to bring up here with me. Would
you open your Bibles to the book of Ezra chapter 5. I want to speak this morning on
the subject of laying the foundation of God's temple. Now, if you will recall in the
history of the Jewish people, that due to their rebellion, God had sent invaders from the
north, first from the Assyrian Empire, and then from the Babylonian
Empire. The Assyrian Empire took the
northern tribes into captivity, And then, I can't remember how
many years later it was, it was quite a while, but the northern
tribe, excuse me, the southern tribes, known as the Kingdom
of Judah, was taken into captivity. And this was done when King Nebuchadnezzar
was king of the Empire of Babylon. An interesting point about that,
now it didn't happen all at once. There was a couple of invasions
from Babylon, but they came down there and on their first invasion,
they conquered Jerusalem, tore down its walls, destroyed the
temple that Solomon had built, took all the costly pieces of
furniture, and I mean the amount of gold that was involved in
that temple and all its furnishings was astounding. Well, you know
that conquerors aren't going to leave gold behind. So they
grabbed that up, and it says they took about 10,000 of the
best of Jerusalem. You can imagine that there in
Jerusalem were all the more or less important people within
the government of the Kingdom of Judah, which would have included
the king, all his advisors, any of the governors and whatnot
that worked under him, treasurers, all that kind. It's anybody that
served in there. And then, of course, the wealthy
people of the town, because you take the wealthy people because
you can take their wealth right along with it. But they deported
about 10,000 people up north. And what I thought was interesting,
he said, they left only the poor behind. And I couldn't help but
think, isn't that the way it is when God brings judgment? Spiritually speaking, he comes
and he tears down that which people have raised up and made
to be their own glory. Because Jerusalem did glory in
its temple, rather than the one whose temple it was. And so he
got rid of that. They gloried in their city. So
he got rid of that. And they gloried in themselves.
I'm the king. I'm the king's chief advisor.
I'm the captain of the king's army. I'm this, I'm that. I'm
a notable man in the city. I'm a rich woman in the city. And those within the scope of
religion, and I suppose since we are talking about Jerusalem,
which in the New Testament is often used as a picture of the
church of the Lord Jesus, within the greater church, or what some
people call the visible church, there are many who really do
not belong to God. And when judgment comes, they
will be taken away. They will be destroyed. Who will
be left? Who does God's judgment not touch? The poor. What does the Lord say? Blessed
are the poor. Blessed are the poor. And he
didn't mean the poor in natural wealth. Now, I tend to agree with the
rather cynical fellow who said, Sounding like he's going to get
very philosophical, he said, I've been poor. I've been rich. Rich is better. And you think
that they're going to turn around and say, well, poverty wasn't
so bad. Well, no, I don't want to be
poor in the natural things of this life. And I'll tell you,
if you've been very much in the rest of the world, particularly
outside of what can be called Western civilization, you'll
find that the poor in the United States live like kings do everywhere
else. If you are truly poor in the
United States, there's a real problem, because it's almost
against the law to be poor. Nonetheless, I know what it's
like to live from hand to mouth. I know what it's like to have
reasonable confidence that not only will this month's bills
be paid, but probably not going to have any problem next month
either. And I prefer, you know, that if I see something, you
know, doesn't cost too much, and I want it, I can go ahead
and get it. That's nice. But I will say this. It is a very difficult trial
to bear. to have an excess. When I say an excess, I mean
more than you need. Those who are forced to pray,
give us today my daily bread, who can't see tomorrow's supply, By that very act, they are living
in a constant dependence on God. It is very easy. If the Lord
is pleased to give you a substantial amount of wealth,
so very hard not to trust that wealth. So very, very hard not
to find your security and peace in that wealth. And I don't,
well, Brother Mahan used to say, wealth and grace rarely go together. But when wealth and grace do
go together, that is when God is pleased to give a person both
wealth and his grace, you find someone who while he or she may
have wealth, they are not trusting in it. and they would be willing
to lose it all for the Lord's sake, if that's what the Lord
called upon them to do. And they will be generous with
it, because grace always makes people generous. But the poor, the spiritually
poor, every one of God's people is in that class. No one calls upon the name of
the Lord until he has nothing else to call on. The Lord God
is always a person's last resort. Now you think on that a minute.
A man will exhaust every hope of eternal life he can think
of before he bows before the Lord of heaven and earth and
cries out for his mercy. So long as he thinks he has something
that might encourage the goodness of God toward him, he will hope
in that. Not only are all God's people
poor, they are all bankrupt, yea worse, they are in debt. All they have to offer is debt. And those who are in that condition, are enriched by the grace of
God. Paul said, and you know the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ, though he were rich, yet for our sakes
he became poor, that we, through his poverty, might be made rich. And so I say on the one hand,
every one of God's people is poor, poor in themselves. They have nothing to give to
God, nothing to offer to Him, nothing to sacrifice for Him. And yet they are the wealthiest
in all creation for the unsearchable riches of Christ have been given
to them. But after these people had been taken into captivity,
and understand when I say the rich were taken into captivity,
that didn't mean that all that were taken into captivity were
ungodly people. For among them were people like
the prophet Daniel. He was taken into captivity,
as were his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. But they were simply taken away. And, you know, we're looking
at what people were naturally and just making a spiritual inference
from that. But just because God brings judgment,
natural judgment, what we call, or natural hardship upon a person,
doesn't mean that he is cut off from God. In fact, the scriptures
went on to say that if you are without discipline, then you
are no more sons but are illegitimate children. The Lord doesn't visit
his children with chastening or discipline, but never with
punishment. because the punishment's been
taken care of in the Lord Jesus Christ. But after the appointed
time had been served in captivity, and Nebuchadnezzar's empire had
been destroyed by the next empire, the Persian Empire, a king named Cyrus arose, a king
that had been named by Isaiah, 150 to 200 years previous. Now you talk about a prophet.
He said, he named the king that would give the order for the
Jews to come back. And he was the king of the Persians, the
Medes and the Persians. And he made a decree to send back those of the house
of Israel that had been displaced. And he returned to them all the
vessels of gold and whatnot that had been taken out of the temple.
And he told them to go back and rebuild the temple of their God.
And Ezra and Nehemiah give us accounts of that. They began to do this work, and
the nations around them, and the ones probably who had been
taken from another place and brought into the Holy Land to
inhabit that. Well, they were worried about
the Jews coming back and asserting their place. This was their nation. And when they saw them building
the temple and starting to build back up the walls of Jerusalem,
they sent a letter back to the king. By now, it was a man named, Darius
was the king. And Darius wrote back and essentially
said, now they had discouraged the people, that is, the nations
that lived around Israel had discouraged those working to
rebuild the temple. And the work had stopped. And
then the letter gets sent up to Emperor Darius, and Darius,
right back, he said, they were sent back, leave them alone,
let them build. And the Jews had sent this letter to Darius,
and in verse 11 of Ezra, chapter
5, we read this. This is the answer they gave
us. We are the servants of the God
of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding the temple that was
built many years ago, one that a great king of Israel built
and finished. But because our fathers angered
the God of heaven, he handed them over to Nebuchadnezzar the
Chaldean, king of Babylon, who destroyed this temple and deported
the people to Babylon. However, in the first year of
Cyrus, king of Babylon, King Cyrus issued a decree to rebuild
the house of God. He even removed from the Temple
of Babylon the gold and silver articles of the House of God,
which Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem
and brought to the Temple in Babylon. Then King Cyrus gave
them to a man named Sheshbazar, whom he had appointed governor.
And he told him, take these articles. and go and deposit them in the
temple in Jerusalem and rebuild the house of God on its site. So this Shesh Bazar came and
laid the foundations of the house of God in Jerusalem. From that day to the present,
it has been under construction but is not yet finished. And
so this was the appeal of the Jews to King Darius in opposition
to the letter that the nations around them had sent. And they're
saying, this is all we've done so far. We haven't been a trouble
to anybody. We've done what King Cyrus told us to do. But the
point I want us to notice here is here in verse 16. Shesh Bazar. Now that's a weird
sounding name. Doesn't sound like a Hebrew name,
does it? Well, it's not a Hebrew name. It's a Babylonian name.
Nearly all the Jews that were deported up there, at least the
ones that found themselves in high positions within the court
up there, they were given Babylonian names. Daniel was given a Babylonian
name, but I can't remember what it was. Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego are all Babylonian names. They had Hebrew names, and their
Hebrew names are recorded in the scriptures, but I can't remember
right off what they were. And this fellow here, Sheshbazar,
that was the name that was given to him in Babylon. But it is
the belief of many commentators, probably most of them, that this
Shesh Bazar is one and the same with the man we read is named
Zerubbabel in the book of Nehemiah. And that's important because
that makes him the son of the king who was deported out of
Israel some 70 years previous. So what I'm saying here is that
this foundation Said, it's laying, it's put in place. The first
thing to ask about this, who did it? Who did it? What was his office? It was the king. The rightful
heir to the throne of a unified Israel. You know,
God had promised to David that there would always be one of
his descendants on the throne. Now, there was a time when it
wasn't any of David's descendants on the throne. For example, when
our Lord Jesus was born, who was king of Israel? A man named
Herod. He wasn't even a Jew, much less
of the house of David of the tribe of Judah. but the Lord Jesus himself is
the son of David. And I believe even David understood
that the kingdom of Israel as a natural kingdom was not gonna
go on forever. It was put in place for a time,
and his household wouldn't necessarily rule that
natural group all the time that it was present. but one of his
heirs, one of his descendants, would someday sit on the eternal
throne, not in the natural Jerusalem,
not in the natural Israel, in the heavenly one. And of course
that's come to place in our Lord Jesus Christ. He is of the house
of David, and he will sit on the throne of his father David
forever. and of the increase of his government
and peace, there shall be no end." Nonetheless, as God is
providentially working out the restoration of his people, and
of course it's very important that in their restoration the
temple be restored because that was the central place of worship And it illustrated, for the most
part, the true temple of God, which is the church of the living
God. It has to be rebuilt. And who
builds it? Who lays the foundation? The
king. Nobody else can. Now, we read
earlier that the workers laid the foundation. I think I've
explained before, back then they didn't have concrete, so they
didn't just dig a big trench, pour concrete, wait for it to
harden, and then build on top of that. But they would go out
and find the most massive stones that they could move, and lay them as foundation stones. To give you an idea of the size
of those stones, Everybody makes a big deal out of the stones
with which they built the pyramid. And I'll admit, that's remarkable.
But the stones that they stacked up to make pyramids were about
two tons. And they said, now this was the
temple later built, the Herod's Temple, the temple that was present
when our Lord was here on the earth. That temple, they said,
their foundation stones 70 feet long. and they estimate that they're
in the neighborhood of 70 tons, and they moved them there. That's something. But that was
the only way to build something with strength to last, built
on a good foundation. You couldn't build it on gravel.
You couldn't build it on rubble. You couldn't build it on wood. It was a very difficult thing
to lay the foundation of a building. But they went to that effort
because if you want a massive building like that to stand and
stay, you really need quite the foundation stone. And there's
no one who has the authority or the wealth necessary to do
that kind of work than the king. And our Lord Jesus Christ is the only one that could lay
the true foundation stone of the church of the Lord Jesus
Christ. We will see later that he not only laid that stone,
he is that stone. But we'll just stick with the
fact that he is the one that put it in place. He came and
by his instruction showed the people what the Old Testament
had been saying all along, and for the most part, they missed
it. He said, you search the scriptures, for in them you think you have
eternal life. These are the scriptures that
testify of me, but you will not come to me that you might have
life. What a joy it is to open this
book, the Old Testament, and not see a different God than
is seen in the New Testament. It's the same God. People say,
oh, the God of the Old Testament is just angry and full of judgment,
and in the New Testament, He's nice. Brethren, He is both of
them in both of the Testaments. And if you think he wasn't angry
and strict and judgmental, just behold the Savior on the cross,
bearing sins before God, sins he didn't even do. Somebody else did them, he took
the blame for them, and yet God visited on him everything he
would have visited on the sinners who actually did them, were it
not that Jesus Christ bore those sins in his body on the tree. You know, and some 40 years after
that was done, because the Jews rejected them, and they wouldn't
accept the fact that that covenant that God made with them on Sinai
was done and over with, and that the time of the Jews had passed,
and now the Gospel was going into all the world, and which
should have been a delight to them, They got upset about it
and they clung to the old covenant types or an old covenant way
of doing things. And finally God said, OK, I've
had enough of this. You guys wouldn't listen to me. And just
like he had earlier called the Assyrian Empire and then the
Babylonian Empire, he called down the Roman Empire on them.
And they did the same thing that Nebuchadnezzar had done some
600 years previous. They came and they destroyed
the city. and destroyed the temple. And it's never been rebuilt since.
The city's still there. The temple's gone. In fact, you
know what's sitting where the temple used to be? An Islamic
mosque. Because that was on Mount Moriah.
The Bible tells us that the temple was built on Mount Moriah. That's
where Abraham sacrificed Isaac. And therefore, the Muslims, who
also revere Abraham, when they dominated that area, they went
to Mount Moriah and set one of their mosques there. So right
now, if the Jews really wanted to build a temple, they'd have
to get rid of a mosque. I think that would be kind of
explosive, both metaphorically and figuratively, if they did
that. I don't believe what some believe, that God's going to
somehow or another have the old temple rebuilt, and they're going
to start offering sacrifices again, and then Jesus is going
to descend and take a throne in Jerusalem. It would be worse,
but this is the best I can do. That would be like the President
of the United States becoming a dog catcher somewhere. He already sits on the throne
of heaven, why does he need a throne in Jerusalem? No, the temple, the new temple
to be built is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And only
He could lay that foundation because only He knew where it
was supposed to be. Only He knew what its shape was supposed to
be like. You know, a building, particularly these old kind of
buildings made out of stone, they had to, you know, whatever
the shape of the foundation was, that's what the shape of the
building had to be. Because you had to lay all the stones on
top of that foundation. And Jesus Christ is the shape. He is the beginning, the original
cornerstone, foundation stone. He designed or determines the
shape of that building. and he bears the weight of the
entire building. Peter says that we, like living
stones, are being built upon that precious stone into a temple,
a dwelling for the place of, for God, a dwelling place for
God. Only the king can do that. We see that pictured for us,
that when the Jews went back, and there are so many ways in
which the return of the Jews after their captivity is a picture
of the gospel and the gospel age. I'll give you another example
of what it was, of how it resembles a gospel age. Those Jews, they
were all up here, and they were scattered among several Gentile
nations. and they were called out of those
Gentile nations back to Jerusalem. And what happened under the gospel?
Well, God's people, what Paul calls true Jews, Jews are people
who are Jews inwardly, not just outwardly. Where do they come
from? Every kindred, tribe, tongue,
and nation. But anyway, Jesus Christ is the
one with the authority The one with the ability and the wealth
to be able to lay the foundation of the house of God. Why? Because he's the king. Now turn over to 1 Corinthians
where we read earlier. 1 Corinthians chapter 3. Verse 11. What is this foundation? That's the next question. Under
which authority is it laid? The authority of the king. Secondly,
what is this foundation? Paul wrote, for no one can lay
any foundation other than the one already laid which is Jesus
Christ. There is no other foundation
for the church. Unfortunately, there are some
within broader Christendom, and I'm thinking here primarily
of Roman Catholics, but others labor under the same kind of
delusion. They think the church is the
foundation. No, the Church is not the foundation. Christ is. The Church is built on that foundation,
but the Church is not the foundation. I was reading, you know, not
the guy that's Pope right now, but the one before him who retired
some years ago. Well, he died yesterday or the
day before, sometime or another. But they talk about him being
conservative. And that got him in trouble during his time as
a pope because he insisted, and there were several things I could
agree with him, but they weren't issues of the gospel or anything
like that. But then one of the conservative things he held to
is there was no salvation apart from the church. And by the church,
they meant their church, you know, that you could not get
to heaven unless you went through the Roman Catholic Church. I'm
sorry. That's just not true. There is no church in all the
earth that is organized religious church or denomination or whatever
through which you must go, to which you must appeal as some
kind of mediator through whom you can find favorable
access to God. Nothing and no person. can serve
in that capacity. I'd say it's true this, at least
in general, you won't get to glory, you won't find favor with
God unless you hear from somebody that's in God's church or read
something that they wrote. But that's simply because salvation
always comes through the preaching of the gospel and only God's
church is preaching the gospel. But that might be somebody from
a Presbyterian church or a Baptist church like us. Might be from a lot of different
churches that over the years have divided over things that
are not essential to the gospel. And that's true only in the sense
that you cannot be reconciled to God apart from hearing the
testimony that God has given concerning His Son. And the church
is the only one telling that. But it's not as though the church
has the authority or the virtue within itself to somehow or another
be able to grant you entry into the presence of God with favor
or bar you from it. All we can do is tell the truth. And if God is pleased to use
that for salvation, then good. Sometimes he uses it to bring
a person into greater condemnation. For now are they not only transgressors
against God, against God's law, they're transgressors against
his grace and mercy when they reject the truth. The only foundation
is Christ himself. Christ, God in human flesh. What other foundation would you
want? If you read that article I wrote,
I thought it was something, reading that guy's obituary, and I can't
even remember who it was. I don't even know, it might have
been somebody local, I don't know. I was reading somebody's
obituary, and it said, he died clinging to his crucifix. I thought,
poor man, poor man. Because that probably meant that
not only was he clinging to one of those in his hand, he was
clinging to one in his heart, thinking that that would grant
him entry into the presence of God with joy. And I'm not mocking this man.
I feel bad for him. Because he fully thought, I'm sure, when
I leave here, I go to heaven. And if he was clinging to that
crucifix in his heart, heaven's not where he ended up. Oh, the foundation is strong
because it's not just a man, it's God manifest in human flesh. The foundation is strong because
it's Christ and His wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and redemption. All
of that is what we're built upon. It's Christ and His sacrifice. It's Christ crucified that is
the foundation of our faith. We trust Christ in His person,
and yet if He had come, manifest in the flesh like that, and lived
a perfect life, and then at some point just ascended to heaven
as one who deserved heaven, had earned it by His works, that
would have done us no good, would it? Christ must be crucified. The Holy One must be Punished
for the unholy, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring
us to God. And he came, and under his authority as the
king, he laid that foundation. He stood
there before Pilate, and Pilate says, you're not gonna answer
me, don't you realize? I have authority to crucify you or let
you go. And the Lord Jesus said to him,
you have no authority but the authority which is given you
from heaven. And while he didn't say it, part
and parcel of that statement would have been, and I'm heaven. I rule heaven and earth. If I want you to let me go, you'll
let me go, but I don't. And I've arranged all things
so that you'll be boxed up politically. And even though you know I do
not deserve death, you will turn me over to death because you're
afraid of an uprising from the Jews. I arranged all that. Our Lord put Pilate in a corner. And for all of Pilate's thoughts
of authority, the Lord had him boxed in. He could not let the
Lord Jesus go. Why? Well, the Lord Jesus had
to die, and Pilate was part of the process. And our Lord laid down his life,
truly gave up his life, and died in the fullest sense of that
word. and the foundation of God was laid. Last question, who lays the foundation? Now, we mentioned earlier, it
took a king to do it. Well, look over at 1 Peter 2.
You can hold your place there in 1 Corinthians, but 1 Peter
2. Verse six, 1 Peter 2, verse six. For in scripture it says, see,
I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and
the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame. Never. In truth, on the question of who laid this
foundation of God's temple, the ultimate answer is God himself
did that. God. I have laid a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone, and that would be the first and
largest stone of the foundation. It could never have been done
without God. I realize that the Lord Jesus
Christ is God in human flesh, but here he's speaking of God
in the absoluteness of his person, and that's the only way I know
how to describe that. But he, by his own will, and according
to his own good pleasure, determined that his son would become the
foundation stone He determined where it would be laid, how it
would be laid. Now, he turned all that authority over to his
son, and his son, as the king, brought it to pass. But it's God that did it. And
you know what's so good about that? If God laid that foundation,
it's a good foundation. I don't want to build my hope
of salvation upon something that God did not say, this is the
way I want it. People so often say, you know,
you tell them something from the scripture, they go, well, I like to think,
what does it matter what anyone likes to think? This is a God
thing. The gospel is a work of God. And the purpose of the gospel
is to reconcile us to God. And in this reconciliation, God
hasn't done anything wrong. We're the ones that did something
wrong. So he's the one in the position to determine under what
circumstances reconciliation can take place. He can determine
whether or not there's going to be a reconciliation. And if
there's going to be one, he gets to determine how it's done. That's
the method I want to know about. I don't care what anyone else
thinks. I don't care what I come up with my own mind about a good
way to approach God. I want to know God's way of approach
to him because if he said, this is the way, this is what you
must build on, this is the path you must use to come to me, then
I can walk that path or build upon that stone with confidence
because it's his path, his stone, his way. Now, you can hold your place there.
I'm going to come back to it, but we need to go back now to
1 Corinthians 3. Who lays this foundation? Well,
we just said God laid it. God laid it in his sovereignty.
God laid it in his grace. God laid it in his omnipotence. No one could stop
it from happening. First of all, we read that Jesus
Christ is the king. He laid that foundation stone.
But notice here what is said, what Paul says in verse 10, 1
Corinthians 3. By the grace God has given me,
I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is
building on it, but each one should be careful how he builds. God laid it, the Lord Jesus Christ
laid that foundation, and we, as the Church of the Lord Jesus
Christ, in the capacity of preaching to this world, we are laying
that foundation, just like Paul did. We go out into the world,
and we are not trying to attract their attention to the building.
Our church is better than any other church. That's not the
issue. We go out and we lay the foundation
by preaching. We set forth Christ and Him crucified. That's the foundation. And the politics and the social
movements and all that stuff, that's not our business in the
world. Our business in the world is to set forth Christ. And Paul
says, I've laid the foundation as a master builder. The things
that had not yet been revealed were revealed to him and the
other apostles. The matters of what the real
temple of God were. So he was the master builder.
And he laid it, but what are we doing? We're just looking
at the things that Paul said, under the inspiration of the
Spirit, and we're saying, that's the foundation of God. That's
the foundation He designed, which Christ laid by His death, and
which we go out and lay through our preaching. Nothing more,
nothing less. Remember that saying? Got it from Drew Dietz. I don't
know where he got it. He may have made it up. He said,
we preach Christ, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. Why? It's all been sent to preach. That's the foundation. But Paul
goes on to say, For no one can lay any foundation other than
the one already laid, laid by God, laid by Christ, laid by
the apostles. He said, but if any man, and
that's Christ of course, verse 12, if any man builds on this
foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or
straw. Now he mentions six things, but
obviously it's two groups of three. gold, silver, precious
stones, or wood, hay, or straw. Says his work will be shown for
what it is because the day will bring it to light. What he's
speaking there of is what is built upon the foundation of
Christ as the church goes out preaching or as people minister
within the church. Because see, a big issue had
arisen. Who is the best preacher? Is it Paul? Is it Apollos? And people were becoming enamored
of various preachers. And he says, concerning preachers,
and that's whether they be an official preacher, so to speak,
such as I am, or whatever preaching you may do with people you know
or your own children or whatever. When we're preaching, what we're
doing is building upon that foundation. But some build with gold, silver,
and precious stones, and others build with wood, hay, and stubble.
And it says the day shall make it clear which is which. You mean that there's real believers
out there and they're building on the foundation of Christ with
wood, hay, and stubble? Yes, it happens. In fact, I doubt
there's a preacher out there that doesn't have some wood,
hay, and stubble mixed in there. What does he mean by gold, silver,
precious stones as opposed to wood, hay, and stubble? He's
talking about that which is done in the power of the Spirit and
that which is done in the strength of the flesh. And there's only one way that
a man can build upon the foundation of Christ in the power of the
Spirit, only one way. The Lord said, The spirit is everything. The
flesh is of no use at all. The word which I speak to you
is spirit. I imagine one of the things,
if anybody comes here to visit, one of the first things they
know is there's not anything terribly exciting to the flesh
in what we do. Well, that's not just because
We probably couldn't. I mean, how big a show can we
put on here, you know? We couldn't or we wouldn't if
we could, because that's flesh. And there are churches being
filled up with people who are there for the show. They're there
for the religious show. And yes, they're building churches.
They're building big ones. And some of these people, and
I'll be honest with you, it's difficult to know what to do
about them, how to react to them, but some of them are preaching,
in essence, the same thing we do. But they've got so much else
going on. And all the else that they've
got going on is wood, hay, and stubble. They're bringing in
people with the charisma of their personality. or with bringing some shiny new
doctrinal toy for the people to be mesmerized with. Yes, when
they get around to talking about the topics we always talk about,
they'll talk the same way we do. But most of the time, they're
talking about something else. And they build a temple out of
wood, hay, and stubble. And when the judgment of God
comes through, What do you think happens to the wood hay and stubble?
And what does it say concerning such preachers? He will suffer
loss. He himself will be saved. These
men aren't lost. But only as one escaping through
the flames. But the one who builds using
only spiritual means, relying on the power of the Spirit only
to bring to pass any good. It says, verse 14, if what he
has built survives, if the converts that have come to Christ under
his preaching have been brought not by whatever powers he has,
but have been brought through the power of the Spirit of God
as they heard the gospel, and God the Spirit was pleased to
move them, if they've been brought, they will come through that judgment,
because you can't burn up gold, silver, and precious stones.
It'll survive. And it says, he will receive
his reward. Now, what reward is that? Does
he get a nicer place in heaven? Does he get to stand with all
the gold, silver, and precious jewels builders as they look
over the wood, hay, and stubble guys? And, oh, man. They should
have been like us. I'll tell you what the reward
is. Paul doesn't say it, but as a preacher of the gospel,
I'll tell you what the reward of a man like that is, what the
reward will be for me, you, in the presence of God, without fault and full of joy. To be honest, the biggest fear
that I have as a minister of the gospel is that through my
own foolishness and pride, I'm leading a group of people to
hell. Now, that's just my flesh just
constantly finding fault with what I do, and that's not hard
to do. That's why I can't ever get far
from a simple gospel. Paul says, I'm jealous over you
with a godly jealousy. That any who make a profession
of faith under my preaching should in the end perish because I had
led them in a false way. I couldn't bear that. Oh, but
to see you glorious in the righteousness of Christ, in the presence of
the Father rejoicing, that's as good as it can get.
What trinket could you give me to reward me for faithful preaching? And that those who heard me and
believed what I said are indeed saved by the grace of God. One
last quick little point to make. Going back to 1 Peter chapter
2, this foundation, it's laid by God in purpose and providence,
laid by the Son of God in his work, laid by preachers in their
preaching. And it says, the one who trusts
in him, that foundation stone, will never be put to shame. Did you hear that? The one who trusts in Him. Not the one who faithfully builds
with gold, silver, and precious stones, and no wood, hay, or
stubble. That's not the issue here. Now, every one of us here is
a mess in one way or another. We all express our sinfulness
in different ways. But I know this, if you are truly
built upon this foundation stone, if your hope is in Christ and
Christ alone, you will not be put to shame
in his presence. You won't be like that guy who
left this world clinging to his crucifix because you will leave
this world clinging to Christ. built upon the foundation stone
which can never be moved. So the point this morning is
not about your faithfulness, not about whether you've done
this, that, or the other sin. It's this and this alone. On
what are you resting? In whom do you trust? I pray
that you are trusting God. Because then you'll never be
put to shame, and neither will I. Because you will have listened
to me and ended up in judgment.