Sunday School

"The wise man builds his house upon the rock,

the wise man builds his house upon the rock…."

I remember singing this song when I was a kid. Last night I was reading the passage in Luke on which this story is based. It reminded me of teaching this story in a small group bible study I was leading for university students. We read the story and I had them tell me what it was about. They immediately went into "Sunday school mode". They told me that it is about how important it is to base your life on Jesus and that he is the only thing that will last. They told me that Christians will have Jesus to hold onto when troubles come but non-Christians will have nothing to hold on to.

They gave me the answers that they had heard their whole lives and that are essentially true. Jesus is great to hold onto and the only thing that will last. The problem is, that is not what the story is about. Jesus doesn't tell a story about people that follow him and people that don't. It is about people that that follow Jesus and people who say they follow Jesus.

Luke 6:46-48 (NIV)
⁴⁶ "Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say? ⁴⁷ I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. ⁴⁸ 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.

We all have these Sunday school answers that may be true but sometimes they stop us from seeing the message in the text we are looking at. This story is about us not fooling ourselves into thinking we are following Jesus.

Two things stand out to me in this story as I thought about it in the work that we do. The first one is that: since we work in a Christian environment we are in danger of living in a Christian culture rather than knowing Christ. The story is about calling Him "Lord" but not letting Him be Lord. When we work and live in an environment where being a Christian is an expectation we can end up calling him Lord and making it look like we are obeying but not knowing Him. When the floods come we will find that we are not built on the rock. Jesus tells this parable at the end of a section of teaching (vs 17-49) I challenge you to read it as I did yesterday and ask yourself where you are not doing "what He says".

The second thing I thought of as I read this was: we need to make sure that we are passing on what the Bible says to the people we serve, not our Sunday school answers. I know for many of you get the privilege of teaching the people we serve about Jesus. Even as you talk to your fellow staff about the things of God or as you read the bible yourself I challenge you to ask yourself, "What does this story really teach?" One handy question I have found for my own study is to ask yourself "what would our churches look like if this was the only passage of the Bible we had?" It is important to put the passages in the context of the larger scripture but first read what it says by itself. Otherwise we won't really learn anything we didn't know in Sunday school.

Mark Wallace