Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I'm excited to be starting a new series with you. I was thinking about this all the way home on the plane last night. The man next to me was looking at my notes rather interestedly. I always wonder what people think when they read my notes on the airplane. They must think, "Here's a weird bird I'm sitting next to; she is in her Bible and she has something to say." As I was listening to the conversation around me—and conversation around me is where I get most of my illustrations—I can't help myself sitting in McDonald's at O'Hare and listening in to the person next door and writing down in my little book because it's so interesting.

I was just aware of how superfluous everything is. There were three or four businessmen in front of me talking about the pubs in Milwaukee. We were coming home from Boston. One of them had been there before, and he was telling them where they could get the best drinks, where he could get the best foods, and all of that. He said that there were some nice ladies on the trip and they would be getting to know them. They were muttering away to each other, and then I heard one of them say, "Well, everybody's doing it." I didn't wonder what everybody was doing; I was too busy doing what I was doing.

Behind me, there were some people talking about some tragedy that had happened in their lives. I was so well aware that there was nowhere to go with all this conversation. There was nowhere to stand, no solid ground in all of this talk. So, I want to give a series of messages on solid ground, on a philosophy of life, on a way of living that helps us to find something to put our feet on. Of course, I believe that solid ground, because I'm a Christian and a believer, is to be found in knowing Jesus Christ as our Savior and as our Lord, in learning what He said, and in doing what He told us to do in obedience.

I'd like you to turn to Matthew chapter seven. We're going to read a little story to start off about the wise and the foolish builders. Some of them built on solid ground, and others, very foolishly, built on sand. "Therefore," said Jesus at the end of His long Sermon on the Mount, "therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who builds his house on the rock. The rain comes down, the streams rise, the winds blow and beat against the house; yet it won't fall because it's got its foundation on the rock.

"But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn't put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew, beat against the house, and it fell with a great crash." When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at His teaching because He taught as one who had authority and not as the teachers of their law. I was in a college situation at some point during this last few years. I can't remember the college and I can't remember where it was.

I just remember I had a mass of kids out there in front of me and I had an awful lot to tell them in a very short time. So, I did what you shouldn't do when you're a speaker; I told them that. I said, "I have just so much I want to say, I don't know where to start." A voice from the back, a rather bored voice, said, "Why don't you start near the end?" Kids are wonderful; they really are. So, we're going to start near the end. We're going to start, actually, at the end of the first of five great discourses in the book of Matthew that Jesus Christ gave.

This sermon, this first discourse, ends with this short story that I've just read to you. It also says that when Jesus had finished this, people were amazed and they said, "This man is speaking like somebody that's got a lot of authority; we better listen up. He obviously knows what he's talking about." I would like to suggest to you that if we do not believe this man that says these things in the Bible, in the Gospels, this Jesus is God, then we're not going to do what He said. We're not going to build our life on His sayings.

If anyone has the audacity and the arrogance to stand there and say, "Everything I say to you is so important that you can actually build your life on the foundation of what I am saying, build your life on my sayings," he either must be some sort of a nut or He must be the person that He purports to be. If He was God, He has every right to say it. We can know that if we will build our lives on His sayings, then we will be indeed blessed. If you turn back to chapter five, these are the sayings He is suggesting or commanding or giving the opportunity for us to build our life upon.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those that mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted." Each week, we're going to take one of those happy foundation stones of living. Blessed, *Makarios*, the Greek word that told everybody that knew Greek, this was a word that belonged to the gods. Blessed. They believed the gods, the Greek gods, had it just fine, that they had such a happy life; they had everything they wanted.

Jesus borrows the word that is familiar to the people and says, "If you really want to have everything you really want, you're going to have to know me and you're going to have to live your life according to the things I tell you to do. If you want to be that blessed, as blessed as the gods, describing the happy state of the gods, if you want to be that happy, this is the way to do it." Yet, we find ourselves in the midst of a society who are building their lives on anything but the words of Jesus Christ. Who was He, this man?

We know that He had an extraordinary birth. Shepherds told incredible tales of skies full of angels. A baby in a manger—you don't find a baby in a manger every day of the week. Protected by visions and dreams, this baby grew up. His parents cared for him. He grew up with his cousin John. John became a famous preacher, and the whole world flocked to hear his sermons, and they were tough sermons. He didn't start his sermons, "My dear sheep"; he started, "My dear brood of vipers. You're a bunch of snakes." People stayed around to hear what else he had to say.

So, here was a man who knew how to tough talk, and yet people flocked to him because it wasn't he that spoke; it was the Spirit of God that was speaking through him. It was this John that saw Jesus, his cousin, this boy that he'd been raised with, and alerted by God that this was none other but God Himself in human form, borrowing a body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth, to visit us, to teach us, to tell us stories like this one, and to give us sermons like the one that we're going to look at.

John said, "This is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world." This is the man that we heard about right back in Genesis when Adam and Eve first fell and God said, "Well, one day, the seed of this woman Eve, a descendant of this woman Eve, will come and he will bruise the old serpent's head. He will do the devil in and he will bring mankind back to Himself." So, this man that told this marvelous story and that gives us these wonderful sermons, we believe is Jesus Christ Himself.

It was at the beginning of His ministry that He gathered the people to Himself and specifically His disciples, and He began to teach them. This is the first great discourse. We have a little bit of Jesus teaching here and saying this there, and He's done a miracle or two and commented on them, but this is the first time He's ever preached His first real long sermon, the first sermon that Jesus ever preached. I always remember my husband tells this wonderful story of the first sermon he ever preached. He was asked by a man at the back of the church one day, "How old are you?"

Stuart said, "I'm seventeen," and the man said, "Well, it's time you were preaching." Stuart said, "Oh, I can't preach." The man said, "How do you know? Have you ever tried?" Stuart said, "No." So, he said, "Well, how do you know you can't do it if you've never tried?" Of course, as Stuart comments at that point, our churches are full of people that know they can't do what they've never tried. The man went a step further and said, "You will preach next week to the youth group and your subject is the church at Ephesus." Stuart says at that point, he didn't know they had a church at Ephesus.

He was peculiarly motivated to find out all he could about the church at Ephesus, and actually in our hallway in our home, I found a copy of Stuart's first sermon when he was seventeen years of age on the church at Ephesus. Beautifully written—I don't know what happened to his handwriting between then and now. At the end of twenty minutes, he put his head down and just went. He looked up and realized he'd only got through his first point, so he hasn't changed much since then.

In his seventeen-year-old inexperience, he said, "Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I'm not through with my talk, but I don't know how to stop." An old man sitting on the back said, "Well, shut up and sit down." That's how Stuart began his ministry. That was his first sermon. Well, when our Lord preached His first sermon, nobody told Him to shut up and sit down. He could have gone on and on and on, I'm sure. Can you imagine the thrill it must have been to be there? Christ begins to tell the people what He wants them to know.

He starts by giving them all sorts of wonderful ideas, but then He finishes by saying, "If you're going to have your feet on solid ground, you're going to have to be a wise man." The little picture He gives us before we begin is this: the house He's talking about is our life. The house is my life. The question is, how will I build it? How will I build my life? As a disciple or as a Pharisee? Because Jesus was talking to the disciples, the Pharisees were there, the crowd was there. The disciples were on the inner circle; the Pharisees were standing next to them.

Then the crowd, the rest of the world, was listening in. Jesus was very aware that there were two sorts of people listening to Him: the disciple that would love Him and obey Him. "If you love me, keep my commandments," said Jesus. The disciple who would love Him and obey Him, listen to Him, hear what He had to say, build their life like a wise man. Then the Pharisee, who would listen to what He had to say, pay lip service to some of it, perhaps, but his heart was far from the Christ and would build his life on the sand and would have no solid ground at all.

A disciple who tried to follow Him, a Pharisee who didn't want to—both of them were there, and both of them today are here in my heart, and they are here in your heart as well. Every time Jesus says something to you, there's going to be a struggle between the disciple in you and the Pharisee in you. It just depends who's going to win, what sort of a life you build. "O Lord, I found within my heart someone who's been there from the start, a prudish person self-appointed, self-sufficient, self-anointed. Though I a humble servant be, I've met the Pharisee in me."

We're going to meet the Pharisee in me through this series. It's not going to be very pleasant to discover him within our heart, but he's been there from the start. The Pharisee is a picture of the flesh. The Pharisee is a picture of us before we knew Jesus. The Pharisee is the self without Christ. That part of us is not eradicated. That pharisaical attitude doesn't disappear just because we become a Christian, just because we commit ourselves to Christ. There is a constant battle in our lives as Jesus teaches us something and the Pharisee in me says this and the disciple says the other, and we build. On what? Rock or sand?

The wise man hears. Don't say that you've never heard. We have church, we have Sunday school, we have Bible studies, we have Bibles that we can buy, we see Christmas specials and Easter on TV, we turn on the radio. In here in the West, we can never stand in front of God and say, "I didn't hear the words of Jesus." Now, we mightn't have heard very many words, we might have mixed them up with other people's words, but we have heard the words of Jesus. If I were to ask you what all the Beatitudes were, I've just read them to you, you might be able to remember them.

If I hadn't read them to you, would you have been able to tell me what all the Beatitudes are? Maybe not. If I asked you what the names of the twelve disciples were, could you tell me? If I asked you what the Ten Commandments were, could you tell me? Even Bible-believing, committed Christians can't do some of the most basic things these days. I'm well aware that we might have got mixed up with our belief that this was one of Jesus' words or that was one of Jesus' words, all sorts of other stuff that's coming at us from all different directions.

I've just come back from a few women's seminars I've done in a line. I was with a whole bunch of women up at Camp-of-the-Woods in the lovely woods up there in New York State. I spent a lot of time talking and listening, and I was appalled at the reading matter some of these Christian women from churches are reading. I don't know where they get these books from, but there's all sorts of books now coming our way that you can hardly discern if you're not careful where they're coming from, whether they're New Age or not, and a lot of them are.

The wise man has to really make sure it's the sayings of Jesus that he's building his life on. We're not in the position of the tribe I heard about up near China that when they were presented with the Christian Gospel said, "Well, Jesus Christ, I think I've heard of it. Isn't that a brand of cigarette?" They thought Jesus Christ was a brand of cigarette. We are not in that position, and yet I think we're still pretty biblically illiterate when it really comes down to it. If we're going to build our life on the sayings of Jesus, we better find out what they are.

A nice little thing that can go along with my study might be that you open the Gospel of Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, or John; it doesn't really matter. Take a colored pencil and just go through every single saying of Jesus. Some of you might say, "Well, I have a Bible and it's all in red for me; I don't need to do it." Get a Bible that isn't all in red and do it for yourself. As you underline every saying He says, maybe you could double underline with another color every command He gives because some sayings are promises and some are warnings and some are comments on life in general.

Some things are about God and some things are observations. But if you double underline when you've underlined everything He's said, everything He says we are to do, then you'll begin to see the sort of things He wants you to build into your life. How can you build your life on the sayings of Jesus if you don't know what the sayings of Jesus say about what we are to do with our life? So, the foundation of our life is to be knowing Christ personally and knowing His teaching thoroughly so we're familiar with them and we can build our life upon them.

The wise man builds his house like this, whereas of course, the foolish man builds his house on the sand—on self-reliance, on self-gratification, on self-satisfaction, on self-accomplishment, on self-love. In another part of the Scriptures, the Pharisee was seen praying in the temple. You remember that little story? Away off in a corner was the publican. The publican was beating his breast, saying, "God be merciful to me, a sinner." But the Pharisee was saying, "I thank thee, God, that I am not as this man, or as other men. I do this and I do that and I do the other."

Actually, the Bible is very interesting there. It says he was praying with himself, and this is what he said: "God, I'm praying to myself, God." So, he was his own god, and that is the essence of foolishness, and that means that you will build your house on the sand. Living life is like a building. We live in what we build. It isn't the size of the house that matters; it's what's underneath, the foundations that people can't see. It's not the color of the house that matters, the decorations in the house.

Maybe you live a hot pink life and your life is decorated hot pink color, and people look at you and say, "She doesn't need anything. She's happy. She's got it. She's with it." Yet, there are no foundations; it's on sand. Of course, what divides the men from the boys is the storms, when the storms of life come, when the rains come. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, "Who hasn't seen the human house fall before the onset of a business calamity or an overwhelming storm of sorrow? Other lives, despite pitiless rain of filial unfaithfulness, cruel winds of pain, stand firm on solid ground."

All of us know that. I think of two little faces that spring to my mind that I spent a lot of time looking at just yesterday. I spent a lot of time listening to a story that would defy description. Pastors' wives, both—one of them being terribly abused. As I was leaving, she said, "If you like, you can use my story to help other people." So, that's why I mention her. I tell you, if she didn't have a foundation, she would have come down with a great crash. But that little girl, even though she doesn't feel very strong, is standing on solid ground.

After thirteen years of living with secrets that she's never told anyone, yesterday it all came out. As I listened to her and as I looked at her and as I cried with her and as we talked together about what she's going to do about this situation, I thought to myself, "Here's a gal whose feet are on solid ground, absolutely solid ground, and she's not going to fall with a big crash." The rains are coming down on her, and the floods are coming up on her, and the wind is beating against her house, but she's standing on solid ground.

The Bible says it did not fall because it had its foundation upon the rock. Read Psalm 61 sometimes; it talks about God being the solid rock, our refuge. We can get our feet on Him. We can stand firm. It's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Psalm. I think about another little girl, this time, who's got her feet on solid ground—one of our missionary kids, Heidi, a fifth grader. The storm is on her at the moment. She's gone to boarding school after being homeschooled for a long, long time, and she's homesick, and the floods are rising, and the wind is blowing against this little fifth grader.

She's got her brother and her sister, a sixth and eighth grader with her, but still she's homesick. This is what she writes: "This is noon rest of the first Sunday. We had a neat service. I went to the sunrise one. It was so cold that when we got back, Aunt Janice made us hot chocolate with marshmallows and doughnut holes. It was so nice. My two first-grade roommates—bedroommate, she means—are fine. They give me the biggest bear hugs. I will explain one of my very hard nights. One, I wake up by loud laughing, which was really funny. Julie was laughing really hard, but she'd flooded the bed. Aunt Janice had to change the sheets."