Sermon Tone Analysis

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As always, it is an honor and a privilege to share the Word of God with this church.
Today we are closing out the final message in a series that we began almost a year and a half ago walking through the Greatest Sermon Ever Given.
That sermon wasn’t given by Billy Graham, Adrian Rogers, or even Charles Spurgeon.
The Greatest Sermon ever given comes from none other than Jesus Christ Himself.
The overarching topic we see throughout this sermon is the righteousness of God as compared to self-righteousness of man.
Last week, we looked at one of the most sobering sections of Scripture in all of the Bible.
We saw that on the day of judgment, some people will look at Jesus, they will have a knowledge in their head of who He is, what He has done.
They will attempt to say that they have done many mighty, great things in His name.
Jesus will look back at them and say depart from them I never knew you.
This is one of the most sobering sections of Scripture because Jesus tells us that this will be the case for MANY.
Many people will claim to know Him and say they done great things for Him, but their claims are a delusion.
Today, as we wrap up this series on the greatest sermon ever given, we will be taking a deeper look at why this is the case.
Why it is that many people claim to know Jesus and claim to have done things in His name, when they actually do not know Him.
You see, what we are learning about today is that people have a foundation problem.
Many people, including many religious, seemingly well put together people, do not actually have a strong foundation in their lives.
Its kind of like this: In 1994 the Corvette Museum was opened in Bowling Green Kentucky.
I know that we have a lot of people here who like cars and you may have even visited this particular museum.
This museum houses millions of dollars worth of classic corvettes.
I’m sure that it is a very cool site to see.
If I’m ever in the Bowling Green area, I might even check it out myself.
However, when this museum was constructed in 1994, I am sure that the builders put forth their best efforts to create a structurally sound building that would last for some time.
I doubt that any of the builders expected that in 2014, 20 years later, a sink hole would open up underneath a section of the museum, sucking in and damaging 8 rare corvettes.
The local news reached out to the president of the Louisville’s Fall City Corvette club to get a reaction and he said, "I think anybody who has a Corvette was stunned when they heard that," he said.
"We're all feeling the same way: 'Oh man, that's a shame.' "
When a building is built, what it is built upon has major significance as to its structural integrity.
When something appears to be built on good ground, but later it caves in, people can only look and say, “Oh man, that’s a shame.”
Now heres the things, ultimately even really fancy corvettes don’t have an eternal significance.
Earlier in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us not to bother ourselves with collecting earthly treasurers because moth and rust will inevitably destroy such things or thieves will take it away.
He says instead lay up treasures in heaven where everything lasts eternally.
Corvettes don’t have eternal significance.
But your soul does!
Just a few verse before where we are picking up this morning Jesus tells the hearers to enter the narrow gate that leads to life and do not choose the wide gate that leads to destruction.
These destinations of life and destruction are eternal destinations.
We saw last week that simple knowledge of who Jesus is or even simply accomplishing might works are not enough to be known by Jesus.
What you say and what you do really does not matter if the life you have built those things into is built on a faulty foundation!
Let’s look at what Jesus has to say on this matter in our text this morning.
If you haven’t already, open up to Matthew 7. We’re going to be looking at the end of the chapter today, starting.
In verse 24.
Let’s read verse 24-27
Every time I read this section of Scripture, I can’t help but think of the song we learned in Sunday School years ago.
The wise man builds his house upon the rock, then it go the rains came down and the flood came up, and the house on the rock stood firm.
Then it’d switch and say the foolish man built his house upon the sand, the rains came down and the flood came up, and the house on the sand went splat!
As a child I loved singing this song!
The lyrics were catchy, the movements were fun.
Especially at the end when you got to splat.
I loved making a show out of it, of course.
And while I believe this is a very fun way to teach this scripture to children, we have to recognize just how real and devastating this truth is for the fool who builds their house upon the sand.
In this section of Scripture we are presented with two wise man and the foolish man.
Before we look at the differences between the two men, let’s look first at the similarities.
If you look in verses 24 and 26 you can see that both of these men represent people who hear the words of Jesus.
That means that both the wise man and foolish man heard what Jesus taught to them.
This should cause us to perk up and pay attention for one very important reason.
All of us here in this room have also been given the opportunity to hear the what Jesus has taught.
If you’ve been with the church for sometime, we’ve been going through Jesus’ sermon on the mount for a quite a while.
But even if you are joining us today, you are hearing at least some of what Jesus taught!
You are being exposed to what Christ truly desires for those who follow Him.
When we see that the wise man and the foolish man both heard the the words of Jesus, it points us to the reality that both of these categories are likely represented in our church or at least in churches, even Bible-believe, gospel-professing churches, all across the globe.
Both the wise and the foolish hear the Words of Jesus.
Let’s look at another similarities.
Both the wise man and the foolish man built houses.
The houses represent the lives that they lived and made for themselves.
We are all building our life's in some shape or fashion.
What is important to realize in the comparison between the wise and the foolish man is that their houses have no distinguishable differences from an outside perspective.
In verse 24 and 26 it just says that each man built a house.
Why is this important to note?
Well because it doesn’t say that the wise man built a mansion and the fool built a shack or even vice versa.
For all intents and purposes these two house might have well of been two Ball homes with the same siding, brick, garage layout and everything.
From our perspective these houses looked basically the same!
This is important because it points to the idea that the basic facts of people’s lives can be very similar while they are still in very different eternal positions!
In our context, this might look like two people who both go to church every Sunday.
Two people who are faithful to their spouses.
Two people who are generous and they give to the church and the give to those in need.
The visible attributes of their lives may look the same, but as we will see they were built on two very different grounds.
But before we get to that, we need to look at one more similarity.
Both the wise man and the foolish man were hit by the same storm.
In both cases we see that the rains falls and the floods came up.
This is showing us that both houses or really both people will face the same structural test.
This is talking about the final judgment that all of us will one day face.
This judgment is heavily expounded upon in Hebrews.
In Hebrews 9:27 we see that everyone will face judgment
And Hebrews 4:13 we see how the judgment moves past superficial appearances and to the core of our being
So in our text from Matthew, when the men are tested it is not the external prettiness of their houses that provides protection, but rather the hidden foundation that truly matters.
So to recap where we are, the similarities between the two are that they both heard the words of Jesus, they both built up lives that may even appear similar from outside perspectives, and they both faced the same testing or judgment.
Now let’s look at the differences:
The most obvious difference between the two men is that one is wise and the other is foolish.
I think all of us would be able to make some distinction between wise and foolish behavior.
We’d call the one who spends all his money on frivolous things a fool and the one who saves for the time of need a wise man.
You might say that the one who constantly gets into trouble with the law is a fool.
The one who stays out of trouble is wise.
All of those may be true, but those are ultimately mancentric standards of wisdom and foolishness.
Jesus gives a higher and better standard of wisdom in this section of Scripture.
You see the wise man is identified as such because he not only hears the words of Jesus, but he acts upon them.
On the other hand, the fool hears the same things but does not do them.
In fact the verb for “does” in the Greek is in the present active form which says even more specifically that the wise man is hearing the the words of Jesus and continues to keep on doing them while the foolish man keeps on hearing the words of Jesus and keeps not doing them!
Willful obedience is the big separator between the two groups!
There are many people, particularly in our culturally Christian section of the Bible Belt, who will build lives that from the outside have the appearance of godliness, but internally they are not following Jesus, but they are just feigning religion to keep up appearances.
This is made evident by the difference of the foundations shown for each group.
The wise man builds his house upon the rock.
So we must ask ourselves, what is the rock?
The rock IS willful obedience to Jesus.
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