This year Peachtree is building two houses for Habitat for Humanity. Dr. Chuck Roberts has encouraged our Iron Man Ministry to lend a hand; he joked with the congregation a few Sundays ago that, because the brothers would be working on the second story of one of the houses, each brother should have his insurance paid up in the event that, while working on the second floor, he suddenly finds himself down on the first.
Whether on the second floor or the first, the good work that the brothers will be doing presupposes that they will be building upon good work that has already been done in the laying of a firm foundation for the houses. One needn’t be a building contractor nor the son of a building contractor to know that for any house, everything rests, quite literally, upon its foundation. Without a firm foundation, no house, however carefully constructed or beautifully appointed, will withstand the rains that will invariably fall, the floods that will invariably come, and the winds that will invariably blow and beat against it.
Jesus summons the image of the house built upon a firm foundation as an apt metaphor for discipleship. So too, much later, does the eighteenth-century hymn writer John Rippon:
How firm a Foundation, ye Saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your Faith in His excellent Word;
What more can he say than to you he hath said?
You, who unto Jesus for Refuge have fled.
The words of Jesus serve as the foundation for the judgments of his disciples. Judgments founded on the “rock” of his words mark the authentic followers of Jesus. His words serve as the criteria of his disciples; they are what makes the difference for them. It is by his words they pick and choose between what is right and what is wrong, discern the true and the false, forsake what is evil and cleave to what is good.