Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2004 : March 28, 2004
Christ Built Your Dream House
Lent 5
Recently the housing market has been running at a phenomenal rate. People have been buying houses left and right, it seems, even though some of us have gone through some difficult times financially. People are re-financing their mortgages to take advantage of the low interest rates before they go back up. Some of you might even be in the market for buying a home right now. But I'd like to ask everyone this morning: if you were going to buy a house and money was no option, what house would you buy? What features would it have? In other words, what would be your ideal dream house —- again, with money as no option? Would it have a four-car garage? Six-car garage? A half acre of land or 100 acres? 12 full baths? A huge kitchen (that comes with a chef)? A gorgeous view of the mountains or the ocean? There are all kinds of possibilities, aren't there? As we're thinking about what the vision for our church here at Living Word is going to be, with the sky as the limit, what would your dream house be?
Have you purchased your dream house yet? Some of us never will; we'll just have to be content with where we live now. When the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the Philippians, he wasn't concerned about a dream house -- he was renting out a nice little house in Rome at the time, under arrest for preaching the gospel -- and yet he was content. That's because he knew that he had something much more valuable to him than anything this world could buy. He had eternal life through Jesus Christ. Spiritually speaking, Christ Built Paul's Dream House, and Christ has Built Your Dream House as well. We'll see how it happened as the Holy Spirit guides us through his Word in Philippians 3.
Paul starts out by saying: "I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ." Paul had thought that he had everything he needed in this world. He had it made. He was a very zealous, God-fearing man who even went the extra mile to persecute this new sect called the Christians that was growing and opposing what he knew to be the truth. The only problem was -- he wasn't God-fearing. He was basing his salvation on what he did in order to get to heaven. But then Jesus reached out to him on the road to Damascus as he was rounding up more Christians to hand over to the Jewish authorities. Then he found out that his whole life had been based on a lie: works get you to heaven. He found out that they couldn't at all. Now he knew that Jesus was his only way to get to heaven, the very Jesus whom he had been persecuting. Now he considered everything in his former life a loss compared to the far greater knowledge of Jesus as his Savior.
For Paul's life and his thinking to be changed around so completely, something major had to happen in his life. That major thing was his call to faith, which occurred when Jesus appeared to him on that road to Damascus. We can picture that change by thinking again about houses. Suppose you have invested your whole life savings into buying a house for your retirement. It's beautiful -- just what you've always wanted. But you don't have any fire insurance on it -- you figure that you'll get around to it after you've been in your house one year. What are the chances that your house will catch fire in that time when you've never had a fire in your house your whole life. But, sure enough, there was faulty wiring put into the new house, it catches the house on fire when you're away, and by the time the fire department gets to your house, it's a complete loss. Just think of how you'd feel -- what you've worked for your whole life is burned up. What a waste! Paul's point is this: When we come to know Christ, everything else in life is far less important; in fact, if something else starts taking the place of Christ in our lives, like a house, Paul would lose it all to keep Christ. If that house becomes more important than Christ, Paul says he would be the first one to light the match to burn it to the ground to keep his hold on Christ. Paul considered his former life of trying to earn salvation as garbage -- worthless, smelly garbage -- compared to the incomparable riches that were his through Christ.
But how could those riches in Christ become his? First, by seeing that your old house, or whatever you used to place before Christ, is garbage. Then by seeing that Christ has built your dream house by giving you his own house, which is yours through faith.
Let's look at how Paul came to see the house Jesus built for him as his dream house. Earlier in the chapter he tells of what he used to boast in. He was circumcised on the eighth day, which not even many of the Jews could say. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, not a Greek who had become a Jew; he was a Pharisee who took pains to do even more than the Law required, or so he thought. He said that as for legalistic righteousness, he was faultless. But now he knew better, that these things couldn't get him close to God, they couldn't get him to heaven.
Suppose after your dream house burned to the ground and you were left penniless, your long-lost uncle let you stay at his house. When you arrive there, you find out that it is a mansion, much better than any house you could have built for yourself; it's something beyond your wildest dreams. If your dream house hadn't burned down, you never would have discovered your real dream house -- the one that was given to you. So it is with our salvation. Until the Holy Spirit wakes us up, we think that we have all we need to get to heaven. But after we come to faith in Jesus, we realize that we had nothing. God said through Isaiah, "Your righteous acts are like dirty rags" to God. The blessing of eternal life comes through faith in Jesus Christ alone, nothing else. The righteousness we need to enter heaven is the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.
The Judaizers at Paul's time were trying to get fledgling Christians to go back to the old ways that Paul knew -- get circumcised, don't eat certain meats, do everything according to the Old Testament law. Paul was encouraging the Philippians to consider those things garbage. He knew first-hand that those things could get you nowhere. We have those same kinds of pressures today as Christians. We might look at some of the things that we have done and boast in them. Maybe we were baptized as an infant; maybe our family has been Christian for generations; maybe there are a number of pastors in the family, maybe we have served the church for more than fifty years doing things that others don't usually do. Those things can be good blessings, as long as they don't become a reason for us to look down on others, as long as they don't get in the way of relying entirely on Jesus for salvation.
You've known Christ all your life? Great! Instead of using that as a reason to boast, Paul encourages you to know Christ even more and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. In other words, it's not time to sit back on your laurels. Now is the time to strive even more for knowing about Christ and his salvation. If you have known Christ your whole life then you should be the first one in Bible class, ready to learn more about what he's done for you, eager to see one more truth from Scripture that you may have missed before or taken for granted, empty of your own boasting and ready to be filled with a more complete knowledge of Jesus as your Savior. Christ has built your dream house by giving you his righteousness that he earned during his life. Your old house was garbage. Your new house is Christ's house that he has given to you through faith. But there's still plenty of yard work that needs to be done.
Paul says, "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me." Yes, Paul is perfect in God's eyes through faith. His sins were paid for in full when Jesus died on Calvary's cross. He has Christ's righteousness credited to his account through faith in Jesus. But even though Paul is redeemed, he isn't perfect yet. He will be perfect completely in heaven. Until then, he remains a forgiven child of God and heir of eternal life, but also a sinner who many times fails to appreciate fully what Christ has done, a sinner who falls into the same sins every day. For that reason, Paul presses on to take hold of his eternal reward. He says, "But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Paul continued to strain toward his heavenly goal, he pressed on toward heaven which he knew would be his. He had his dream house already in Jesus' forgiveness; but his mansion in heaven still awaited him.
So it is with us. Jesus did everything for our salvation. It says that nine times in nine different ways in these seven short verses. But I can still blow it. It's like the classic tortoise and the hare race. You are the hare, you are out in front by a mile, you can't lose, or so you think. But if you start letting up, if you look at the cheering crowd, if you stop to smell the roses, you'll lose. If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall. But in our Christian races, we strain toward our heavenly goal with our whole being. We don't focus on this world. We focus on what happened at our baptisms, when the Holy Spirit washed us clean of our sins and gave us faith or strengthened our faith to see Jesus alone as our ticket to heaven. Then we focus on the ways that we can live our Christian lives to say thank you to our loving God. We do yard work at the mansion that Christ has given us. We invite others to hear of the marvels of Jesus and what he did to give all people salvation. We don't get side-tracked by our sinful flesh, our own boasting, the things the world has to offer. Instead, we focus on heaven.
You are a Christian. Whether you live in a cardboard box or in a ten-bedroom house with a four-car garage and a Jacuzzi out back, you are all residents of the dream house that Christ purchased for you with his blood. Live your life accordingly as you press on to take hold of your mansion in heaven. Amen.
