimes for the rough edges to be sanded off.

But Paul made the case in previous weeks that we’ve looked at, they should have grown past where they were. And I’m just going to give you a real world example of this because it happened last week and I thought that is exactly what I preached about. There was a congressperson from South Carolina who made an inappropriate sexual joke at a prayer breakfast. I don’t know some of you have heard about this.

And the crowd, you can hear kind of nervous chuckling. You know, sometimes you laugh not because you think it’s funny, but because is somebody playing a prank on us? And when she was called out on it, she doubled down.

Oh, it was just a joke. Even my pastor thought it was okay. But somebody made the point, oh, she’s only been a Christian for four years.

Pretty sure after four years, we ought to know some things about the faith we profess. Not saying we’re expecting anybody to be perfect. And if you’d come out with the explanation that, you know, I wasn’t thinking and I know that was wrong, that’s one thing.

But say after four years, oh, she’s still completely a baby Christian. That’s a different story. That’s the kind of thing that, and if you think I’m being political, okay, she’s from the political party I’m a member of, so it’s not like I’m just attacking the other side.

I heard that and I heard her explanation and I thought that is exactly what Paul was talking about when he said you should be off the milk and on to the meat by now, but you haven’t grown to the point where you’re supposed to be, and you still think these things are okay. So he’s dealing with the worldliness in the church, and he says we have to make sure of what we’re building. We have to consider what we’re doing and what we’re putting together and what our efforts are going toward.

And we need to understand right from the beginning, Paul’s point, that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the foundation of the church. It’s not the culture we come from. It’s not the culture we’re surrounded by.

It’s not what our preferences are. It’s not what our dreams and hopes are. None of those things are wrong in and of themselves, unless they conflict with God’s word.

But they are not the foundation of the church. The foundation of the church is Jesus Christ and the good news of his death, burial, and resurrection. Paul said there in verse 10 according to the grace of God which was given to me like a wise master builder I laid a foundation when he had come and done some of the beginning work of the church at Corinth he said I laid a foundation for you all I told you where this all needs to start what it all needs to be based on and then he goes in verse 11 and says what that foundation is for no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid which is Jesus Christ so there is only one acceptable foundation for the church, and it’s Jesus Christ. When we try to base what we’re doing individually and as a group, when we try to base it on other things, it’s not going to work.

We’re building it on the wrong foundation. If we come and try to pull out the foundation that’s already there and slip a new one in and build it on something else, it’s wrong. There’s no other foundation that can be laid for the church, for us as a group, for us as individual members, for our lives.

There is no other foundation that can be laid other than the one that has already been laid, Paul says, and that’s Jesus Christ. And that means that we as a church, we as individuals in the church, and understand throughout this message, when I say the church, I’m talking about us as a group, and I’m talking about us individually. If you belong to him, and especially if you identify as a part of this body, we are still the church when we walk out these doors Sunday afternoon. We are still the church as we go about our business on Monday through Saturday, and then we come and gather as the church on Sunday and the other times we meet.

So understand that when I’m talking about the church, I’m talking about when we gather, and I’m talking about what goes on in this building, and I’m talking about what we do together, but I’m also talking about how we live it out in our individual lives. What we do as a church, what we do and what we teach must be in obedience to Him and for His glory. Because without that foundation, everything we’re building, whether it’s the stuff we do as a church or whether it’s the stuff we do in our daily lives, everything we build is on shaky ground if it doesn’t have that foundation.

If you try to build something with the wrong foundation or you try to build something without a foundation, it’s just never going to be as sturdy. I did this with my chicken coop a few months ago. I was trying to figure out what to do and how to not go into tremendous debt, if you see some of the chicken coops that they sell, they are nice.

Some of them are nicer than the house I live in, right? But I didn’t want to go into tremendous debt for these spoiled chickens. So Christy gave me the idea.

I ordered a shed from Lowe’s and had it delivered and just a little metal shed, and I customized it to make it a chicken coop. There was stuff in the information in the box about how you could build a wooden foundation. I didn’t really want to do that and give snakes a way to hide out under there.

You can build a concrete foundation. I was ready to just get it done. I thought this is, you know, I’m not putting a ton of stuff in here, just birds, right?

So I didn’t build a foundation. And it, understand, it’s working out okay for now. I did, I did buy some anchor things that you screw into the ground and then wired them to that so that at least the wind doesn’t tip it over.

But understand, the whole thing is not as sturdy as if I had built a foundation underneath it. When I built the run, I had to drive posts into the ground to support everything. I did decide it was probably a good idea to put a little bit of a foundation there so it didn’t wobble and come apart or sink into the ground.

So I augured my holes out and I poured gravel in there so it would have something to compact against. A gravel foundation is better than nothing. I have a shed on my property that I recently had to tear down. And it rotted away years ago before I ever moved there, but it’s built without a foundation.

The guy who lived there before me built another building that has a concrete foundation, and it’s lasted for 20 years and still looks good. The foundation you build on makes a difference in what you can accomplish. And for us as Christians, for us as a church, the only foundation we should be building our lives on is Jesus Christ. What that means for us is that everything we do should be done in obedience to Him.

That should be our first question. Not, does it make me happy? Not, does it fit with my life plans and goals?

Not, does it meet with the approval of everybody else around me? The first question we should be asking ourselves in anything we do, in anything we prioritize, is does this obey Jesus Christ? And does this bring Him glory?

Now, Paul here is talking about himself specifically. You notice he slips in the phrase wise master builder. He’s the architect.

He’s the one in charge of carrying out God’s instructions in what he did. And he makes that subtle statement that I’m wise at what I do. Because there were people at Corinth that were asking, well, who are you to be telling us?

Who are you to be laying this foundation? I’m the architect. That’s who.

I’m the one God put in charge of the project. But even though he’s talking about himself, this stuff still applies to the rest of us. Because God has called each of us to build up the church.

Again, understand what I mean when I say the church and how that applies. Because when I say build up the church, that doesn’t just mean giving money or taking care of the building. We’re not just talking about the church.

Talking about the church and our job to build up one another in his service. He says, I laid a foundation, verse 10, and another is building on it. That was sort of understood all along that even though Paul laid the foundation, he wasn’t going to be able to accomplish everything that was necessary for the church at Corinth to become what God wanted it to be.

In the same way, I can’t accomplish everything that God wants done in Central Baptist Church for it to be what he wants it to be. Even those that we would call quote-unquote church leadership cannot, by ourselves, accomplish everything that God wants to be done among this body. It’s the job of the body to build each other up and encourage each other and build on this foundation.

So even though he’s speaking here specifically about his role as the apostle, he also is emphasizing the fact that he’s just a servant. If you go back to the previous passage, he says, who is Paul? And it’s not because he forgot who he was.

It’s because he’s saying, I’m not that important. It’s God’s work. It’s God’s design.

I’m just here carrying out his orders. And he says, others come along and build on his work because it’s their calling to do so. Folks, every one of us here is building on somebody else’s work.

In my work as the pastor, I’m building on the work of Dr. Miles who came before me. And he’s building on the work of those who came before him.

And you’re building on the work of those who came before you, some of you talk about, some of you that have been here for many years, talk about those from previous generations and what they did and how they contributed and how they taught and how they left a mark on your lives. And you’re carrying that forward and you’re building on their legacy. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants here.

And that’s how it’s supposed to work. We as Christians are supposed to build on each other’s work because it’s our calling to do so. And as we look at Ephesians chapter 4, which has really shaped my view of the ministry, it talks about people in church leadership and how our job is the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry.

We’ve gotten this backwards idea in America where the people at the top, if you want to call it the top, the people at the top do the work or call the shots and the little people just come and sit and listen. I don’t believe any of that. As a Christian, I have ministry to do, just like you as a Christian have ministry to do?

I just have the added privilege as your pastor of being one to help equip you to do it. But if it all falls to me, if it all falls to me and the deacons, if it all falls to me and the Sunday school teachers, there’s a lot of ministry that doesn’t get done. There are a lot of people that need to be encouraged.

There’s a lot of fellowship that needs to happen. There’s a lot of teaching that needs to happen. There’s a lot of evangelism that needs to happen that doesn’t get done if we just relegate it to a select group of people.

So the expectation here is that Paul says in verse 10, I laid the foundation and others are building on it. We have those who are in leadership have a special responsibility in this. But it’s a responsibility we all share to build up the church.

And as I say that, you may be wondering, how do I do that? How do I build up the church? I’m not a Sunday school teacher.

I’m not a pastor. I’m not a music leader. I’m not I’m not any.

How do I build up the church? On Wednesday nights, we’ve been talking about the roles of the church in fulfilling the Great Commission. And through our conversations and through Brother Rodney and myself getting together and working out these lessons, we’ve come up with five major jobs taught in the Bible that the church is supposed to do.

And just about everything the church is supposed to focus on falls into one or more of these categories. evangelism, teaching, worship, fellowship, and ministry. If it can’t fall under one or more of those headings, we ought not to focus on it too much.

These things are our job. These are the things that we do to carry out the Great Commission. And the great thing about these, as we’ve been through this Wednesday night study, is that we’ve been seeing that you don’t have to have huge numbers of people to get started with something in any of those.

You don’t have to have a massive budget. You don’t have to have a building and a facility and all these things. These are things that we can do with those things, but these are also areas where each of us can work just on our own in our daily lives.

Evangelism is telling people about Jesus. If you’ve trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, you know how to tell somebody to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior. It doesn’t mean there won’t be questions that they can ask that you don’t have an answer for right away, But I can tell you, nobody is asking a question today that has never been asked before and answered.

And there are people in this church who can help you find those answers. And we’ve been trying to offer various ways to equip you to be able to share Jesus Christ with people who need to hear it. And every time you share Jesus Christ with somebody, even if they don’t accept him right away, even if they never darken the door of this church, there’s something that happens in us when we share the gospel that encourages us to keep doing it and encourages us to be God in other areas, and it encourages the people around us when they start to see it happening, and it’s a shot in the arm for the church.

So you think, how do I build up the church? Tell somebody about Jesus, and you don’t know how God will use that. Teaching.

This is something that we talked about. Brother Rodney and I split them up, and this is one of the ones I talked about was teaching. There are a couple of words in Greek that are used for teaching in the New Testament, one of them is a very specific formal setting, somebody lecturing to somebody else like you’d experience in a classroom or here.

That’s one of the words. The other word is just any time you’re given information from one person to another. Guess which one of those words is used about 90% of the time when the New Testament’s talking about teaching?

Just sharing information. About 10% of the time they’re talking about a formal setting. So we hear teaching in the New Testament, you probably think, I’m not a teacher.

How am I going to teach a class? How am I going to teach somebody? If you’re telling people what you know about Jesus or what you know about His Word, you’re teaching.

And I love using the examples of just driving down the road and my son asks me some of the most random questions you can imagine. We’re not having formal lessons on, okay, sit down now and I’m going to teach you all the things that you need to know. Just teach it as we go through life.

About biblical stuff, but about life stuff too. I’d venture to say most, if not all of you are teaching. As you go through your daily lives, you just may not realize it.

But when you use that to encourage other people and build up other people, it builds up the church. Worship. Worship is something that we do together.

When you come in on Sundays, that’s not all worship is, but when you come in on Sundays and you fight, and I know how hard it is because I’m easily distracted, but you fight to put those distractions away, you fight to get rid of your to-do list out of your mind, and you spend that hour just focused on Jesus with others around you, and you actually worship, you pour out your heart to Him. It encourages the people who are leading in worship. It encourages those who sit around you.

It encourages you more than anything. But worship is contagious. But on top of that, worship is a posture we adopt as we go throughout life.

Whether we’re singing songs, whether we’re closing our eyes and swaying and raising our hands or not, if we’re going through life oriented toward glorifying God in everything that we say and do, that’s worship. And you can worship God doing your job well. You can worship God being the best husband or wife or parent or child or employee or employer that you can be.

By doing that, you can be worshiping God. And it encourages one another. Fellowship.

Building connections together. Letting people in this fellowship know that you care about them. That you miss them when they’re not here.

And it takes all of us. Because if it falls to any one of us, whether that’s me or somebody else, there’s enough people in this room, we’re going to not notice whether somebody’s here. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called somebody and said, hey, we missed you at church today.

And they said I was there. So now I’m nervous about ever calling and doing that. It doesn’t help that I’m, as I said, easily distracted.

But just reaching out to people in the body and letting them know that you care, not just when they miss, but when you know there’s something they’re struggling with, or when you know that there’s something good going on in their life. I think it’s in 1 Corinthians later on that Paul talks about being members of one body and says, when one rejoices, we all rejoice together. When one mourns, we all weep together.

This fellowship of just knowing that we’re not alone, that somebody cares and there’s somebody there to walk alongside us as we draw closer to Jesus. Christ. And then ministry is going out and serving other people in his name. And as we talked about Wednesday night, there’s a lot of ministry that goes on in this place that nobody ever knows about.

Nobody else ever knows about. And I almost got myself in trouble by starting to name some of those things. But you can never name all of them.

You’re inevitably going to leave somebody out. But when somebody is ministered to or sees somebody else doing ministry, even if it’s a thankless job, it encourages and builds up the body. I won’t go into too much detail, but there was somebody yesterday that I was in a conversation with, and he said, some of you know about the mosquito problem we had Wednesday night.

He said, wait, you had to go set off your own foggers at the church? I figured you’d have people for that. I said, well, we have people that do a lot of things, but it didn’t hurt me to go kill some mosquitoes.

At least this time I wasn’t having to jump and catch them like Wednesday night. And based on his reaction, I think that was encouraging to him to know that, oh, wait, you do stuff like that too. When you minister to other people or when you just do things that need to be done for other people.

We have people in this fellowship that have gone and mowed other people’s lawns without being asked. We have people that have inundated people with food after surgeries if they know about it. There’s ministry that goes on.

As a matter of fact, on Wednesday night, I asked the group that was there, I said, out of these five categories, relative to each other, okay so it doesn’t mean we get an f in in one of the categories and an a in another just compared to each other which of these areas do you think our church is best at and the overwhelming majority said ministry and I think they were right but when we serve others in jesus name it builds up the church it encourages all of these things they they may look like little things as you’re going through life and you’re just trying to live your life and you you you do little things here and there to serve and to point others to Jesus. Maybe it’s never anything flashy. It’s just what you can do in the moment, but you have no idea how those things will build up the church and build on that foundation.

My goodness. I don’t know at this point whether to try to get through my notes or save the rest for next week. I’m only two points in.

Let me try to wrap it up for you pretty quick. We’re all building something. We may be building up our own lives.

We may be building up the church. We may be building a kingdom for ourselves, but we’re all building something, and what we build, what we build will be tested. It will be tested.

He tells us this in verse 13. Each man’s work will become evident. Talks about the day of fire where the things will be revealed.

Now, that’s not talking about hell. That’s not talking about punishment. They were familiar with fires that would burn down their entire cities.

Rome, just about 10 years after this was written, would be burned to the ground. If things weren’t well built and made out of good materials and weren’t well constructed, they’d burn up. Things that were built of gold and silver and marble and things like that stood a much better chance of surviving.

So they would have understood this, that the fire becomes a testing ground, a proving ground. He’s talking about for us, there’s going to be a moment where what we’ve built is going to be tested like it’s been on fire. And we’re going to be rewarded for what endures.

Verse 14, if any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. But he says in verse 15, if any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss. We’ll lose the things that don’t endure.

It’s that simple. We can spend our lives building things that please us and make us happy. And in the end, it’s not going to matter.

But it’s the things that we do to build up the body. It’s the things that we do to encourage one another in the truth. It’s the things that we do to draw each other closer to Jesus Christ that are going to stand the test of time.

Those are the things that we’ll be able to stand and look back on at the end of our lives and be proud, not in a prideful way, but in a grateful way. Be proud of what the Lord accomplished through us. And again, I want to be very clear that we don’t confuse this testing and this reward with salvation because he even says in verse 15 that those whose work is burned up, says he himself will be saved, yet so is through fire.

he’s talking about we may have to pick you up out of the rubble of what’s burned down around you but you’re still going to be saved because what matters is that foundation in jesus christ and so what we need to do is pay attention to what we’re building when we go back to verse 10 there at the beginning he said I laid a foundation and another is building on it but each man must be careful how he builds on it must be careful sounds like a suggestion because of the way english works We don’t have third-person imperatives, meaning we don’t give a command to him. It’s always a command to you. But in Greek, this is a command.

It’s not a suggestion. Well, you might want to be careful. Or he must be careful.

He should be careful. It’s telling us, be careful. This is the command here, to take care.

Not be careful in the sense of, I’m nervous about it, I’m cautious. He means pay attention to what you’re building. Consider it.

Think about what you’re building. isn’t it so easy to just float through life doing your own thing and just reacting to things that come along? It really is.

I can’t tell you how many weeks I get to the end of the week, and I’ve been busy all week, sometimes putting out fires in ministry, and I get to the end of the week and think, what did I accomplish? I’ll tell my wife, I don’t know what I actually did that was proactive this week. We need to pay attention to what we’re building.

Three questions that came to my mind. I’m going to give you this in close. Three questions that came to my mind as I was reading this text and the idea that he says we have to pay attention to what we’re building.

We need to ask ourselves, does what we’re building fit the foundation? Because he says in verse 11, no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid. The foundation is so important.

And if our foundation is Jesus Christ, we need to be asking ourselves, is what we’re building in our lives and in our church life, does it fit that foundation? In other words, is what we’re doing, what we’re spending our time and resources on, does it fit with this idea of being obedient to Jesus Christ and bringing him glory. The second question is, are we building with care?

He says we must be careful how we build on it. Are we taking time to make sure that we’re doing our best at it? Are we taking our time to make sure it’s a priority?

And then third, are we building something that will last? Because he says each man will become evident. Are we focused on those things that are going to last?

See, it’s so easy for me to get sidetracked thinking about things that aren’t going to last. I’m a worker. I even work for fun. My hobby is yard work.

And I can get so focused on, I’ve got to mow and I’ve got to get those trees trimmed. I’ve got to do this. When the winter comes, I’m not going to care anyway.

And eventually this earth is going to be burned up anyway. It’s not an excuse for irresponsibility about those things, but I can get so focused on those that I forget about other things. I might even be so distracted that my kids come to me and say, Dad, I have a question about this, dealing with something about life or something about God’s Word, and I should jump at the opportunity to build up something that’s going to last there by encouraging them.

It’d be a shame if I get focused on these things that aren’t going to last. So we need to ask ourselves, are we building something that’s going to last? Are you building something that’s going to last?