When I came to faith in Jesus in the early-1990s, I had 28 years of pagan living behind me, and I was eager to get off on the right foot as a new believer. At that time in my church, it was popular to have a life verse, a single scripture that encapsulated a promise from God, giving a sense of identity, purpose or destiny. While reading the Gospel of Luke, I was immediately confronted by Luke 6:46, where Jesus challenged his hearers that there was more to following him than spoken agreement or mental assent. At the end of the Sermon on the Plain, a decision is called for, and the two different outcomes described by the builder’s distinct approaches paint a clear prediction of our future. Either we choose to follow Jesus wholeheartedly, not just in word and deed, or we don’t. There are outcomes connected to the value we place on doing all that our master said we could do. In this paper, I will examine my life verses, Luke 6:46-49, emphasizing Jesus’ call for us to come to him, to hear his words, and to put them into practice while contrasting his instruction with the misunderstanding and disconnection that can pass for discipleship today.
“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.” (Luke 6:46-49 NIV)
Jesus repeats the term Lord for emphasis, the Greek word kyrios[1]. This word can mean lord or master, and is a term used to refer to a person of higher status. The word would also be used for a person who was master over property or slaves, a way of showing honor and respect. For society at the time of Jesus, there would have been clear distinctions between the classes. Jesus’s refers here to the understood honor, power and authority of the position of master – the right to direct your life and your activities because of my ownership of you. And yet, the assent is merely verbal because the required actions aren’t following the expression of loyalty. We see a similar threat in Christianity today, that comes from many different directions. We have established the preeminence of conversion, to be forgiven of sins and rescued from hell, by praying a prayer. But we have not always stressed the importance of a heart-changed life, as evidenced by our actions. As Jon Mark Ruthven says:
… if one cannot “hear” and obey God’s (prophetic) voice, one necessarily cannot “know” him. Again, the two essential parts of the New Covenant involve the prophetic word leading to the ultimate intimacy with God. The biblical emphasis is clear that one cannot “know” God without hearing and obeying his voice.[2]
But we have disconnected Jesus’s relevance to our real lives, pointing all of this to sometime in the future, when we will be with him in Heaven. Jesus in this verse is pointing us to actually becoming disciples.
In the next verse, Jesus gives a course of action that can free us from the hypocrisy of calling him our master whilst living disconnected from him. He makes the offer for us to come to him, to hear him, and to respond by taking action on what he’s said. He says elsewhere in scripture that he has come that we would have life and have it to the full (John 10:10b). Dallas Willard points out that this abundant life we all seek is connected to the obedience of following our master:
But the truth about obedience in the kingdom of Jesus, as should be clear by now, is that it really is abundance. Kingdom obedience is Kingdom abundance. They are not two separate things. The inner condition of the soul from which strength and love and peace flow is the very same condition that generously blesses the oppressor and lovingly offers the other cheek.[3]
Obedience then is not all difficulty, sweat and sadness, since the point of obedience is to get to the good stuff, the full, meaningful life that Jesus speaks of, one of love, joy, peace, patience and so on. Coming to Jesus means I make spending time with him a priority of my life. A portion of this may be in the context of fellowship and community, which is an important part of walking together. But we see Jesus insisting on having time with his Father, time spent alone with him. So that’s our example. To hear his word means of course to read scripture, to memorize, to meditate. But also, to listen in prayer, to listen to the counsel of friends we know are walking intentionally in his way. God definitely speaks to us through his word in Scripture, but he is a conversational God who is speaking to us all the time. Jesus says in John 10:27 that his sheep hear his voice, and they follow him. The third and final component is to act on what he has said to us, after we have been in his presence. Many of these things are obvious, like his commands to bless and not curse, or to love one another. To view him as our shepherd, and to recognize we lack nothing. Thus, if I fret or worry, I am not doing what he said, am I? And some of these things may be less clear. As we pray and journal, and as he gives us direction in prayer, am I being careful to respond to his direction in all the affairs of my life? Further, what am I to do with the commands of Jesus that might truly stretch me, like healing the sick or raising the dead? I must seek his counsel and direction for myself, asking for his empowering grace and presence, and the courage to act in accordance with his command. And when I blow it, to dust myself off, to agree with him about my sin in repentance, and to get back to the business of following him wholeheartedly from my position as a well-loved son, or well-loved daughter.
To drive the point home, Jesus uses a powerful illustration of two different builders. We infer, based on his earthly father’s profession, that Jesus was also a carpenter. He would have been familiar with house construction, and how it was done. Typically, houses at that time were built in the summer. When it’s dry, it can be hard to imagine that there will be a time in the rainy season where the water will gather quickly and move rapidly. Those who first heard Jesus say this would connect well with what Eugene Peterson describes:
In the Middle East, watercourses that have eroded the countryside are all interconnected by an intricate gravitational system. A sudden storm fills these little gullies with water, they feed into one another, and in a very few minutes a torrential flash flood is produced. During the rainy season, such unannounced catastrophes pose great danger for persons who live in these desert areas. There is no escaping. One minute you are well and happy and making plans for the future; the next minute the entire world is disarranged by catastrophe.[4]
Jesus points out that a wise builder would take the time and the effort to build a strong foundation by digging down to the rock bed. In our own lives, we can see that building down to rock bed is connected to the three-part instruction that Jesus has given in the prior verse: to come to him, to hear, to do. It’s clear that regardless of where we choose to build, or how we choose to build, that flood will come and torrents will shake it – death, divorce, loss of job, cancer, financial ruin, and so on. But the response to these life challenges will be connected to how we are building our lives, and whether we are building them on the person of Jesus and a conversational relationship with him, evidenced by our desire to act on what he has spoken. And what would be the reasons that the foolish builder doesn’t build a foundation on rock? It might be he lacks resources to make this effort. It may be a matter of denial that a flood will come when everything looks so dry in the summer. It may be a lack of awareness that the season will certainly change. Or it may be a resignation, that the flood will come and bring destruction so why bother? And let’s not forget hardheartedness or our desire to be in control. Any of these reasons Jesus addresses by his willingness to be our teacher, as stated earlier in the chapter, Luke 6:40, that when the student is fully trained, he will be like his master. He promised to be with us, that we would never be alone or unknowing, and to fill us with his Spirit who would remind us of all truth. We are empowered by his grace – not just forgiven of our sin but given what is needed to live our lives in obedient and abundant response to who he is and what he says.
If we now hearken backward in Luke 6, the entire Sermon on the Plain has been a call to the contrary life of the Kingdom that Jesus was announcing. A Kingdom where judgment and condemnation would be replaced by forgiveness and generosity. A Kingdom where we would treat others as we would wish to be treated, and that our love would not just include those that we find easy to love but would extend to our enemies. A Kingdom where we set aside hypocrisy and work on our own character before correcting those around us. A Kingdom where the overflow of our good hearts would be seen in the way that we speak. It is from this context that Jesus challenges us to not just know these things and think, “yes, it would be good if we all lived like that” but rather to think, he actually is my Lord and Master, and with the empowering grace of the Holy Spirit, I can do all of what he calls me to do. Jesus is the wisest person who ever lived, and he truly does know what is best for us. Peter Rhea Jones describes Jesus’ teaching here by saying, “One should note the passion to persuade, the pastoral intent to protect, the desire to motivate and to invite change, and the willingness to warn prophetically by laying out a stark choice.”[5] The stark choice is really to either live in our practical atheism, continuing in our misunderstanding or disconnection of Jesus from our real lives. Or we can see that he offers us truly good news, the chance for a different kind of life in his Kingdom, where abundance and obedience are simply two sides to the same coin, where his grace fuels us and propels us. This passage of scripture serves as a plumb line for me, that I am not just willing to call him Lord, but that I strongly desire to spend time with him, to know him intimately, and to hear what he has to say. And that the priority of my life, the affection and attention of my heart, is to put his words into practice in my life, what I think, what I say, what I do, flowing from who I am as his son and his follower.
[1] Edward Goodrick and John Kohlenberger, The Strongest NIV Exhaustive Concordance (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 3261.
[2] Jon Mark Ruthven, What’s Wrong with Protestant Theology? Tradition vs. Biblical Emphasis, (Tulsa, OK: Word & Spirit Press, 2013), 193.
[3] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 312-313.
[4] Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Director: Discipleship in an Instant Society (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2000), 74.
[5] Peter Rhea Jones, Sr. On Rock or Sand? The Two Foundations (Matthew 7:24-27, Luke 6:46-49), Review and Expositor, 109, Spring 2012, p.240
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