The One Who Does

Well, this morning we come to the homestretch of the Sermon on the Mount. We're going to be wrapping this up within the next two weeks.

The last sermon I plan to preach from Matthew 7 will be on the 28th, and so we really are in the homestretch.

And as we've said now for several weeks, in this homestretch, as Jesus is bringing the Sermon on the Mount to a close,

He's demanding a response, a response to all that He has said from chapters 5 through 7.

Last week we drew from verses 22 and following, that many will say at the end,

Lord, Lord, but it will be shown that their profession of His Lordship was empty. It wasn't based on knowing

Him, because it wasn't based on doing the things that He commanded. As He Himself says,

Why do you call Me Lord and not do the things that I command? And so the confession,

Lord, Lord, belongs to those who not only hear, but do the words that Jesus is saying.

And that brings us up here to verses 24 and 25 this morning.

Our big focus across this morning and next week, as it has been, is doing, doing what

God has told us to do, doing the words of Jesus, doing the righteousness of the kingdom of God.

If our righteousness doesn't exceed that of scribes and Pharisees, we won't be able to enter the kingdom of God.

And so this kingdom righteousness, this focus on the Sermon on the Mount, is something that's not only to be heard, but something that is to be put into practice.

Do what God has said to you, not as hearers only, deceiving yourselves, but as doers of the

Word. Thomas Adams, an old Puritan, said, True obedience has no lead in its heels.

In other words, this is not something that we'll do later. We don't do this three years from now.

What a great series. When things work out a little better, I might even try to do it.

Although we haven't heard what Jesus is saying here. We're not to deceive ourselves in this way.

Of course, true obedience in this way comes from the heart. That's been the whole point of this kingdom righteousness.

It's not something that hypocrites can do. It's not something external. It's not done to the eye or the praise of man.

It's done from the heart unto God, to the degree that we separate even what our right hand and our left hand do in giving.

There's things that we even keep secret from ourselves, if you could put it that way. So intimate, so close is this desire to know, draw near, and serve the

Lord. Doing what God has said. And that's not easy. And Jesus knows it's not easy.

That's why in this home stretch, He's driving these great calls and warnings. He's talking, as we'll see even next week, about a building that will collapse upon itself and destroy us.

Not just destroy our efforts, but destroy us in that great collapse. Great will be its fall.

He's charging His exhortation with these kinds of warnings. So we must not think that obedience is going to lead to an easier life.

It's not going to be easy. In fact, it requires denying ourselves, picking up a cross, and following Him.

It desires a willingness to lose our lives that we might find it. This is the costly call of hearing and doing the

Word of God. We shouldn't assume that when things fall apart in our lives, it's always a sign of specific disobedience.

It should give you pause to examine, but we should not assume it is always a sign of specific disobedience.

When you're trudging along the narrow path that leads to life, things often fall apart.

The way is difficult. You will not experience the cruise control version of Christianity.

There is no cross -bearing light. It's only heavy. It's bloody. It's a hard thing.

God's ways with us are often very intricate and complex, and yet we also find grace and refreshment along the way.

He gives blessing. He gives good gifts as our Father who knows the things we need before we even ask, and so we have no reason to fear.

In fact, in great confidence, we can look to His provision. We can know that He has begun a good work.

We'll see it through all the way. Our lives may not be easy. In fact, it may be very difficult to be obedient and do the

Word that we are taught, and yet there is no other way. Nor, if we're thinking rightly, would we want there to be any other way.

Lord, to whom else will we go? You alone have the words of life. Others can turn away, but we're not turning away from the things that You have shown us,

You have taught us. And so, the further you go in this obedience, the more you see of God's plan.

In my life, I wish I could know the end from the beginning, but God hasn't in His wisdom disposed that to me.

I don't think He has to you either. He doesn't give us the whole thing all at once. He likes to give us information on a need -to -know basis.

That means that our obedience is worked out in the wisdom of His Word, step -by -step, in dependence upon Him.

He reveals things in our lives, He reveals things from His Word, He reveals His holy will, in seasons, in ways, through blessings and trials, and step -by -step, we look to Him, we follow

Him. It's not all at once, it's not a map, and He says, good luck, I hope I see you in the end.

He's shepherding us, leading us faithfully. Of course, this shepherding is for those who seek

Him and know Him. My sheep know My voice, they hear Me. They enter by the gate.

There's no such thing as a genuine knowledge of God that begins anywhere else. It comes from this genuine call of God.

We established that last week. It's all in response to God's call, God's initiation. We can know

God because God has first decided covenantally to know us. We can respond to God because God first called us.

We can love God because God first loved us. And there is no such thing as this genuine knowledge of God that does not consist in obedience to His word.

This is just the implanted result of a new birth. This new desire, a new heart to be able to not only understand, but yes, to do

His will. Not perfectly, not always consistently, but genuinely, truly.

The person who claims they know the Lord, but doesn't do the things He commands, as John says, is a liar.

The truth's not in him. The person who wants to know God, but has no heart to obey Him, doesn't really want to know

God. Wants to have a former assemblance, wants the benefits of knowing God, but doesn't actually want to know

God. God does not give divine knowledge of Himself to those who have no desire to know

Him and to glorify Him. And we know Him and glorify Him in keeping

His commandments. So the whole focus is on doing. Now really, the last three weeks, which includes this morning,

I'm framing it in this way. We're looking at verses 24 and 25, but I'm really not going to do justice to verses 24 and 25 this morning.

That's going to have to hold us through next week, because He gives us this beautiful contrast in this parable of the two builders.

You have one who builds wisely because he's building on the rock, and clearly the implication is the one who's building wisely is the one who not only hears but does the words of Jesus.

That's the one who builds wisely as if it were on a rock, a solid foundation.

Storms come, winds beat, floods rise. It doesn't matter because he built wisely on the rock.

Whether that's storms of life, as Augustine and earlier commentators held it to be, or the judgment at the end, as more recent commentators hold it to be,

I think it's probably both. I think it's the storms of life and the ultimate storm to come, eschatologically.

The point is it won't collapse. The soul will survive. The building, even if there's hay, rubble, and straw to be burnt, will endure.

In contrast to that is the one who builds foolishly. Hears the words, is willing to attend it for a year of sermons, but doesn't actually put it into practice.

And that comes collapsing down in the storms of life, and if it endures through life, it will at least collapse at the end.

And some of those whose lives will collapse at the end will be saying, Lord, Lord, didn't we serve you in all of these mighty ways?

So we're looking at verses 24 and 25, and we'll unpack more of the specific content of that imagery next week.

This morning I just want to give us a broad view of doing because in these two parables, doing is building.

And I want to focus on building this morning. So Matthew 7, 24 and 25.

Therefore, let me just pause. Therefore is not just immediately following from verse 23, but arguably all the way from 517.

This is the great turn. This is now the conclusion of the whole sermon.

Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them,

I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rains descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

Notice the emphasis here. Whoever hears the sayings of Jesus and does them, that's the wise one.

Whoever hears and does not do is the foolish one. So the focus is on doing and doing in terms of building.

Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Here's what I hope to accomplish. We'll see how far we get. First, three aspects of what it means to build.

What does it look like to be the one who does? Well, it looks like buildings. We're going to look at three aspects of building.

As we're building, what are the obstacles we run up against? Let's look at three aspects of obstacles, or three obstacles,

I should say, to building. And then if we have time, which is probably unlikely, we want to focus on the perseverance that we are to have in building.

That's what I hope to accomplish this morning. And then next week, so that's the one who does. Next week, we'll look at the one who does not, the one who builds foolishly, the one who assumes that because it's standing now, it must be able to stand at the end.

And then we'll close at the very end of this year with the one who did, and that is

Jesus, the one that the whole crowd was astonished at. We'll consider that. So the one who does this week.

Next week, the one who does not. And lastly, as we close out the year, the one who did.

Well, the one who does will not only build, but more specifically, they will repair and they will fortify.

That's the first point. Three types of building. Building proper, and then building as repair, and then building as fortification, as strengthening.

And these three types of building are very important to understand if we would build like wise men and women.

The difference between these three types of work is very striking. And first, when it comes to building anything, what do you have to do before you can build anything?

You have to survey what you want to build. You have to take stock of it. Is the ground flat?

Is there a place that I can actually labor? Is it meeting the codes that this state requires, and the code books always change, and they grow larger and larger and larger, and you need paralegal apparatus just to be able to build a shed in your backyard.

Before anyone can build anything, they must survey. They must investigate. They must take out the leveler and whatever those weird tripod things are.

I don't even know what those do, but they seem to be very important, although I've never seen one actually occupy.

Whenever I drive by on highways and building sites, I always see the tripod. I've never actually seen a worker look through it.

They're always just drinking coffee and talking to the stadium. I don't know what that is there for, who actually uses them.

But the point is you have to survey. If we go back to the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, when they returned from exile to build up the walls that had been torn down, it all began with surveying.

Whenever you build anything, you must count the cost. You need to consider what's required.

Is the endeavor, is the effort going to be worth the outcome? Have I planned for all of the kind of curveballs that I ought to expect?

It's not going to be easy just because it looks okay. As we start building, we're going to run into all sorts of problems.

Big dig, anyone? Well, when these people returned, they were a couple generations removed from what the walls had even been like.

They come and they see the walls all broken down. They don't even remember what the walls looked like in their former glory.

As human beings, we can resonate with that. We don't even know how our lives are to be built because we're born broken.

As we've said, we don't know what the good tree is that bears good fruit because we're born thorns and thistles.

We're born as bad trees. We need to be reborn, replanted in order to bear good fruit. We need to be built up spiritually by the

Lord who shows us what the building is supposed to look like. So you cannot survey anything properly if you don't know the

Lord. If you haven't understood the Gospel, its fullest presentation in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the

One who did, the One who was built glorious, the only good tree there ever was in this wasteland post -fall.

And so part of it is an understanding we don't even know what the walls would be like or are supposed to be like unless the

Lord reveals that to us. So surveying requires not just a look in the mirror by our own efforts or some worldly counselor telling us here's some things that I've noticed.

It requires nothing less than the mirror of God's Word and His illumination of it. Otherwise, you don't even know what to build toward.

You can't properly survey at all. You need to look in that surveying, what is broken in my life?

What is falling short of the glory of God? Where am I, as it were, turning away from my

Savior rather than being built up into Him? That's what's broken down and needs to be addressed.

That's what has to be surveyed. So this means, just like in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, when you come back, you can't candy coat things.

You're looking at the rubble, and you just have to own it for what it is. This is what we're going to have to build on. This is what we're going to have to deal with.

This is what we're surveying and addressing. A lot of people want to come and be built up in the

Lord without ever looking at the rubble, without ever looking at the broken walls. It can't be done. It can't be done.

This is no duct tape repair job to be built up spiritually. We go through rolls of duct tape like nobody's business.

I'm a duct tape artist when it comes to patching things up. I thank the Lord that He's not a duct tape artist when it comes to my life.

He likes to build up solid work that will endure. This means that I have to actually address what's broken in my life.

Is it the frailty of my prayer life? My Lord was not that way.

I cannot settle for that. That is something broken that needs to be built. Is it how I communicate with my

Lord in prayer? But what about how I communicate with others? Maybe how I communicate in my marriage or communicate with my children.

Am I spending the kind of time that God has desired and shown that I should spend with them? Am I with them in the ways that I ought to be?

Maybe these walls have been broken down. Maybe these walls have never been built up. The point is you don't even know what to build unless you survey it in this way.

So you survey with a careful eye according to God's Word. And particularly this, you survey with a careful eye to what surrounds

God's worship. Those will be the walls that tend to be the most broken in your life. The things that attend to God's worship.

The things that near God's worship. Why? Because that's the focus of Satan's attacks. The three -headed enemy of the

Christian is the world, the flesh, and the devil. And what that repels in our life is the things that are closest to God's worship.

And so you don't have at the farthest fringes, yeah, you know, I could be a little more dutiful than I am or I could have a better attitude than I've had.

That's great and that's probably true, but you need to survey a lot more close to the things that are actually at the heart of knowing and worshiping the

Lord. Those are the things that are so broken that everything else is just the effects or the overflow of that.

And those are the things that in repairing all those lesser cracks get filled in. All those lesser damages get repaired.

What I've noticed in my own life is that the enemy will often leave those cracks and creaks and places in my walls unassaulted as long as the central things are broken down.

I can have other things farther from God's worship that will be relatively calm and at ease so long as the things at the very heart are broken down.

So just because some aspects of your life seem to be going well and you seem to be able to cascade along merrily, that doesn't mean that you're actually understanding what

Jesus is saying. What I've also seen in my life is years can go by with this being the case.

You might despair, my broken walls are so broken, they've been broken, they'll be broken forever.

But again, there's great encouragement here. We are, as those who hear and do the word, being built up even as we seek to build.

There's something about the way that God is growing us and as Ephesians 2 says, we also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the

Spirit. So the sense in which we are building, we all have our role to play, but there's another greater sense that upholds that.

We are being built by God. We are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.

And so as we attend to these things, we realize we're only able to do, again, because of what God has done.

We're only in response to God even as we build. So the first thing is just to build, and building requires a careful eye to survey.

Secondly, repair. And seeing what's broken, we're not just building something new, we're not just clearing the property and building something, oh, this will be a nice little bonus to my square footage of Christianity.

No, a lot of Christianity is repairing the things that you surveyed. So it's not new construction, it's more a repair job.

Salvage work, we could put it that way. In order to repair, you actually have to take stock of those things.

What hasn't been built up that needs to be newly constructed in my life? Something that hasn't been there, but as I've been walking in the

Lord along these years, I now have to build this in. Maybe I've come to this church now, and I'm aware there's all sorts of things that I've never been confronted with.

I've never really thought through, I've never had to deal with. Maybe that's something the Lord wants me to build. I've never built it before.

I need to survey, I need to build wisely, I need to be thoughtful and careful to hear and glean all that I can from those who are seeking to build that, or have built that.

This is part of the progression of Christianity. But more often than not, you won't have a lot of new things to build.

More than anything, you'll have a lot to repair. And again, just like with building, sometimes we don't want to do the repair work because we're not honest about the damage.

We're not honest about the damage. Sometimes, let me give two different angles on this.

First, sometimes we mask what really needs to be repaired because we just don't want to do the work.

It's too costly. We know it's damaged. We know that it has to be repaired.

We think of how consuming and difficult that work would be. We would rather prepare it, we would rather assume or pretend we don't know the damage.

I don't know, it's fine. It's okay like this. I'd say that's true, but for the earnest

Christian, that's relatively uncommon. What's far more common is this. We don't even know what needs to be repaired.

We just don't realize it. Others may be able to see it, but we can't. The problem is, we often think we do know the things that really need to be repaired.

Scripture tells us not to be wise in our own opinion. It's not something we often take to heart.

Are you alone wise? We generally, if not by our mouths, in our hearts go, yeah,

I'm actually pretty wise. I actually kind of know all my weaknesses. I see all my strengths.

I know all my blind spots. If you know your blind spot, it wouldn't be a blind spot. That's why it's called a blind spot.

As I often found when I was, the Lord protected me as I was going up the bowling alley called Route 128 to the

North Shore. It was 6 a .m., and I was just trying to stay up, finishing a term paper, and I'm trying to make it to the class, and I'd veer toward a lane and have three cars, and kind of alert and shake.

I'm amazed that I've survived all those years. It's a blind spot for a reason. It just seems like the lane's wide open.

You don't even notice it. So we're not to be wise in our opinion. The problem is we generally think we are.

The danger is then we look for worldly solutions or carnal solutions to the things we think we need.

That's one problem. I definitely can say the damage.

I don't want to have to do what the Bible says I need to do. Is there some lesser solution, some easier path, some better way of dealing with this?

It won't be as costly. It won't be as dramatic. Maybe that's the way we need to go. Or we look for books and blogs and sermons to meet us where we think we need to be met.

Yes, yes, I know all that I need, and I'm going to go find it. The problem is, again, you don't actually know the things you need.

It's very, very hard to survey the things that are broken in your life. It's very, very hard to do that on your own.

You actually need someone to come alongside you and to help you see these things. We all do. And the most dangerous outflow of this is not only turning away from the

Word to the world to imitate or mimic their way of handling damage, their way of handling difficulty.

Or we look for books and blogs and sermons to meet us in the things that we want to be met with rather than the things that we need to be met with.

And the outflow of that is we take the Word, but we filter out whatever we feel doesn't fit the bill for us.

I don't want to hear that. I don't need to hear that. That doesn't apply to me. What is Jesus saying here? Whoever does my words, these sayings of mine, is building on the rock.

So don't filter out my sayings. Don't cherry -pick what's convenient for you. Take the whole world and apply it to your life in this way.

Otherwise, we're like toddlers who, they're hungry, but they only want to eat ice cream and candy and sweets.

And if you let a child go in that way, their life doesn't turn out all that well.

Well, sin makes us look at things in this way as well. You can only have the sweets and the pleasantries. You don't have to take it as it comes.

You don't have to do the hard work. There's always an easier path. There's always an easier way. And so sin and the delusions of our sinful thoughts when it comes to difficulty, it makes things at our level look crooked, and it makes things that look crooked level.

That's the problem. All we need is God's tripod, which is the

Word of God. And we even need others to help us look through it. We need to not be conformed to this world by being transformed according to the renewal of our minds.

So this is something that Scripture does. We renew our minds, the Spirit illuminates. A lot of that comes through means of grace that are not solitary, but communal.

It's very, very important we grasp this. Very, very important we grasp this. You go off to Vermont and stay in a cabin for two weeks to look in the mirror.

You'll probably come back worse, not better. I finally have understood myself.

I see all of my weaknesses and my strengths. It's like you should have never gone. You've come back worse than ever.

You're more deluded and blind than you ever were. You see, the means of grace functioning corporately is one of the ways that we actually can hear and do the words of Jesus.

Sometimes I don't even see a blind spot or weakness in my life until I see it as a strength in another brother or sister.

It's the contrast that's revealed something to me. Oh, I'm not like that. Oh, I don't do that. Oh, I didn't react that way.

Do you see? Really, really important we understand this. So you have to see the damage, and to see the damage you need others.

That will help you not to ignore it, not to excuse it, but to actually address it, to repair it. And I mean really repair it.

As we said, no duct tape jobs. I can't remember if I ever shared this story.

I think sometimes my mom listens to these recordings, so I'm always like, uh, I don't know how much to share. We were roughhousing upstairs in the second story of the house

I grew up in. I was probably a sophomore in high school, and I think I grabbed something from my buddy, and he charged after me and kind of tackled me at the top of the stairs, and I put my elbow through the drywall at the top of the stairs.

I was like, whoa. Uh -oh, what did we do? This big hole right at the top of the stairs.

So I called and very elaborately said, I fell into the wall.

That was about as much as I was willing to share. And my solution to that at the time was to find a wedding picture of my parents and just put it in the middle of the wall.

It's just like no pictures anywhere, and then in the most awkward place, there's this random picture.

And it's like, let's just add more pictures, and it won't seem out of place, right? And then you go to the house, and there's picture frames on the ceilings and all over the place.

You can't do that for long. You actually have to do the repair job. That's the idea. And it's not enough to repair.

You need to fortify. The third point within this, the third aspect of building is to strengthen.

Walls that are broken, walls that are in need of repair, are often in need of being strengthened. When you have something that's broken, that becomes a point of weakness.

I found this a few weeks ago after hitting a curb in Boston, coming out of a parking garage.

Didn't think anything of it. And then I noticed a few days later that I had this bulge on the sidewall of my tire.

I was like, oh, that doesn't look right. Now, the point is, in that structure, because damage was done, where the damage was done is now the weakest point in that structure.

And so if I hit a pothole hard enough, all that pressure that's been regulated or normalized across the surface of the sidewall now finds the weakest place, and that's where it's going to burst.

It's going to burst at the weakest place. So what do I have to do? I can't drive around forever with this rubber hematoma on my tire.

Well, I had to go to Walmart and say, please fortify my tire, which unfortunately meant a new tire.

Maybe the analogy ends there, but you see the point. When something is damaged, that's a vulnerable thing.

The place that was broken, even the most recent repair, is still this place that's so tender and vulnerable that you have to strengthen it.

You have to not say, yeah, that's been dealt with, it's patched up, let's move on. No, wait. The enemy knows that's fresh paint.

That's a picture hiding a hole. That's something weak. That's the place to attack. That's the place to put effort toward, you see.

So you have to strengthen. You have to fortify. Just because you've built up, just because you've repaired, doesn't mean you're done.

Things break at the repair site. Where you weld will be the weakest point.

Where the crack was glued will be the place that it will break. You see the point. Satan prowls around like a lion looking to whom he may devour.

He's looking for weakness in what you're building. The things that you have most recently repaired are like blood in the water to him.

Now, if you refuse to survey, if you refuse to be honest to the rubble, if you refuse to see it and you don't want others to see it, so rather than going earnestly to say, is there something within me that you see that you can attest to?

Are you willing to be that faithful friend that's so rare? Are you willing to wound me? Can you address me in this way?

Well, if you refuse to do that, that's one thing. I can tell you who for sure doesn't refuse to do that. Satan. You might not want to see the damage.

He does. You might not want to see the weakness. He knows it. He exploits it. He'll manipulate with it. He looks for what's flimsy and weak, what's neglected, what's aloof, what's hidden.

Do you see? Well, the problem is sometimes we're seeking to build and we're so weak we don't even know what to address or where to start.

It's overwhelming to us. What we need is wisdom from above.

Show us these things. Enlighten the path. Give us that endurance, that strength, step to step.

James 2 says, Who's wise in understanding among you? And then he castigates.

If you have bitter envy, self -seeking in your hearts, don't boast. Don't lie against the truth. This wisdom doesn't descend from above, but it's earthly.

It comes from beneath. It's sensual, demonic. Where envy and self -seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.

Well, don't you remember Babel? All the builders became so confused they couldn't understand each other.

They couldn't build. If you're being fueled by that which is earthly, that which is sensual, in other words, if you lack wisdom that is from above, first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruit.

If you deny that which comes from above, you're going to be so confused you won't be able to build.

All there is is confusion. James says this is not wisdom from above. Wisdom from above causes there to be a building, causes there to be something that is edifying in the process of the

Christian's life. Sometimes it's not even the building so much, it's just where it's begun. I can see all these things clearly now.

That's a day of small beginnings I would never despise. To walk away this morning having seen something clearly that needs to be addressed is a wonderful beginning if you hear and do all that the

God will ask you to do with it. Confusion about what to build, confusion about where to build, confusion about how to build does not come from the pure light of God's Word.

We might be confused. God's Word is not confused. We might be holding the blueprint sideways and upside down, but God's blueprint is written in the way it's written.

So confusion doesn't come from above. It comes from beneath.

Confusion doesn't have its source in God's Word. It's just too difficult. It's too out of reach. There's just so much to contend.

I just can't do it. Well, you're not confused because of God's Word. You're confused because of your flesh, because of what's sensual, what's carnal within you.

That's what James 2 is saying. What's pure, what's peaceable, what has light comes from above.

And if you're so confused that you don't know what to build, where to build, or how to build, you'll ultimately come to this question, why should

I build it all? I don't know where to start. I don't know how

I could do it. I don't even know what it's supposed to look like, so why would I even try?

But the thing is, you're going to go build something. Everyone's building something.

You're going to repair the damage in your life one way or another. You're going to try to address it. You're going to try to cope with it.

You're going to try to deal with it one way or another. The world has no shortage of all sorts of remedies to offer, solutions, paths, crutches.

All sorts of things you can do to address it. You're going to fortify something. You're going to strengthen and reinforce something in your life.

Maybe it's your ego. Maybe it's your ambition. Maybe it's your success. Maybe it's your influence. You're going to fortify something in your life.

You're going to build up something in your life. Well, building wisely is building on the words and teachings of Jesus, following in His footsteps, living out

His example. That's building wisely. That's building the right thing.

And that comes from the wisdom He provides, wisdom from above, and it has certain effects. Building wisely will never be a pop -up skyscraper.

It will never be something you can do all at once. It is hard work.

It is beam by beam, post by post, panel by panel.

That's building wisely. It's one brick at a time.

One day live to the glory of God. When it comes to building, we're asking, what is broken and needs to be built?

When it comes to repairing, we're asking, what is damaged and needs to be repaired? When it comes to fortifying, we're saying, what's weak?

It needs to be strengthened. And when we're building and we're repairing and we're fortifying, as I'm sure you've experienced, you're also met with obstacles.

And that's the second point here, three obstacles. I have never seen a home improvement show, and these things are almost always scripted.

I've never seen a home improvement show where in the first 10 minutes, they're going, oh, here's this side, and Nancy wants us to build this.

And they all take stock of it and look around, and they go, well, I think it's going to cost about $30 ,000, and we should have it done within six days.

And then 30 minutes later, they did it in six days for $30 ,000. It almost has never happened.

It's always half way through the episode, oh, no, we're ruined.

And then it goes to commercial break. And they come back, and there's some cesspool, and there's water and flames shooting out everywhere.

And what happened? And now it's three times as long and three times as much. When you're trying to build, you're going to face obstacles.

So here's the second point. The one who does must overcome weakness, rubbish, and threats.

The one who does, the one who builds, must overcome weakness, rubbish, and threats.

So the first point, the one who does will build, repair, and fortify. The second point, the one who does must overcome weakness, rubbish, and threats.

And this is all just the three obstacles held out from Nehemiah 4, when Nehemiah, that mighty man of God, came back to build.

And it was those three obstacles that he was faced with. Verses 10 through 12, we read, Judas said, the strength of the laborers is failing.

Here's the first obstacle. And there's so much rubbish, we're not able to build this wall.

That's the second obstacle. And our adversaries said, they don't see or know anything until we come into their midst and kill them and end their work.

That's the third obstacle. Weakness, rubbish, threats. So the first obstacle is weakness.

The strength of our laborers is failing. How hard it is to build when we're tired.

Jesus himself says, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. We know, and if you're young, you don't know it as well as you will.

We really are body and soul. And our souls are not unmeshed and untwined from our bodies.

Neither are our bodies from our souls. We are body and soul. We don't have our soul in some glass container somewhere else.

And the body's not some shell to be dispensed with. But rather, in intricate ways that we cannot fully understand or grasp, our bodies have a certain bearing on our souls.

And our souls have a certain bearing on our bodies. Our fleshly needs and conditions and appetites do something to us spiritually.

And our spiritual conditions and appetites do something to us physically. We're body and soul.

It is very hard to build. It is very hard to find the energy and the zeal necessary to build when we are fatigued.

In fact, you can have such fatigue that you despair of living life itself. That's what fatigue feels like.

I remember my grandfather toward the end when he used to come around. And my mom would ask him, you know,

Bob, Bob, how are you doing? And he would say, I'm tired. And he wasn't saying

I didn't get much sleep. He wasn't saying, oh, I've been more tired than usual. He was saying at an existential level,

I am tired. I'm just tired of living right now. Every joint creaks, everything hurts.

I can't remember, I can't taste, you know, I'm just tired. That's fatigue.

We're subject to the tense that we're dwelling within. We're waiting for them to be raised glorious, made like the first fruits of our great hope, the

Lord Jesus. We want to have bodies built up as they were always meant to be. Not prone to the curse, not subject to the decay and corruption of the world.

But in this fallen world, as we see the world groaning and convulsing around us, we, too, feel that within ourselves.

We're subject to it. We cannot forget it. And this affects the way that we build. You know, if there's anything that I dislike about our hymnal, which

I love, is that it includes a lot of that that period of hymnody in Protestantism where you had a lot of just I have no other way to say it than cotton candy hymns.

It's just like that toward the end of the 19th century, it was just all these really optimistic hymns and and we sing them.

And it says things like always happy with the Lord, never not smiling, things like that.

No frowns here, always please. You know, it's like and we're singing that like I can't relate at all.

And we go to the Psalms and the Psalms are a lot more honest. Where are you, God? You want to know what

I've been eating lately? My tears every night. I can't even see you. That's how that's how raw the

Psalms are with the human experience of discouragement, of fatigue. God is a lot more honest with us than we tend to be with him.

And so the old adage in worship, I remember hearing this from a professor, you know, worship should have something old, something new, something happy, something blue.

The idea was the Lord wants to meet us exactly where we are, and he can even take those tear stained sighs and turn them into his praise.

It's a beautiful thing. But that means we need to be honest. Do we see that damage?

Do we see the brokenness? Do we feel the fatigue? Do we own it? We don't hide it.

We don't pretend it's something else. We own it. And we say, Lord, I don't feel that I can build right now.

In fact, I feel like I'm about to abandon this whole thing. Please sustain me and strengthen me.

The obstacle is that we're we're weak. That's the obstacle. The builders are losing strength.

If you if you read in that little paragraph, it's so interesting in Nehemiah four in verse six, they started out and they get halfway through.

It's like all this energy. We put our shoulders to the work and it's like, yee -haw, like who was the presidential candidate that shouted that?

Bee -haw, whatever. We have all that energy. But we're going to look at we're halfway there.

And then there's something about that halfway point. The first half is always the easiest half. Most of the people

I've known that were saying, Lord, Lord, they they did that first half with that kind of energy. And then they just abandoned it.

The second half is always the hardest. You begin with all the hooks, but in chapter four, verse six, the people had a mind to work.

They put their shoulder to it. They had sword and trowels. They were all about it. Then you get just a few verses later to verse ten.

Our strength is failing us. We quit. That's exactly what it's like to build, isn't it?

That's how fast discouragement comes to us and the weakness of our bodies and the frailty of the ways that we think of the things that we struggle with.

We feel it, don't you? It affects whether you'll sleep, how you'll eat.

It can have effects on your blood pressure, on your heart rate. No wonder Jesus has said so much in chapter six about do not be anxious.

Do not be afraid. You really can depend on your father. He really is good. He knows exactly what you need. Don't give up building.

Even though you feel weak and tired. Well, there's a there's a two kinds of weakness.

I think we could distinguish. First, we could say there's an outward, outward weakness. It's that which is sort of outside of us.

That seems so difficult. So inwardly, we feel OK. We know where we're at is sure and strong.

But what we're up against seems so overwhelming that it's that kind of outward facing weakness. I'm OK as long as I don't have to keep going in this direction.

That's an outward weakness. You think of Paul in Acts 18. He was in Corinth.

He came determined, as we said, to preach nothing but Christ and him crucified. That's where Paul is.

But he's seeing all the pushback in Corinth. And we read in Acts 18 that he has this vision because he wants to jump ship.

I think it's time to go. He's gone in there and said, I'm done going to the Jews. There's this great instigation raised up.

He had just told them, your blood be on your own head. I was thinking, I think it's time to leave.

This isn't going very well. And God gives him this word. Do not be afraid.

Speak. Don't keep silent. I'm with you. No one will attack you or hurt you. I have many people in this city.

Paul wasn't inwardly weak at that juncture. It was because of what he was up against.

It was an outward facing weakness. And God came to him and said, no, no, no, speak. Paul, Paul, I'm with you.

Don't worry. Nothing's going to happen to you. I have a lot of people in this city. Keep preaching what you determined to preach when you first came here.

That's an outward facing weakness, and we have an inward facing weakness. It's those things within us, within ourselves.

We're weak, so weak that you start to disbelieve the word of God.

That's weakness. I can't even have faith that what

God says, what God promises is true. So weak that I start to think maybe it's not even my weakness.

It must be the weakness of God's word. Must be the weakness of his spirit. That's a weakness that is profoundly paralyzing to a

Christian. Let me put it in this way. Have you experienced the truth of this verse? Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Have you experienced that? There's a lot of apostates who say, the only reason

I'm not walking with the Lord is because I kept on asking him to deliver me. And I prayed that prayer and I tried to resist the devil and I trusted in the promise and he just never came through.

In other words, it wasn't my weakness. It was God's weakness. I'm here to tell you, seasons of trial may come.

Weakness in the flesh may come. God's word stands true. It's never his weakness.

His arm is never too short. It's our own weakness to even trust the word of God. Resist the devil.

He will flee from you. That is true. Mortify the flesh by the spirit and you will enter into life.

That is true. So to the flesh and you will from the flesh reap destruction.

That also is true. It's not God's weakness, but our weakness and our weakness can become so profound that we start to think

God's word is weak or his promises to fall short or his spirit is incapable. Rather than understanding the source of the issue.

Lord, I believe help my unbelief. Lord, I'm a weakness is pitiful. Lord, I keep saying

I'm clinging to your word, but to be honest, I just see the desires of my flesh deceiving me, throwing me all around.

I see these chains, Lord, that I thought I was broken from. And in my delusion, I've allowed them to get thicker, stronger and wrapped more tightly around my life.

That's someone who knows where the weakness really is. When you know where the weakness is, as we've gone at the beginning, you're actually surveying the walls rightly.

Now you're in the position to actually build. You're not denying you're not blame shifting the damage for what it is, the brokenness where it is, the rubble and trash for what it is.

It's there. And so you take that into your life. You take that into your heart rather than saying we're not able.

And so we're just going to stop building. We say, of course, we're not able. We never were able, but you are able.

You're the strength of my heart. You're my portion forever. No, no temptation will overtake me, except which is common to man.

God, you are faithful. As Paul says, you won't allow me to be tempted beyond what

I'm able. And Lord, it feels overwhelming to me. I'm drowning. So strengthen me,

Lord. I just see how how dark the interior of my mind and my heart can be.

Show me that way of escape. You promised you would, Lord, and don't let me deceive myself to think you haven't.

So there's outward wicked weakness. There's inward weakness. These are obstacles. Another obstacle right here out of Nehemiah four is the rubbish.

There's so much rubbish. We're not able to build the wall. Being a

Christian is not just being a builder. It's being a garbage collector. Waste management.

That's the Christian life waste management. You survey rightly and you have to deal with it.

You see the brokenness, you see the damage, you see the rubble, and now you have to deal with it. You have to wrestle with it. You know that you cannot build properly until it's dealt with, until it's removed.

You can't afford to pretend it's not there. You get closer to it and you realize it's a lot more than it seemed from far away.

You try to address and it seems to get worse. It almost always happens, doesn't it? You turn to start shoveling out and it seems to get bigger.

The heap is taller. It's harder to deal with. You see something in your life, something in your relationships, maybe your marriage and your home, something in the church.

You say, OK, we're going to go address it now. You go to address it. It gets 10 times harder. There's usually more fights going home from a marriage retreat or marriage counseling than on the way to it.

It's for this reason. When you actually are getting close to the trash, it's really hard to deal with if you want to build properly.

And fatigue plays into that. It feels overwhelming. You start to feel again like, why am

I even bothering? Why am I even building? You lose sight of why you were trying to clear the rubbish in the first place, to make the foundation clear, flat, level, strong, sure.

You forgot that you were only clearing the rubble so that you could build. Somehow you forgot that that was the purpose.

So you're just looking at clearing the trash. You say, every time I shovel, there's twice as much. I just, why even bother?

There's no point to it. And you think that's all it's about is rubbish removal when it's, in fact, about building.

And so the fatigue plays in. You feel overwhelmed. Then all of a sudden, more rubbish doesn't matter.

What does it matter now? Yeah, I've sinned in this way, and I've tried to deal with it. It's gotten worse.

So why bother to fight so hard against sinning again? What's a little more sin?

As a coworker used to say, when things were going south, what's a little more water when you're going over the

Niagara? What's a little bit more? It doesn't even matter at this point. That's how it can feel.

What difference does it make? I'm sure I've shared this story, probably with the same analogy.

It comes to my mind. When I was working at the plastic factory, we would have these massive green dumpsters with all sorts of pieces of plastic and stuff with grease and cloths and all sorts of muck.

All sorts of little, thousands of little tiny pieces and anchors and extrusions. And it would all just get dumped throughout the shifts into these massive dumpsters, along with any other trash from the break room or the restrooms or whatever.

And we also had these French interns that would come through because we were bought by a French company, and one of them was this character named

Faisal. He was just a character. He had this very kind of, you know, jazzy way of exerting his presence.

And the company bought him this beater car. It was like an 89 Mercury Cougar. And he would always go out to lunch and get this sub, you know, this huge grinder with a wrapper, and he'd drive back past.

One of the days that he was gone, the trash truck came in, and it lifted up the dumpster, and it totally missed.

Instead of it going all the way back and into the rear of the dump truck, it just kind of dropped it right in front.

And the guy just pulled out and left. So we're all standing on the docks, looking at just this pile of garbage, just like gobsmacked.

Like, are they coming back? Like, what do we do? And as we're all standing, gawking,

Faisal, you know, putters along in his little Mercury Cougar. And he surveys the scene really quick, and he sees us all staring at this heap of rubbish, and he's on the other side of it, and he rolls down his window, and he crumples up his sandwich wrapper and just throws it on the top and goes to park.

The idea was, well, what's a little more trash, right? It was going to go in the dumpster anyway. Well, guess who had to help shovel?

So it does matter. Every little crumple matters. And just because you have the attitude, what is a little bit more when

I'm this far gone, to deal with it is inescapable. Someone's going to deal with it somehow.

Listen, someone's dealing with the rubbish of your life, the damage of your life somehow. You might not be the one shoveling it up.

Someone is. Probably a lot of people are, and you're just oblivious to it. But it has to get dealt with one way or the other.

It has to get contained. It has to get worked over one way or the other. Someone is dealing with the rubbish.

But you don't want your life to be contained and managed. You want your life to be leveled and built up in the

Lord into something that can endure even unto that day. And so you've got to distinguish, what's the rubbish in my life that has to be dealt with?

There's going to be actual just garbage, things that have stained my mind, things that I've exposed myself to, exposed others to, that that's just rubbish

I need to deal with. It's not fitting. It's not proper. There's this rubbish in the holy place, like 2

Chronicles 29. You've just got to get rid of it. Just scoop it out. Al Mohler was saying this in regard to the, you know,

Charlie Kirk thing. And this has come up recently again with just the mass desensitization to gore and violence that we're seeing in our society.

To think that we're two, two and a half generations removed from the FAA banning

Elvis gyrating at the hips on public television to now having live leaks of people getting shot in the throat.

And people watching that and not even flinching, not even feeling nauseous about it, but treating it like they would a video game or some movie.

And when you can't distinguish things at that level, we're just like, like why were the Christians so bent on trying to overturn the gladiatorial games?

And we tend to look back at the ancients and see them as a bloodthirsty people. We are them. We are them.

We're a stone's throw away from that. So you become desensitized.

And you can't actually even see the rubbish that, as Mohler was saying, stains your mind. There's some things that we just should have never seen in the first place.

And some of that, you just go, Lord, help me to see it and to purge it, Lord. Cleanse my mind.

Purge my affections. Sever some of those strings that draw me into these things.

So that's the actual rubbish. And we may all be at different levels and have different consciences about that, but we all need to be striving toward that as a goal.

Really, really important. Again, it's an area where you don't know your blind spot until you see it as a strength in someone else.

And then there's comparative rubbish. We talked about this last week. Not the actual rubbish in terms of things that even the world could classify as wrong or damaged or rubble, but the things that actually the world prizes and we prize along with the world.

The things that have to do with worldly ambition, worldly success. The things that Paul said were rubbish when he compared them to the excellence of knowing the

Lord Jesus. We've got to contend with that kind of rubbish, too. What is it that gets in the way of the

Lord's presence in my life? What is it that eclipses me from seeing his face clearly? Paul says, whatever had eclipsed

Christ now to me is rubbish. He dealt, he was dealing with that rubbish.

You guys all want a clamor for the things that you think you could boast in. I once boasted in them.

Now it's all garbage to me. If Paul were on, remember that show

Hoarders? And, you know, they'd have a, you know, a counselor go to help the person and their home was just stacked with all sorts of things.

And the counselor would go around and go, can we, Cindy, can we throw this away? And it was like a broken plate with like muck on it.

And she's like, no, no, no, no, no. We've got to hold on to that. And the counselor's like, okay, we'll put that here for now. Let's think about that one.

Paul's like the anti -hoarder. He's like, point to anything in my life, rubbish, get rid of it, gone.

Anything less than the knowledge of Jesus Christ and my service and my longing for him.

This is rubbish when I compare it. That doesn't mean the things in our lives have no value.

We shouldn't think of them in this way. They have real value, good gifts from a good giver. They're meant to have value.

They're meant to give joy and praise and gratitude unto God. It just means when we compare that to God himself, it really is rubbish.

Just like the love of the people that are dearest to us. Love for a mother and father, when it's held up against God, is to be like hatred.

So, there's nothing even on the same stratosphere of the valuation that Jesus ought to hold in the life of a

Christian. It's not even in the same stratosphere. That's actual rubbish that we have to contend with.

Is it a good thing from God that should give me joy and gratitude unto him? Amen. Is it beginning to puff up in Eclipse's presence in my life?

I've got to deal with that, because I can't build properly without it. And then, really briefly, threats.

The third obstacle we see is opposition. Adversaries come in.

They whisper a constant stream of discouragement. Discouragement is like psyops. It comes in all different forms.

It's the subtleties of cynicism. It's the subtleties of sarcastic skepticism.

And these, too, prevent us from building. What if I am ordering my life in a way that I don't even need to?

And I'm making my life so much harder than it has to be, and I really don't need to keep going in this direction, and maybe

I'm just kind of weirdly brought into this setting, and it's having all this impact, and maybe

I should just stop trying to build this thing all together, at least not in this way. Maybe I'll just go and do something a little bit different, and that's it.

That's a discouragement. That's opposition. That's a serpent slithering into the garden and saying, did

God really say? And that happens very easily to us. What's your life?

Jesus asked that question from Matthew 6. What's your life? Are you just a body for clothing and food?

What's your life? What's your life about? What's your life for? He's asking here at the close of 7, what are you building?

What are you building on? Why are you building? How are you building? What are you building?

Well, we know we're not building something all that great. If we're being honest with ourselves and we're surveying rightly, we're not building the

Taj Mahal here. We're not building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. We're not building a wonder of the ancient world.

We're building something that looks like burnt stones and rubble and something almost embarrassing, something that shouldn't be able to hold up any sort of structure whatsoever, and yet somehow in God's sight, by God's grace, this little foothill is going to ascend to be the highest hill in the world.

God is pleased and he's building up our waste places. He's dealing with the desolation. So the world says, why would you build like that?

What are you building? It's not even worth it. They think it's strange that we're not running like them in this flood of dissipation, but we are those who give account to him, knowing he's ready to judge the living and the dead.

So we build in light of that. We don't build in light of the world. We don't build like the world would want to build. The world despises the sacrifices you make as a

Christian. It despises them. The world mocks the things you're trying to build.

That's always been true. Christians have for two millennia been the butt of the joke.

Don't preen and posture yourself as if you can escape that and still build a life well -pleasing to God.

You just can't. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, but also woe to you if you only speak well of yourself.

You need to see what's half -burnt and shabby and crumbling. You need to see where you're unfruitful.

You need to address your life in all the ways that Jesus is splashing cold water on your face, and he's saying, are you hearing and doing what

I'm saying? Only that will endure. Only that will survive. Anything less, though you attend it, though you enjoy it, anything less than doing it will collapse upon you.

It will destroy you, and so you need to persevere, and we're going to have to cut short here, but I'll come to the very end of what

I want to say. I simply want to say this from Psalm 127 .1. Unless the

Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. This is, again, as we've said all along, this is not something you muster up from your own strength or your own ability.

You cannot build unless the Lord builds. You don't know how to build unless the Lord reveals it to you. You don't know why you should build unless the

Lord moves in you, gives you that hope, that promise everlasting. You have nothing to build toward, no ability to build whatsoever apart from his spirit.

Unless he's building, you're laboring in vain. You can spend a lot of energy and effort, but if he's not building into your life, then you're not getting anywhere, whatever pains you take.

So you have to start there. Do you actually know the Lord in all the ways that we've said? Have you been given a new life, a new birth?

Have you been made a new tree, planted in a new place? That's his building into your life, and unless he's building in that way, you're laboring in vain.

You're just building on sand, as we'll say next week. I just want you to, again, unless, that's the first word in the

English translation, at least, unless the Lord. I don't want you to walk away into this afternoon saying unless I, unless I, unless I, unless I, I want you to walk away going unless the

Lord, Lord, help me, show me, move in me, strengthen me, so weak, so helpless, and because you're crying out unless the

Lord, you're quick to see his providential control over all things. Of all people, we should be the last to think that it's our success, our advance, our gains, strategies of our own devising.

It's unless the Lord, that's the call. And then we recognize the Lord is as sovereign over the building of our lives as he is over the storms and the winds and the rains he sends against those buildings.

He's as sovereign in the building in your life, this work that he's begun, as he is over the storms he sends against that building.

What is he doing? He's proving his workmanship. He's shaking to see whether you're on a solid foundation.

His sovereignty is not selective, it's comprehensive. He sits enthroned over the flood.

So whatever the storms are, the winds, the rains that beat against this building, it's of the

Lord. He's the God who sits above the storm and it takes that faith to recognize that God has control over the storm, even when it's chaotically raging and you feel like you're unable to build because of all these obstacles in the way and you've lost sight and you're finding yourself confused and you're losing heart.

Why should I build? It takes that faith to say the God who began this work is building me even still.

He's sovereign over this storm. He'll bring it to pass. That's easy to say when you're not in a storm, easy to preach when you're not in a storm.

It's really hard to cling to when you're in a storm, isn't it? It's really hard to cling to when you're feeling the floodwaters rising in your life, but it's no less true.

It's perhaps only in these situations that we learn to walk by faith and not by sight. The vast majority of our lives we lead by walking by sight, walking based on how we feel or what we need.

It's those storms and those winds and those rains that teach us how to walk by faith. That's why we read missionary biographies, isn't it?

It's like trying to put the jumper cables into our lives to say, Lord, give me some of that. I need that kind of faith.

I want that kind of resolve. I want that kind of zeal. It almost seems like a fairy tale, like a legend, like a myth.

Are people really like this? Because I'm not, Lord. And if you read the really well -written missionary biographies, not the hagiographies, but the biographies, you'll know they weren't like that either.

What you'll see is a sovereign God who began His work, sovereign over the storm, and Him completing that work in and through their lives.

And you don't think He has the same desire for you? As much as it requires of us to walk by faith and not by sight, we cannot walk at all apart from the faithfulness of God to us.

So the wall is never built. The victory is never won apart from the grace of God through Christ.

And when we cling to this, when our hearts sing it, when our wills bend to it, that's what it looks like to abound in His work.

Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the

Lord. Why? Because you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. That's the issue. When you lose sight of the

Lord by faith, and you're walking by feeling and by sight, when you lose sight of the Lord because the storm clouds are so thick, and the rains are so torrential that you can no longer see

Him, all you can do is see Him by faith, not by feeling, not by sight. You're actually in the place where your labor is conducted by faith, not in your own strength, but by the grace that's given in Christ Jesus.

That labor will feel like it's in vain when you're in the middle of a storm. Why am

I building? I just put the shovel into this because I was so convicted, and now it's three times as hard.

Why would I keep going? Do I want to just keep quadrupling this? I couldn't be more discouraged than I already am.

How could I keep going? And the storm clouds eclipse the Lord from your vision, and you're clinging by your fingernails by faith to Him.

And the Scripture is saying, your labor is never in vain in the Lord. That's what it looks like to build by faith.

Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock and the rains descended, the floods came, the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it was founded on the rock.

Let's pray. Father, thank

You for Your Word. Lord, bless us with this perseverance. We're such a weak and needy people,

Lord. We cannot see the things You want us to see. We don't attend to the things that You want us to attend to,

Lord. We don't have the strength we ought to have by now. We're still in many ways drinking milk when we ought to be eating steaks.

Help us, Lord. Thank You for Your mercy and Your grace, Lord. As a father so tender, as a shepherd so caring,

You still dwell with us, Lord, patiently leading and guiding us, attending to us, making the way before us plain, even if it's only step by step from the light of Your Word.

Lord, I pray You'd help ones that here are discouraged, Lord. Maybe someone in this room that felt there's no point in continuing to build, even this week.

Others, Lord, who have just felt overwhelmed by all the obstacles. Others, Lord, who have just lost sight of You, lost sight of why they were dealing with the rubbish in the first place.

They forgot that this was all about building. And Lord, help us all as individuals, as a body, to be those kind of people that can be the blind spot alarms for our brothers and our sisters, and give us that courage to be faithful friends that wound.

Lord, help us to build wisely on the rock, both as individuals, also as couples in our marriages, also as families and households, also as a church.

Lord, build us up in this holy faith by Your own Spirit. We can do nothing apart from You.

We beg of You, Lord, empower and strengthen Your people. We ask it in Jesus' name.