Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. Luke 6:47-48
Every Sunday morning, as I sit in the classroom at the local jail, waiting for the inmates to arrive for Bible study, I contemplate the surrounding cinder block walls. Those walls didn’t just appear there one day. They were laid, one block at a time, until a structure was built. Similarly, the guys in jail didn’t just make a single wrong turn one day, ending up in jail. No, they laid down one poor choice after another, building a life of wrong choices, which, like that block wall, now confines them.
So it is with all of us. We don’t control every aspect of our lives, but where we are today is largely a product of the lives we’ve built every day leading up to now. What is it we’re building and upon what are we building it?
In today’s passage, Jesus used this metaphor to teach that the wise man builds his house on a foundation of rock while the foolish man builds his house on no foundation. When the storms of life come – those things we cannot control – the life we’ve built will stand or fall, based on how we’ve built it.
What is this foundation of stone? Everyone who hears my words and does them. In daily following God – doing what’s right – we build our lives, block by block, on the right foundation. This isn’t a once-for-all decision that we made long ago. This is our daily decision making. Do I get up early to read and pray? Do I treat others with kindness and love? Do I abandon my way to follow God’s? The blocks we lay today determine the kind of life we have tomorrow.
We often think of recovery as necessary only for the drug addict. The truth though, is that we’re all tempted to build a life on following ourselves. This is our nature – to do what we want – and if we don’t purposefully follow God, we follow ourselves. It isn’t only the guy in jail who needs to build the new life. We’re all in recovery from our fallen nature and we all daily, must make the choice to build our lives, block by block on the only foundation that can save us.