I want to show you all a neat video that Brian West, our contractor who's building our building at Sydney because I wasn't able to be there because I was intrigued about part of our building process. And so we've got this video that kind of shows what's going on a little bit with this, but our foundation is what's called a post-tension slab. And so what you see here is if you looked out while the, when our foundation was forward, you saw all this steel bars sneaking out outside and they're anchored on two sides of our foundation. But what this machine is doing is, those tables are networked throughout, woven throughout our foundation.
And this machine is doing, it's amazing, is it grabs a hold of that rebar and pulls it tight against the anchor. Brian said that we were pulling like six inches on those two sets of cable out of that and then it snaps it off. And what it does is it keeps our foundation under permanent tension. I read them a little bit of research just so we can make sure I wouldn't lie to you this morning telling you the story.
But it puts our foundation under 33,000 pounds of permanent tension. And it does so for several reasons, but it allows it to be significantly stronger and allows also a greater flexibility for the way you build and what you were doing. But it gives you a better foundation. And I told you last Sunday that we're going to spend a few weeks asking ourselves the question, what does it mean to follow Jesus in the 21st century?
What does it mean to follow Jesus in our world and our culture now? And this Sunday, we're going to kind of start at the beginning. We're going to talk about foundation. We're going to talk about what does it mean for us to understand at just a basic level about what following Jesus means, but specifically in our world now.
What do we need to equip ourselves with? We're going to read one story from the gospel of Matthew. We're going to read it two times in two different translations to just hear these words in a wider sense. But Matthew chapter seven, verse 24 through 27.
And this is what we read, this is the words of Jesus. Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who builds his house on the rock. The rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.
The rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat it at the house and it fell and it great was its fall. Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astonished at his teaching where he taught them as one having authority and not as their scribes. And read this again in Eugene Peterson's translation, the message, this is a more recent translation. Sometimes I love to use this for just how it helps us hear these words in a different way.
This is how Peter's been translated the same passage. These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock, rain tore down the river flooded, a tornado hit, but nothing moved that house, it was fixed to the rock.
But if you use my words in Bible studies and don't work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on a sandy beach. When a storm is a little harsh, isn't it? Okay, make sure it's not weird anybody else. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.
When Jesus concluded his address, the crowd burst into applause. They had never heard teaching like this. It was apparent that he was living everything he was saying quite a contrast to their religious leaders. This was the best teaching they had ever heard.
So this passage we read this morning is the very last bit on three chapters in the Gospel of Matthew that we commonly call the sermon on the Mount. The sermon on the Mount, some said it's a theological tour de force of the message of Jesus. In those three chapters, he contains like this is what a vision of life looks like when we live inside the Kingdom of God. This is the parable he told to close out that teaching and we see people's response inside of that.
But the foundation, we read about that a couple of times. The same word is translated. Other parts of the New Testament is grounded or established. In a kind of literal sense, it means just we think it means to provide a base.
Other parts of the scripture, this is used in a spiritual way like we read about it right now and it gives us the idea of a secure beginning point for the inner life. If this isn't taken care of well, nothing else you do afterwards is worth it. Nothing can last no matter what. And in these three chapters on Matthew 5, 6, and 7, Jesus defines out what does it mean to live a life that's drastically different from the secular systems of that day, but also from the religious systems of that day about how both of those groups of people said what a good and a proper life was like, about what does it mean to meet people's needs?
What does it mean to matter? What does it mean to live a life that matters? What does it mean to live a life that's truly changed? Jesus kind of throughout the sermon says, you know, this is the way that you're used to thinking about things, but all that leads to is brokenness and at least to crumbling and at least to things that fall that simply isn't adequate enough for you to base your life off of.
So what does it mean to follow Jesus in the 21st century? What does it mean for us to understand the way that he is asking us to move forward? What does it mean for maybe for us to think about what does it look like to follow Jesus in our culture now is different as it is? And I've been labored over this for the last few weeks and found it's going to give you a warning.
It's the next 10 minutes might be like drinking through a firehouse, but we need to just think about how we got to where we are now. So what does it mean to follow Jesus in our world now? A few weeks ago in our annual vision Sunday, I asked this question, what does it mean to embody the presence of Jesus Christ in our neighborhoods and our spheres of influence for the sake of the good news of Jesus? What does it mean for us to bring the presence of Christ into all the places that God has intentionally placed us in?
Eugene Peterson, translate the message, said this, life's basic decision is rarely if ever whether to believe in God or not, but whether to worship or compete with him. Mike Brein, a British pastor said this, if you create the church, you don't necessarily get disciples. But if you create disciples, you almost always get the church. So what does it mean to follow Jesus in our world now?
In a previous point in time, we would use the word conversion. There are so and so converted to this idea of distinctly moving from one way of seeing how the world is in a foundational way to another way of seeing how the world is in a foundational way. We don't talk about conversion now, we don't use that word. It might be too churchy for some.
It might be too complicated for some. But I mean, that's ultimately what this is about. Because all of our life now is conversion. Everything's about being converted to something.
Our whole culture now is a marketed attempt where we unknowingly are being shaped and shifted towards new primary decisions. We are tempted to be converted at every moment, at every shape and shift and turn now. There are other people that are trying to get us to buy in to their idea of the good life. We become what we worship.
And whether that makes sense or not, I'm here to tell you there are massive engines of change that are warring to have control of your hearts and your souls and your pocketbooks and your minds. You are a commodity. We are being converted to different things constantly. What we cannot assume anymore is that our culture will naturally create Christians.
We can't even assume that the church will naturally create Christians. Remember that quote from Mike Breen. We are being converted to something. The question is, what are we being converted to?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor in the 1930s and 1940s. He was also martyred for being part of the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler. The Tom Cruise movie. He got the point where he realized this is the only thing I can do is be part of this.
Before this, Bonhoeffer was pasturing that he had a seminary deep in the woods in Germany. It was called Finkenwald. That's three times really fast. Between myself and my stutter, I can't do it.
Finkenwald. I'm not even going to try it. A friend came to him to talk him down a bit. He had Bonhoeffer and these young men moved out there and they were praying together.
They were living together. They were studying scripture together. They were learning together. They were working together.
They were working together. Bonhoeffer wrote a book called Life Together out of that experience. One of his friends came to find him to talk to him and say, man, you are taking this too seriously. You are going a little bit too much.
This is a little bit too intense for what you need to be doing. Calm it down, man. So Bonhoeffer invited his friend on a walk and walked off the property. They went to the woods for a while.
They come to a creek and there's a boat that's there. They row across the creek and they go up on top of this bluff and the friend realizes they are overlooking a German Nazi training camp. Bonhoeffer looks at him and says, they are warring for our hearts and minds just like we are warring for our hearts and minds. He points back in the distance to where Finkenwald was and says, this must be stronger than that.
This must be stronger than that. For us to ask ourselves the question of what does it mean to follow Jesus in the 21st century? We have to have a realization of this must be stronger than that. If we want to reach people who have never been reached before, we have to fundamentally understand the what and the why and the where of what we are trying to be converted to.
What does that look like in our life now? If we want to reach people, but it also means us understanding that even in the Bible belt, why is there this natural distance between us and following Jesus? Shouldn't this be a normal thing by now? Why is it not?
And friends, the tough thing about it is we are not fighting against disbelief. What we are fighting against in our culture now is apathy. How did we get here? What got us to this point?
What have we been converted to? Where apathy is the biggest thing? There is a phrase you might have heard before, you might have even said it. It is this, I am spiritual, I am not religious.
Does that sound familiar? In the golden age of American Christianity, this word was published for the first time in 1960. When we think everything was peachy keen, it was a point in time where the Methodist Church bragged that they had more churches than post offices. Like this was the crowning achievement of what we would seem to be the good life, right?
This phrase is already being said, I am not spiritual. I am not religious. In 2005, there was this monumental study of the religious landscape of people under the age of 30. You might have said that is a bunch of millennials.
2005, under 30. We are 15 years later. In this study, they did all this research across the spiritual beliefs of people in America, and they coined this term. The term is this, it is moral therapeutic deism.
They described the way the average person believed about God. There is five pillars to moral therapeutic deism. The first is this, that God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. Now this sounds normal, right?
You listen to the other four pillars. You said the five things, I said this perfectly describes this condition. The second pillar is this, God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other. It is taught in the Bible and by most other world religions.
The third pillar is this, the central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself. The fourth goal is that God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. The fifth pillar is this. You could go to heaven when they die.
It was 15 years ago. I was 29 now. This described our role. Kenda Creason in her book.
It was called the almost Christian, this is what she says. The problem is not seeing to be that churches are teaching people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job teaching what we really believe, namely that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little and that church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people. She goes on to say if churches practice moral therapeutic deism in the name of Christianity, getting folks to church more often is not the solution. Conceivedly it can make things worse.
A more faithful church is the solution. Another writer in 2010 said this, moral therapeutic deism is the perfect civil religion for a self-focused society. This must be stronger than that. We must be stronger.
Albert Moll, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary person I never thought I would ever quote, says this, we now face the challenge of evangelizing a nation that largely considers itself Christian, overwhelmingly believes in some deat, considers itself fervently religious but has virtually no connection to his story to Christianity. You know, in the 1980s they told the church that we'd be facing militant atheists. But that's not our problem. Our problem is that we now live in a world that is unknowingly converted into an apathetic and uninvolved vision of Jesus.
I'm going to close the fire hose now. And let's talk about what this actually means for us. How do we approach this? Here's the thing, we can do no good in our life until good has been done in our hearts.
It starts with us. It starts with us realizing the war for our own hearts and our minds and our soul. A few months ago, I was having a conversation with Jack Lock, we were talking about what happens when you're walking alongside of people, they seem to be passionate about Jesus Christ, they're serving, they're doing all the things like, wow, something's really going on great with him and all of a sudden it stops. What happens?
What is that moment in life when we get there and Jack just kind of in passing telling us it's like a wall of purpose. We both stopped and realized that's actually a fantastic description of this, that we hit a wall of purpose. It's that point in our life where we have to face our own attempt to be God. Where we realize our self-focused religion no longer gets me to the place where I feel like I need to be.
This is a form of faith where we're still relying on ourselves. When we get to that point we realize we can't go any further. We're stopped, we get to that point, we either can make a decision to begin operating in the strengths and the truths of God or we choose to exist in a world where our vision of things has to be larger than Jesus' visions of things. That leads us down the road of apathy.
And this is the point where many of us stop. This is the point where a lot of us are like, you know, I'm just going to keep on being barely involved because culture says I have to be around the church. I've got to have a place to go a few times a year, when bad stuff happens I need to have an connection point to get a little bit out. But I can't, this is stressing me out too much to go any further.
This must be stronger than that. So three ways, and I have to kind of pay back the fire hose drinking with super practical now, but three ways that we can make our way over this wall of purpose. I like to think about this is making over this wall of purpose is that moment where we allow the Holy Spirit to stick that weird machine on the tension rods in our life to pull us strong and tight, able to withstand things, able to be truly used. You know, the first way to over the wall of purpose is we have to pack a snack.
This isn't going to be quick. We've got to have things available to us to give us fuel for it. I feel sometimes like I'm kicking a dead horse when I say this when this is like a practical side of so many things, but we don't need to forget how powerful just our own lives of prayer and scripture can be. That prayer is the deep well of God that rejuvenates our soul.
The prayer allows us to be filled with the presence of God for right where we need at this moment right now. Next month, Jack is starting a class that he's taught multiple times when he was in campus ministry called how to pray. I'm really excited. I'm going to go to that class and be part of that.
That's something that just helps us step into this as a newcomer to prayer. As somebody said, I've always had questions. I don't know what to do or how to do with it. I'm excited to have Jack Lee in that class here at Foundry as he's led it in several other places before.
The first way over is we pack a snack. We give ourselves fuel for what's to come. The second way we make over that wall of purpose is we just kind of take a peek over. I think about Wilson and Home Improvement's remember, we kind of looked over.
Now we surround ourselves with stories from the other side. We begin mining the past and then looking to those around us to hear about what happens when someone does climb over this. And I hate to tell you, but this isn't a one-time thing in life that we're always going to be coming against the temptation to do this our own way. And if we never learn how to get over it the first time, we're going to be missing out from so many things ahead of us.
In my own life, whenever I come up on a wall of purpose, I go back to biographies of people I've looked up to in the past of missionaries and old evangelists. The last few years I've been reading tons of firsthand accounts of revival movements across our world because it's a peek of what life is like on the other side. The third way that we get over the wall of purpose is we just get a boost. Earlier this summer, we took our middle scores on a confirmation retreat to Woodworth.
And one of the things that happened there is we had to do a low-rope challenge course, these team building exercises. Anybody ever done this team building stuff before like that? I hate them because there's always some sketchy spider web they want to pass you through. There's a little wall to get over it.
I'm always the big guy and I will always get dropped on my head. You know, 11, 11-year-olds cannot get me through the spider web. But we try to make it over that wall by ourselves. We think we can do it.
We think we're strong enough. We think we're fast enough. And we run up against it and try to get over it. We're going to fail.
And we're going to keep on trying and trying and trying until we get exhausted. And we're sitting there at the bottom of it, exhausted, and tired, and exhaustion. We can speak lies into our ear. It's saying, how do you think you can do better than this?
Or do you think God cares about you enough to actually do that? This is silly. This doesn't make sense. This is something from back in the day that people used to explain things now.
You're not that important. These are the lies and exhaustion whispers in our ears. We have to have other people alongside of this force. You've got to get a boost up from the bottom sometimes.
People at the same stage of life that you are. We also have to have people who've already been over up on top willing to hand give your arm down and to pull them up. That's the only way I get over walls with a lot of other people's help. We can't do this by ourselves.
One of the things that got us the place where we are was believing in the lie that it's possible to be a Christian without the body of Christ. You need people around you to live a life like this. So where are you at the wall? Are you at a wall right now?
Maybe you've been over one. Maybe you're slumped up against it in that exhaustion phase. Maybe you've given up and you're walking back the other way. But things are at stake here.
It's not just ourselves at stake. It's what's at stake at the lives around us. It's our own stories of being on that wall for the sake of those we love the most, for the sake of our spouses, for the sake of our kids, maybe for the sake of our parents. The sake of people we lead at work and to play on ball teams with our kids, we do this for what's at stake for those around us.
At one point in time, we used to ask the question, what have you been saved from? And I don't think that question is adequate any longer. The question we'd be asking ourselves now is what have you been saved to? How do we tell the stories about what life is like on the other side of that wall?
Last night, I typically don't write the ends of messages until Saturdays, so I've been over them four or five times. Last time I'm doing this research and I just look up, what's the opposite of apathy? And I began laughing to myself when I read that, because all the words that were listed as the opposite of apathy were the words that God's people have been accused of in the past when they're fervently following him in a life and a culture changing way. Words that we see Jesus being accused of having zeal.
Words we see, the apostles and Paul accused of in the book of Acts of saying that you were too excited right now. Words that we see apply to people over the last few hundred years during revival movements and awakenings when they say you were too enthusiastic. John West with the founder of the Methodist Revival movement that we're part of, that was the main accusation lobbed against him as followers as they were called enthusiasts. I laugh so hard with the opposite of apathy.
The thing that might be eroding us right now are the various things that God's people have been accused of in the past when they're awakened by the whole spirit. So what have you been saved to? How do we tell that story? We ask ourselves questions.
What does it mean to follow Jesus in our world now? Our foundation has to be stronger than other foundations. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the life that you've given us.
God, for the ways that we have made it over these things before in the past, for the times that you've worked in us, things have been changed. God, we pray right now for eyes that are clearly focused on the things that we have to overcome. God for ourselves, but also that we have to overcome so we can more fully be the church that you've called us to be, more fully be the people that you have called us to be. Or we want a life that's strong enough.
God, we need a life, a strong vision, a foundation. God, not just for us, but for others. God, a life that moves us past the self-focused interior of your faith into one that is directed at the world as you directed yourself at the world. God, make us to be like