How many of y'all have ever had a trust issue before? A silly trust issue, okay? So when I was a kid, I went through a phase to where I would want to headbutt my dad, okay? And so to do a little bit of size here, I'm so five years old, five year old, but that's all right.
Dad, by five nines, I would bend down and I would just run and headbutt him. And the geometric angle for a five year old, headbuddling his father was kind of the worst place possible for you to headbutt your father. And so my dad got this idea that he was gonna cure me of it. So one day he stood there and he said, chat, I want you to give me all you've got.
I want you to go ahead and just get a run and start and just show me what you're made of. And so our house was like a ranch style house and it was wide, it wasn't very long, but he was in the kitchen and he told me this and he's standing like right here in the house. And you could get a clear line across the whole house if you got to the back bathroom and you could run the entire width of the house. And so I backed up to that back wall and my four year old self was running as fast as I possibly could because I was gonna finally give my dad the headbutt of all headbuds.
But what I'd not comprehend it four years old was that my dad was standing right in front of the refrigerator. Yeah. And when I was about three feet away from him, dad just did this. And I just smacked and nailed the refrigerator.
Just, well, four year old can't go that fast. And I hit the ground and dad said he thought it was a good idea and told him how many steps away that he realized what was probably gonna happen. And mom got mad, mom said the funny thing was I just did not trust my dad for a few days. I got, he'd say something to him like, I'm not gonna do that.
It took him a while to regain my trust back. So this is like a silly idea of trust issues. But a lot of us have serious trust issues. Okay, who has trust issues?
This is not by example, this is confession right here. Okay, we have trust issues. We have things in life that make us not trust. There's a relationships we have with people or it might be just a person period we don't trust.
There might be situations we don't trust. Or like organizations or groups of people, there's all sorts of ways that we can't trust. And those cause unhealthy things in life for us. And a misplaced trust, it leads to not just trust issues, but authority issues.
Okay, I remember the first time anybody told me that I have an issue with authority. It's when I tried to lead a coup in junior high youth choir because the lady was gonna make us do hand motions and I was not gonna do hand motions. So I started organizing a revolt in junior high choir to overthrow the junior high choir director because I didn't wanna do hand motions. Well, the only problem with that was, it's like, first of all, I'm trying to get 90 kids to throw a revolt one day, problem one.
Two, my dad was a youth pastor at the church, so problem that right there. So that got me getting even more trouble. And then it was just, I remember getting pulled into the corner and like, you have an authority issue. I kind of explained to a lot of my life this idea of authority issues.
I like, I'm kind of scared by how much I like Frank Underwood on House of Cards. And that time somebody said something, he said if you don't like the way the table is set, just flip the table over. Authority issues that they stem from trust issues. We have an authority issue when we don't trust somebody or something enough to provide us a stable foundation in the midst of chaos.
And chaos can be defined in many different ways. And so this week we're wrapping up this series we've had all summer long on the start of the mount. And Jesus is not talking about authority, but he's showing authority. And people are responding to that authority.
It creates a different picture of the world for us, an amazing picture of the world for us. And it makes us internally begin to ask ourselves questions about what we trust and about how do we trust things. And what do we do when we don't trust something? And what is it like to build up an even bigger idea of what trust might look like.
So you can open your Bible. Matthew chapter seven, and we're gonna read from verse 24 to the end of the chapter 29. And so you can read on your Bible, you'll be up on the screen behind me if you're phone, feel more than welcome to do that. But let's listen to these words of Jesus as we wrap up our conversation this summer on the start of the mount.
And so he says, anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it as wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. And though the rain comes in torrents and the flood waters rise and the wind beat against that house, it won't collapse because it's built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn't obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. And when the rain and floods come and the winds beat against the house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.
And when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching. For he taught with real authority, quite unlike their teachers of religious law. So all summer we've been going through these three chapters. I have historically know them as a sermon on the mount.
We've been calling it Jesus's greatest hits. For us to understand Matthew as a disciple of Jesus, when he began putting together the absolute essential, most core, the things that anybody needs to know about Jesus and his teaching. And in this section of four verses, this whole three chapters is just straight the word and the teaching of Jesus. And he's doing an amazing thing because he's building a completely new and a completely different vision for what this world looks like.
So the first couple of verses, he saw his disciples. And he saw the crowds and his compassion. So he wouldn't put a mountainside again. And he sat down, he began to teach them.
And he went into some of those famous words that he's ever said. And Matthew closes this chapter, these three chapters out with people's amazement. Their amazement of Jesus's authority. And we have to think about this, that maybe our trust issues and maybe our authority issues, because we all have them.
Some might be more severe than others. Some might not be a severe at all. But our trust issues and our authority issues, what they do is they show for us the boundaries of the world we've created for ourselves. And for these last three chapters, what Jesus has done is Jesus has begun showing us the boundaries for the world that God's creating.
So let's jump into this. A couple of things are going on. The first is this, that we find a character for the first time, also on the lawn, we find a character in this passage. That's the crowds are there.
Now the crowds, this group of people, they're doing a couple of different things. So the people in the crowds, some of them are huge fans of Jesus. They're amazed by him. They want to be like him.
They want to follow him everywhere, every single thing he's doing, that they're just enraptured with. The crowd is also made of people that haven't made their minds up yet. They kind of like some of this, a little bit of this resonates with them in their life. But some of it, they're still kind of unsure of.
They don't know who to trust. And there's other people in the crowds that absolutely can't stand Jesus. They don't want anything to do with him. They can't explain why they're so interested in him.
But they're there to listen to him. Some of them are trying to find like a loophole where they can arrest Jesus and they can take care of this problem once and for all. They can't explain how they're, and they're inextricably drawn to who he is. Now I talk about the crowd there for a moment because not only are there this passage, but every single one of us can find ourselves in that crowd sometimes, right?
And what's so interesting is sometimes in our life, we actually move places in that crowd. It's almost like a scale of trust, right? There's people who trust him absolutely, and they're willing to do anything. And there's people that absolutely don't trust him, and they're trying to find a way to bring down his authority inside of there.
So there's two phrases that are very interesting in this first part that keep repeated over and over. And Jesus was talking about that for those who hear my words and listen to them, other translations say obey them. It's in verse 24 and verse 26, says, for those who hear my words and don't listen, this phrase is built up there twice, and it's teaching us something that's significantly bigger than we can imagine. It's the idea of hearing.
We don't hear in means. We have the capabilities to understand, the capabilities to listen, that sort of thing. But hearing all across scripture is seen as this hugely important thing. St.
Genesis one in the beginning, God created the heavens in the earth. He said, let there be light. The audible voice of God is what started this whole thing. Hearing is huge.
In John one, when John starts off his gospel, he says in the beginning was the word, and the word was God. And the word was with God. And he was in the beginning with God that Jesus is visible, physical manifestation of who God is. John introduces us to him as the word.
In the book of Revelation, but all throughout all the prophets, there's this phrase that is used consistently, that says, for those who have ears to hear, let them hear, the people who hear God and hear his message are a very big thing, because Christianity is a religion of the spoken word and of the heard word, because the religion of being active, it's not passive. And it leads into this next thing. Jesus talks about the people who obey my words. And obey is not really a good enough word.
So we find most of our translations. But this is really about response. The people who hear and the people who obey are the folks who understand they hear something and it brings them to making a decision. It brings them to causing an event and bringing that into reality.
Same thing on the here on. We go back in Genesis one, we hear Jesus, when God's creating this world, and he's saying, let there be a water between the earth and the earth is doing the action. The first time that he gives Adam, something to do Adam, he says, let you go and name and steward over this garden. That God makes his creation to have the potential to respond to him.
So when Jesus says these words, for those who hear and obey, it's not just about people doing what he tells them to do, it's not about this blind obedience or just us making something happen as we're told to make it happen, but this is the way that we participate and the way that God has created this world. And even with sin, even with this broken state that we have to deal with, that we have the capability and potential to be fulfilling the very thing that God asked this world to do in the beginning, to hear and to respond. It's about us and the actions that mirror us doing what God has made us to do, that our life, the decisions that we make, are in offering to him, and we're participating in the way that he originally designed us to participate, to respond to what he's doing. And we see interesting here, this goes all throughout the sermon amount, there's been some times that we felt kind of awkward, okay?
If you were here last week, it's mochra-suff. We've had a few awkward weeks because the words of Jesus are kind of getting right to it, and we have to like swallow a little bit. Makes us feel uncomfortable. And this is another one of those places where Jesus is saying, folks that listen, there's gonna be folks that don't listen.
And it's not gonna work out well for those who don't listen. And one of the ways we kind of pad this awkward is we realize that Jesus is not talking about people who have never heard, have never been introduced, who have no earthly idea what's going on. Jesus talking about the folks who have heard, the folks that have been given this option. So in one way it makes us realize that God is not, is malevolent or mad that we can make him out to be sometimes when we don't have to explain him well.
But it also means that we have to realize what's going on when we have heard the word of God that we have to respond. Because cataclysm affects them both. There's a story of a storm. And we've been losing it especially this last week, and a half, last six months.
We know what storms are like, don't we? There's a visible reminder of a storm sitting outside right now in the lobby, there's a bunch of box fans and we're gonna talk more about those later on. But we know what storms are like. No matter what decision you make in life, storms are gonna hit you.
Storms are going to be coming. But the way we choose to deal with those storms matters, what Jesus is talking about. So Jesus lays out this parable. Matthew puts it at the very end of the sermon on the mountain.
Next time we read is that the crowds who are in attendance were amazed because Jesus taught with authority. Now how many of y'all would be honest? And I said, this is confession, not an example. How many of y'all have authority problems?
Okay, let's go back to the definition of authority. So we have authority problems when we don't trust someone or something to provide a stable foundation to avoid chaos. Okay, just parable of the storms is a picture of chaos. All throughout scripture is this image consistently, it's storms, think back in your mind of all the times, all the stories in the Bible, you know that involve storms.
Okay, it's a picture of a world that's in turmoil. It's an image that the writers of the Bible love to you. Think about it, the turmoil that frustrates you and the times that you've reacted to that turmoil. It's because you don't trust.
A lot of times we begin to rail because we immediately think that authority is somebody who really does not know what they're doing, right? Just be honest, I'm all about honesty. But in scripture, this idea of authority we find, if you pick this word apart in Matthew chapter seven, there's like eight definitions, like bullet point definitions. And the top one is the one that's really used the most, we should understand the most.
It takes us through four definitions of authority before we get to anybody who's in a pointed position. Like a government or a job or a role like that. The top four are all about capability. So a person who has their right to make a decision based off of their potential to evaluate what's going on.
I can trust somebody that knows what's going on. Next layer of this is that a person who has a state of control who has the potential or the resources to command. It's a different picture of authority. It's all relational and we dig into authority.
It's even a larger picture. The number one in the New Testament, the number one usage for any sort of authority is when Jesus exercises control over the weather, over sickness, over evil spirits. Okay, if you're living in the first century in the Middle East, there are three things that you're worried about that can destroy the life you live. The weather, sickness, or evil spirits.
That's their entire cosmology. So all these miracles that we see Jesus when he's healing people, when he's calming the storms and disciples are freaked out and he's taking a nap. When he's going casting out demons, what Jesus is doing, he's showing them, I have control over this entire world. You don't have anything to worry about.
There's nothing that I can't take control over. It's the largest use of the idea of authority in the New Testament. Is Jesus showing control over the weather, over sickness, over evil spirits? That God, that his authority, it always stems from the fact that he has created this world.
If he's created this world, how can he not control this world? And God's control over this world brings peace to this world. You mirror that with faulty authority, especially in the Old Testament with the Kings, because what you see is that they did not create anything. They, in turn, that typically destroy things.
And their destruction does not lead to peace. Their destruction causes chaos. Jesus is a picture perfect image of his father. We sing those words earlier.
It's a good father. So Jesus' definition and functionality of authority is drastically different from what we want to. So that's a bunch of information right now, okay? Like, all right, Jed, we've gotten that done away.
But how does this affect me? How does not just, this is six verses in the sermon of the matter, but how does this whole thing we've been reading all summer long affect me? How do I bring this into my heart? How do I bring this into my home?
How do I bring this into my workplace? And the places and the folks I interact with all day long. Land is plain for me. There's two things I want us to think about.
Jesus' words in 24 and 26. I'm gonna read them to you again. There's just one pronoun that should stick out more than anything else. If anyone who listens to my teachings and follows it as wise, like a person who builds a house on Solid Rock, and then in 26, anyone who hears my teaching and doesn't obey it as foolish.
See, the folks there are not used to anyone claiming themselves as authority. They're religious leaders, they're politicians. Everybody else who's trying to overarch and push authority on them. And these folks here in the first century in the Middle East, they have multiple authority structures going on.
At one point in time, the whole Persian empire had taken, everybody else seen the 300, right? The whole Persian empire had taken this place over. And the Persian empire had got the Greek empire and Alexander the Great, and then the Romans took over, but they all acted the same. Their policy was to allow people to continue to govern themselves as they already had.
So if anybody right now, like we can get frustrated with government, local government or state or national government, we can get frustrated with that, right? Sometimes, yeah. It's an election cycle. Everybody's frustrated.
I've seen Facebook. Imagine if you had more than one government trying to exert control over you. Can you imagine how maddening that would be? Because that's what they were doing with.
Because not only that they had the Roman Empire exarting their control over them, the Roman Empire was allowing them to govern themselves. And the province of Judea was governed by a religious authority. So they had two people just pushing and pushing, pushing authority on them. But their authority structure was then pointing back to somebody else.
So a religious leader would say, well, so and so says, they pass the buck up. The government leader's doing the exact same thing. Well, that's not my decision. That's this person's decision.
It's always passing off that responsibility or authority to somebody else. And Jesus comes in here and says, anyone who listens to my teachings, anyone who listens to my words, that's absolutely mind-blowing. He's saying, I have the ability to promise you these things. I have the ability to control these things.
I have the ability to give you that firm foundation. Also, no longer we've been listening to Jesus' tell a story. The story is about how he's not coming to destroy things. He's coming to expand things.
How he's coming in to say, I want to increase your boundaries of what you believe to be possible. I want to increase your vision of what God's kingdom looks like. This can be very different from what you think it's going to look like. It's to be based in love, not judgment.
But I want to do everything I can for your vision of God's world to be larger than your vision for the world. For you to see the possibility and the potential of what's going on. And I can control that. I can provide that stability.
The second thing that we pull not just from these people's amazement from across the entire front of the Mount will be familiar with the people who've been a foundry a handful of times. But that idea is that Jesus is big enough. He's big enough. John Chrysostom was a pastor and a writer in about the third century of our church.
He lived in Jerusalem. His nickname was the Golden Tongue. John Chrysostom writing about this whole idea of authority. He said this, and it's been kind of, I've changed the language a little bit to fit what we're used to.
But it's this question that who possesses the equilibrium to stay afloat when everything in life is thrown at you? Think about what does it look like when you melt down? First of all, you might have to admit the fact that you melt down sometimes. That can be a hard thing for some people.
But I know my wife, I know my good friends. They know what it's like when I've hit my margin level. They know what it's like when I no longer have the equilibrium to keep my life afloat. They know what that's like because they can look and tell what's not healthy.
Who possesses the stability or the equilibrium to keep you standing upright when everything goes south? Do you feel like you can control that yourself? If you can, I want you to teach me the secret because I cannot. It's bad.
It's bad. It's not holy. It's something I pray about. But the second question that Chrysostom asked is this, that who can possess that power and provide stability?
It's a thing about that authority. Authority is when we can trust someone or something to provide a firm foundation in the middle of our chaos. Jesus is big enough. Because when we think about this, we realize that our balance, our own health and our own behavior and the way that we react to things.
In many ways, it's just a marker for how much we trust in Jesus's foundational ability. It shows us where our discipleship level is that. It shows us where our relationship with Jesus is that. We found that breaking point.
And I know that all week is I've been reflecting on that. Reflecting on a week that's been pretty busy. I know next week's been pretty busy. The next week's been pretty busy.
The question I've been asking myself is my relationship with Jesus strong enough right now for where I need it to be. Beginning with a new school year, a lot of us are maxed out, right? I've got a lot of friends in here who are still in school. I've got friends in here who are trying to deal with what happens when you'll embrace their tuition rates.
I've got friends whose kids are going back to school and they're trying to figure out what's that going to look like this year. We've got just the beginning. If there's something in our culture about August September is when things change and things start. Is our relationship with Jesus strong enough to weather the storm we live in right now?
And the question's asked myself, is OK. I have a choice to change it. How am I willing to increase my trust component, my trust portion? Because somewhere along we've been reading the Jesus saying, God's vision for this world is bigger than your vision for this world.
But I can show you where this world is at. This is all about decision making. Our decision making capability. That's been the message of these whole three chapters.
The second thing is have I done the foundation work. Am I busy doing a little bit of stucco or hanging sheet rock or painting something when I've got a crack in my foundation that's going to keep the problem going on there? Jesus says, because what Jesus is talking about, it's not necessarily in the storm story. It's not at the quality of the construction of the house.
Notice that. It's their decision on where to build the house. You're going to build it on strong foundation on the rock. You're going to build it on sand.
How many of you have ever lived in a house that needs to be leveled? It never stops, right? Meredith, now the house we've been right now is the first time I've lived in a house that's on a concrete slab since I was 18 years old. Meredith and I've always lived in houses that were built a long, long time ago until we moved to Stirlington.
And I kind of like it, but you know what? I miss my peer and beam. I was that that floor flex. I talked to the guy.
I know the guy who built my house. And I asked him one time. I said, how crazy would it be for somebody to build a peer and beam house now? And he said, it would be ludicrous.
You'd be an idiot to do that. He's like, I would even do it. He said, there's no way. He said, in losing Anna, it's just going to move.
And you're going to be doing jacks. And you're going to have problems. You're a foundation all along. He said, it would be a very, very bad decision for you to want to do that.
How many times do we try to build a house that has no business on the soil we have in our life? How many times do we stress about things that are going on? And what we're unwilling to do is realize I need to work on I can do that. We can fix that problem.
And you're never going to have to mess with it again. I've got this. St. Augustine is a church father.
I've all throughout the Sermon and Mount series I've been reading. The church fathers and the church mothers, these people, the first few hundred years of Christianity and reading their reflections on these words of Jesus. And they've been amazing. But St.
Augustine, we've talked about him before, but he said this. I read this this week. And it just absolutely flows into what does it mean for us to understand this foundation issue. He says, the house of my soul is too small for you.
So grow my soul that you may enter in. That's a great prayer out there. That's an honest prayer. The house of my soul is too small for you.
So grow my soul that you may enter in. We need to do the right work. We need to realize that Jesus has offered us these things. We need to pray for the amazement that these same people felt because they realized they're finally seeing somebody who has the power to provide the foundation they need for no matter what that chaos is like.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for how you revealed yourself to us, not just today, but this whole summer. And we'll be praying for the honesty. And we pray for the soul care and the soul searching that we need.
Got our soul to do small for you to enter in sometimes. So we pray for you to increase our house. And God not to increase our house for an untangible benefit, but to increase your kingdom. That we may know you more.
That we may experience you fully. God, we pray for the vision to see the size of your world, to see our place. What we know that you created this place. And you send us your son for us to know what that relationship with you is like.
So we pray for that relationship to increase. For our picture of you to increase, and for our vision of you, and your world to increase. And so in your name we pray, amen.