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SAND IS THE DEFAULT MODE

If you’re like me, and you have eight Thursday projects piled on your desk, or there on your kitchen table at home, there’s probably one that’s harder than the others. One assignment you dread. One term paper you can’t seem to get started on writing. And so you dribble around with the other seven, doing the easy stuff, shuffling the easy papers . . . and allowing the difficult chore to just sit and develop its own compound interest of grief. One college advisor once observed with a sad smile: “College really isn’t that hard. Most freshmen do an entire semester’s worth of work in the final week!”

Have you ever noticed, though, that so often the hard thing to do is also the right thing? Isn’t that depressing? It’s easy to gossip, and hard to stop. Easy to be selfish and difficult to share. Hard to get to church; easy to get to the movies and the mall. Hard to pray, easy to watch TV. Inconvenient to live for Christ; wonderfully easy to live for yourself. It’s a spiritual fact of life: the right thing is the hard thing. The moral gravity of sin pulls everything in our lives down . . . and us with it.

You’ve heard the old story, I’m sure, of the kid who was watching a caterpillar-turned-butterfly trying to emerge from its cocoon after the long slumber of metamorphosis. And it was clawing to get out; struggling and gasping for air, looking like it needed CPR and a visit from an UrgentCare Center. I mean, that little hole at the bottom of the cocoon was just too tiny. Obviously God had made a mistake in design. So the kid, with a pair of scissors, cut a larger hole so the butterfly could get out. Well, it slithered out in a slippery heap, all right . . . and then just lay there on the ceramic floor. And continued to lay there. Because the exercise and work and struggle of coming out, of doing the right thing, the appropriate butterfly thing, was going to give it strength for the journey. Having slid down the greased chute of convenience, it was now doomed.

And you know, as we read through this very interesting parable told by Jesus in the books of Matthew and Luke, about a man who built his house on the sand, and another man who built on the rock, we find some very interesting parallels. So here’s the question for today: Why do people build on sand instead of on rock? In the cradle roll song, “The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock,” why is there even a second stanza where foolish people get out their bulldozers and knowingly build on the flimsy foundation of sand instead?

We began to answer that question — strictly from a building, not a spiritual, perspective — back on Monday. If you were with us, Justin and Tracy, our fictional couple, went out with great excitement and built a fictional mansion on the fictional Malibu Shores right on the very real Pacific Ocean and the real sand which you can find out there. Now why’d they do that? Why didn’t they pay more for a lot built on granite?

Well, from a building point of view, they made their decision based on several variables. It was easier to build on the sand. Rock was difficult; sand was easy. Most of the people around them were building on sand too; there were attractive young couples all over the place, marking out their lots, planning their futures. Lots on the sand were what the crowd was opting for that particular year. And in all the catalogs and over at the home improvement center, houses built on sand were the popular choice.

Here’s another point. If no killer storm ever blows in, a house built on the sand is enough. If things are calm, sand will do. If the ocean stays flat, sand is sufficient. If there’s no earthquake, then paying extra for rocks and granite and cement pilings and retrofittings is just money out the window. Who wants to fork out extra for a tragedy that isn’t ever going to come along?

And one more thought as we get ready to move from physical sand to spiritual sand. But is it possible, out there at Malibu Shores, that building on sand was the default mode? If you didn’t specifically ask for an upgrade, then sand would be what you got. If you just went to Simonson and West and said, “Gimme a lot. Any lot” . . . you got sand. If you put in no extra effort, you got sand. You had to step outside your comfort zone, buck the crowd, do the hard thing, the unpopular thing, in order to get a house built on the rock. Sand was the default thing you got, the easy thing.

I want to go right now to Matthew 7, where this story is found, but let me take two seconds to remind you of a verse in chapter six, where Jesus tells people:

“No one can serve two masters. . . . You cannot serve both God and money.”

And all through the teachings of Jesus, there’s this sense that serving Jesus is the hard thing, and serving self, or money, or the world isn’t just the easy thing but the default thing. Friend, if you and I just get out of bed in the morning and do our own thing, that’s exactly what it is: our own thing. It’s not God’s thing. If you go about your life and just live, that’s a house built on sand. You have to choose God, choose Christianity, choose the rock foundation of a life of faith . . . or you’ll get sand without even asking for it.

But now for just a few minutes, let’s go to Matthew chapter seven and find out just what Jesus was talking about before He got to this story about sandy beaches and storms and smashed-up skyscrapers. This is called “getting the context of the story,” always a good idea for any Bible student. And there are essentially six threads of thought to the sermon of Jesus before the beach story happens. First of all, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Meaning, leave God’s business with God. Number two, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and ye shall find.” That’s obviously about trusting God too. Number three, the Golden Rule. Which, as we’ve already observed, would fall into the category of “Hard Things”! Doing what doesn’t come naturally, being good to your enemies.

But now here are numbers four, five, and six. “Beware of following the crowd,” Jesus says. “Because DOWN is the default mode. Destruction is where most people will automatically go . . . without thinking. The road to lost-ness is a broad, smooth, comfortable one; the path to the kingdom is hard and winding and lonely.” Then comes point #5: “Beware of nice-sounding, charismatic leaders who suck you into their false theology,” He tells us. “Don’t go after a false prophet whose own life doesn’t bear fruit.” And then this companion piece of advice: “Watch out for miracle workers, or people who use My name, or who talk a seductive spiritual line . . . but who don’t obey My Father’s will. Beware of people who fill their conversations with Christian platitudes, but who aren’t doing what I invite them to do, who aren’t living sanctified lives of obedience to My Word, My commandments.”

And you know, friend, you can go down this little sermon outline of six things, and the lessons from Malibu Shores are so very clear. The easy thing is to judge others. The easy thing is to seek our own way, rather than to seek divine answers to prayer. The easy thing is to treat our neighbors and co-workers, and especially our enemies, with spite, and disregard the Golden Rule. You have to step outside of yourself, force your way out of your comfort zone, in order to do what Jesus is describing here. And that’s precisely what this parable is about: the hardness of an obedient life.

Pastor Adrian Rogers, in his wonderful book, Believe In Miracles But Trust in Jesus, hits this very point:

“True faith, strong faith, is always linked to obedience,” he writes. “In Romans 16:26 Paul speaks of ‘the obedience of faith.’ And the apostle James writes, ‘As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’ Sitting in church and taking notes is not faith. You must obey the Word. ‘Well,’ you say, ‘are you telling me that I’m saved by faith and works?’ No, I’m saying that you are saved by faith that works. If it doesn’t work, it is not faith. Simply saying that you believe but not obeying is not faith. There’s no substitute for obedience.

That’s a sober thought, isn’t it, friend? And it’s sober reality as well. Obedience to God is not default; if we don’t stop and think and pray and wrestle, “[resisting] unto blood [and] striving against sin,” as Hebrews 12 colorfully puts it, then we’re going to automatically live an autopilot life of comfortable, easy, natural, sandy disobedience.

The great news is this: your house and mine is being built right now, today, on this Thursday. It’s still going up, still being constructed. Are you on the sand? Well, move. Better yet, let Jesus help you move. Get on the Rock today, and then, on a daily basis, choose to stay there. The Master Mover, and also the Master Architect, is ready and waiting for you.