Making Our Heart, Christ’s
Home
Dr. Larry Thorson
In the 1950’s, Robert Munger preached an evening sermon at the First
Presbyterian Church of Berkeley called My
Heart, Christ’s Home. Little did he
know that night how his sermon would eventually be reproduced to challenge over
10 million people to walk more closely with Jesus. My Heart Christ’s Home, is going to be
our theme for the next seven weeks.
As an introduction to this study let’s
read Matthew 7:24-27
24 "Therefore
everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a
wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came
down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it
did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26
But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice
is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The
rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that
house, and it fell with a great crash."[1]
John Ortberg, prolific author and teaching pastor of the Menlo
Park Presbyterian Church observes that our text this morning has some very similar
characteristics to another important classic in American literature. Can you
guess which one? Like in Jesus’ story, the characters in this story are
builders. As in Jesus’ story, each builder constructs a house, and each house
faces a test. If the house is built wisely it stands; if foolishly, it falls.
Anyone know what important story in American literature this is? The
Three Little Pigs! In The Three
Little Pigs, each little pig builds a house, and has to face … who? The
big, bad wolf – who comes to each little pigs’ house and says, “Little pig,
little pig, let me come in.” And each of the little pigs answers how? “Not by
the …” what? The hair of my chinny-chin-chin!
The unwise pigs build their houses out of straw and sticks, not thinking
ahead to the fact that such houses wouldn’t protect them when put to the test,
as opposed to the wise little pig who builds his house out of bricks – whose
house lasts.
Of course, like the story of The Three Little Pigs (which
is meant to help us learn a lesson), Jesus’ story isn’t really about houses. Houses in Jesus’ story are used as metaphors
for our lives. You can replace the word “house” and put in the word “life” or “character.”
All of us are in the process of building our lives. And each of us
is responsible for how it is being built.
According to Jesus, there are two ways we can build. First, we can
choose to build foolishly, like the man who built his house upon the
sand.
In my hometown of
She spent a fortune building that house – one that was continually
being built for some 38 years and never finished! It has 47 fireplaces, 160
rooms, 2000 doors and 160,000 windows. There are all kinds of oddities
–stairways that go nowhere, and doors that open to brick walls. It didn’t matter what the carpenters built as
long as they kept building, 24/7.
That house is a picture of how many try and build their lives. While we might not spend our life focusing on
building a literal house, we can focus our lives on things we think are
important – on money, or power, or pleasure or on a whole lot of other things
–endlessly giving our energies to things that in the end are really just
trivialities.
The other choice is that we can choose to build wisely,
which Jesus says, is like the man who built his house on the rock. There are three
really important reasons why it’s good to build on rock. The first reason is this: every one of
us will face storms. Did you notice that in Jesus’ story both the
foolish and the wise builder face storms? Did you notice that the story uses
the exact same words to describe what happens to both the foolish and wise home
builder in vss. 25 and 27? “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the
winds blew and beat against that house?”
This is not how we would wish the story told. We’d prefer the story
tell us how to avoid storms. It would be
nice if the story told us how to build our house in a storm free zone – where
we didn’t have to worry about anything threatening our lives or property.
But that’s not what Jesus teaches – because it isn’t reality. People
try and convince themselves that they are smart enough, rich enough, or
successful enough and have enough resources to engineer a storm free life. But you know what? We can’t – we all face
storms. Perhaps it will be a vocational storm, as many in our sagging economy
are facing today. Perhaps it will be a relational storm, with someone you care
about deciding not to care about you back. Perhaps it will be a family storm,
where a child will rebel, or a parent will be irresponsible. Perhaps it will be
a health storm. We don’t control these things – they can happen to any of us – young
and old, men and women, good people and evil – none of us have the capacity to
engineer a storm free life.
In contrast the foolish man in Jesus’ story builds his house on
sand. I lived six plus years in
We looked at many houses for sale whose doors and windows wouldn’t
open. They told us we would need to put
jacks under the concrete slab and jack up the house. Imagine what that cost. Then they told us that we would need to
“water” the outside perimeter of the house in the summer to keep it from
sagging.
Jesus says that foolishly building our lives on sand – on a weak foundation
– has serious consequences as well – that in the end, our lives, like the house
in his story … will fall “with a great
crash!” Instead, Jesus says that we should
build wisely because doing so will lead to our holding together –
to being able to stand up to the storms that come. In fact, what we see in
the Scripture is that such wise building will lead not just to storm
resistance, but to true life living – that building wisely is not just storm resistance,
but is really the key to experiencing all that we were created to be.
And so how do we build wisely in the way that Jesus is talking about?
We can summarize it like this – we build wisely, according to the
Scripture, by making our hearts Christ’s home.
In the book of
Ephesians, the apostle Paul prays this prayer for
God’s people: “I
pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through
his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through
faith.” (Eph. 3:16-17)
In John 14:23, Jesus himself says something similar this way: Jesus
replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.
My Father will
love him, and we will come to him and make
our home with him. Christianity is not an idea that we
believe in our heads, but a very real relationship in which Jesus Himself comes
to dwell in the human heart and direct our lives in ways that bring real life.
Bob Munger, in the intro to My Heart Christ’s Home, says it this way:
Without question one of the most remarkable Christian
doctrines is
that Jesus Christ himself through the Holy Spirit
will actually
enter a heart, settle down and be at home there.
Christ can
come and make his home in our hearts! This is the
foundation
upon which we are to build our lives. Paul in 1 Cor. 3:10 says it this way: But
each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation
other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.
So how do we make our hearts Christ’s home? It
starts
by making
a conscious choice to do so. No one intentionally builds a house
knowing that it will fall down. No one starts by thinking, “I’m going to invest
thousands on a home because I want to watch it fall down.” No one says, “Here’s
some sand. A house built here is sure to fall down. This is a perfect spot.”
Did you notice why the man in Jesus story built his house on the sand? He
didn’t do it because he wanted it to fall down, but according to Jesus because
he was “foolish.”
As John Ortberg observes, from the beginning of time, when children
do something foolish, we parents always ask the same question. It is a question
that is designed to make sense out of the inexplicable – to find reason and
rationality where it doesn’t exist.
You know the question, right? One word – three letters.
“Why? “Why did
you put your gum in your sister’s hair?” “Why did you stick a spaghetti noodle
up your brothers nose?” “Why”
The answer
that is always given to such a question –
three words –
you know what they are, right? “I don’t know.”
And if you
think about it, it is really a good answer. Because if
they did know,
they wouldn’t have done such a foolish thing in the
first place.
They did it because they were foolish. They didn’t
plan on it
going wrong. They just didn’t think.
If the foolish man in Jesus’ story could talk, and we asked him “Why
did you build the house on the sand?” he’d say the same
thing “I don’t
know.” You see, nobody plans on building their lives foolishly. They just don’t
think about it. It just kind of happens.
And the same
is true with us.
John Ortberg says it this way: “No couple getting married sits
down and says: let’s plan on ending up in a court. No human being walks into a
bar and says: I think I’ll become an alcoholic. No man ever has a child and
then says: I think I’m going to get so busy and so wrapped up in my career and
be gone so much that my children won’t know me, and will carry a hole in their
hearts as long as they live. Nobody nurses a grudge, and says to himself: I think
I’m going to shoot for becoming a bitter, angry, resentful old person before I
die. Nobody sits down and plans on going to hell. It just happens.”
That’s why we need to start by making a conscious choice to build our
lives wisely – have a solid foundation – by allowing our hearts to become
Christ’s home. How do we do this? We start by
inviting Jesus
in – by inviting Jesus to live in our hearts. In the
Scripture, we
hear Jesus making this invitation: “Here I am! I stand at the door and
knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with
him, and he with me.” (Rev. 3:20)
We make our heart Christ’s home simply by doing this: by
opening the
door of our hearts in response to His invitation, and
invite Him to
come in. And when we do, the Scripture says, He
will come into
our lives and make His home in our hearts. And
He’ll bring
with Him His forgiveness, His mercy, and His grace.
And He’ll be
with us and give us the strength and wisdom we need to be able to withstand the
storms that come our way. That’s what He promises us when He comes into our
hearts and makes His home there.
But inviting Jesus to live in our hearts isn’t the end, but the
beginning. Do
you know to whom Rev. 3:20 was originally spoken to? To members of a church! It
was directed to people
who already
had a relationship with Jesus! And so while I think it
is OK to use
this verse to remind people that we start a relationship with Jesus by inviting
Him into our hearts, it is most directly a reminder that as God’s people we are
to allow Jesus to continue His work in our hearts – that making our
hearts Christ’s home also means allowing Jesus to renovate our
lives. It means
submitting to
Him, and living as He directs us. Jesus says it like
this in his
story: “Everyone who hears my words, and puts them
into practice
is like a wise man who built his house upon a rock.”
Most of you have probably seen the TV show, Extreme Home Makeover,
where a team of designers goes into the home of some struggling but deserving
family and remakes the whole house – turning what was once a dangerous dump
into an unbelievably beautiful new home. Well, in this series and study, My
Heart Christ’s Home, that’s what I believe Jesus wants to do in each of us.
For the next six weeks we are going to picture the house of our
lives having many different rooms - the study, the family room, the dining
room, the workshop and the hall closet.
What we are going to see is that Jesus’ desire is to renovate each of
these rooms in our heart and make them brand new.
Now there one’s catch in Extreme Home Makeover. The family has to
allow the design team to do their work. They leave it up to them to redesign it
– trusting that what they do will be better than what they had. And of course,
when they do, what they end up with is beyond what they could have ever dreamed
of.
I’ve had a number of very talented interior decorators in my past
churches. One of them in
To build wisely – to make our heart Christ’s home – means to give
Jesus access to all of our rooms and allow Him to renovate them as He sees fit.
That’s a lot of trust.
It’s our choice as to whether we’re going to turn our lives over
to Jesus. Some things we have no choice
over. We are all building the house that is our lives. We have no choice over
that – it is being built whether we like it or not. We all face storms and we
can try to engineer our ways out of it, but the truth is that we will all face
those storms. Our choice is will we build foolishly by living apart from God,
or build wisely, by building on a relationship with Jesus in which we are
allowing Him control of our lives?
Perhaps today you are tired of trying to renovate your life by yourself
and getting no where, tired of trying to clean up your own messes by yourself,
tired of feeling empty and alone, tired of feeling defeated, tired of spinning
your wheels doing something that seems successful but in the end isn’t what you
hoped it would be.
Open your heart to Jesus, and allow Him to come in. The fallacy of evangelical Christianity of
which we are a part is that we think we only need to invite Jesus into our
lives once. We think we only have to be
polite and invite him only into the front living room and hope that he leaves
before you have to fix him a meal.
But the truth is that Jesus doesn’t stay where He’s not
wanted. Jesus never forces himself into
any area of your life. He always enters
through invitation. If you’ve been
committing some ugly stuff lately Jesus isn’t going to be sitting around being
a party to that.
So where is Jesus in relation to you right now? Is he sitting on your sofa in a sterile
formal living room waiting for you to come out and visit? Is there some room in your life that you
would be embarrassed if Jesus saw it?
I’m not talking about how you do housekeeping here. I’m not talking about whether every room
looks like Tiger Woods’ house. I’m
talking about what you do and what you think in those rooms. How jealous are you of someone else? How angry are you of someone who’s hurt and
is continuing to hurt you? How immoral
are you behind those closed doors.
Jesus isn’t going to sit there and join in with you. So today might be a good day for you to invite
Jesus afresh into your heart and plan on spending some time with him.