Is Jesus My Firm Foundation?.

As I was prepping for today and deciding what I wanted to talk about, I honestly had a really hard time nailing down what was going to happen. I started writing this message and then I realized I think I've preached this before. So I started going through the archives and I realized I have. I'm actually going to preach a message I've preached before. I haven't preached it here at New Culture. I preached it a little over a month ago, but I think my heart just needed to be reminded of what was in this message, and I just felt really strongly that that was where we were going to go with it today.

Today I want to try to answer the question: why can you trust Jesus as your firm foundation? That's the question I want to try to answer today. It's a really, really important question. And the reality is, at some point we all have to grapple with this question of, can I trust Jesus? We all have to ask it of ourselves probably more than one time: do I trust Jesus?

The wise and foolish builders

Today we're going to be in Matthew chapter 7, verses 24 through 27.

Therefore whoever hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds beat and blew on that house and it did not fall for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rains descended, the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house and it fell and great was its fall.

Matthew 7:24-27

Most of you already know this about me because I talk about it relentlessly, but just in case. I grew up in Tampa, Florida. Very proud to be a Floridian.

And there are two things you should know about the place that I call home. First, Tampa. I don't know if it still is, but for a long time, it was the lightning capital of the world. Lots and lots of lightning, lots and lots of thunderstorms. That's why our hockey team is called the Tampa Bay Lightning. Second, you need to know about this place I grew up in: hurricanes.

Hurricanes, for sure. If you live in Florida, at some point or another, you're going to go through a hurricane. There are multiple tropical storms a year, which is just a hurricane with slower winds. So you're going to go through a lot of storms, like physical storms, living in Florida.

I remember Katrina. I remember Matthew. I remember these different storms that hit when I was a kid and up into adulthood. Most recently, my hurricane experience was in summer 2020. My family, my grandparents, still live in Puerto Rico and the majority of my family still lives there. When quarantine hit, my sister, my mom and I packed up and went to Puerto Rico and we stayed there for the majority of the summer. It was a really good chunk of time. We stayed in Puerto Rico with my grandparents up on a mountain.

While I was there, the earth decided to join in on the chaos of 2020. In the month and a half that I was there, there was an earthquake. I've never been in an earthquake before, so this was my first earthquake experience. I sleep kind of obnoxiously heavy, so I didn't experience the earthquake. I was told about it when I woke up the next day.

Then after the earthquake, there was a dust storm. Dust from the Saharan desert in Africa decided to blow over the island of Puerto Rico. So that was really interesting. And then what ended the dust storm was a hurricane. So it was a really fascinating week of time.

I've been through a lot of hurricanes before. Again, I grew up in Florida. Hurricanes don't super duper freak me out. You've probably heard me talk about hurricane parties. It's a thing that we do. But this was different. I'll tell you why.

My grandparents live in a house that my grandfather built with his hands. Instead of normal windows, there are shutters. And there's a giant river 200 feet to the left of the house. This just felt a little more scary.

I'm terrified. I'm inside the house. I can hear the river next to us literally roaring. It sounds like an animal. The power went out and we only had one generator. So we're using the generator to power the fridge so all the food doesn't go bad and to keep our phones charged, just in case. We had our little candles. I'm sitting in the kitchen with the two dogs and I'm just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

And I look up and my grandma has her little candle and she's just coloring. Just that complete, just minding her business. And my mom is on the couch next to her, sound asleep. Like nothing is happening. Completely and totally undisturbed.

You know, this storm at my grandparents' house is what I think of when I read the verse. The floods came down, the winds beat and blew against the house. And you know, we all have seasons in our lives where we can hear the river roaring. You can just imagine this is going to flood. I'm going to drown in this. We have seasons in our lives where the wind is so strong it feels like it's going to knock us down. And the rain is so fierce that it feels like we might drown walking. This is life. Storms come with hurricane force winds, and we either fall or we stand in those moments.

And it boils down to one question: do I trust Jesus?

Why can you trust Jesus?

Why can you trust Jesus as your firm foundation? That is a loaded question. I'm going to try, to the best of my abilities, to kind of break it down. But if I'm super honest with you up front, this is one of those questions that realistically you're going to have to wrestle with the Lord with, because I don't know what circumstance faces you that makes you wonder if you can trust him with it. There are just going to be some moments where you have to stop and say, Jesus, do I trust you? Can I trust you? Help me trust you.

But in our effort to answer this question, we have to start by asking: what is a foundation? A foundation is the lowest load-bearing part of a building. It's typically below ground level. It is an underlying basis or principle. It is essentially your primary presupposition. Your foundation is the lens through which you interpret the world around you. It determines how you engage with your world.

Whatever your foundation is, this determines how you interact with the world around you. Everything builds off of our foundations. We all have a foundation. The question at hand is not, do I have a foundation or how do I get a foundation? We all have something we're building off of. The question is: what is our foundation? Is it strong? Is it firm? Or is it not? And there is no in between. It's either firm or it's not firm.

If I'm in a hurricane, I don't want to hear that the foundation of the house I'm in is 50 percent firm. That is not firm. That is a weak foundation and I need to go somewhere else. It is not, eh, it's kind of so-so. You have a firm foundation or you have a weak foundation.

So how do we define firm? Firm is defined as having a solid, unyielding structure. It is solidly in place and stable. To be firm is to be resolute, determined, and to have strength of character. Strongly felt, unchanging, decided, fixed, definite.

So Jesus as a firm foundation. One of the things that I really love that defines Jesus as a foundation versus being something that's built upon your foundation is that it's not what Jesus does that makes him a firm foundation. It's who Jesus is that makes him a firm foundation. It's not the miracles he performs. It's not the provision. It's not the signs and the wonders that makes him trustworthy. It's who Jesus is that makes him the firm foundation. It's his character.

One of the things that I get to do that I love is I get to sit down and talk to people about their life and different things that are going on. A lot of times when I have conversations with people and they're struggling in some area of their life and they're grappling with trusting Jesus, they usually describe to me some flawed presupposition about the character of Jesus.

Jesus is everything. And everything he is, he is fully complete in you. So Jesus is peace. This is his character: peace. Jesus is freedom. He is good. He is grace. He is healing. He is love. He is mercy. He is faithfulness. He's not meeting another standard of those things. It is who he is.

So why can you trust him as your firm foundation? We can trust him as his firm foundation because he is the firm foundation. He is everything. He is every promise fulfilled. He is every need met. He is strong and he is reliable. He is the beginning and the end. He is the firstborn of creation. He is our ransom. He is our living hope. He is the foundation.

And he is the only one. There is no external standard he meets. He is the standard. There is one firm foundation and only one, and it is Jesus.

There's a Bible verse that I love, and it's in Proverbs.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

Proverbs 3:5-6

This Bible verse, if I'm perfectly honest with you, for no fault of its own, always felt very corny to me. I'll explain why. I was part of a ministry growing up called Missionette, a girls' ministry that I did from the time I was really little all the way till I graduated high school. Every single club in Missionettes is split up into age groups and has a Bible verse as the theme of the class.

The high school class was called GEOS. Girls Only. That was the verse. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight. Our teacher, Kathy Santana, I love her to pieces forever, but everything she would give us something with this Bible verse on it. I have magnets with this Bible verse. I have notebooks with this Bible verse. I have sticky notes that have this Bible verse. I have a pen that has this Bible verse engraved on it. Everything. When I graduated high school, she got me a plaque with the Bible verse on it. It was just an all the time, all the time thing. So it just became very mundane in my mind.

And then I remember I didn't enjoy being a teenager. So when I turned 20, I decided I was going to have a goodbye to my teenage years extravaganza. And I kicked it off by going skydiving.

The skydiving story

So I decided I'm going to go skydiving. I tell my sister we're going skydiving. And that's what we did.

So we go out there and beforehand they email you a safety video you're supposed to watch. If you know me, you know this is really on brand for me. I did not watch the safety video. I was like, I'm just going to go do it, right? They know what they're doing. Why do I need to know what they're doing?

We show up at the place and you just kind of sit there and wait. Then it's tandem skydiving so you're attached to a professional. Eventually they come out and they call your name. I hear a variation of my name. I get up. I go over there and they hand me the harness and I'm putting it on and he's talking to me. I can see my sister and I can hear her and she's with her professional and he's giving her instructions A through Z. In their conversation, he's making it all the way to when they land. And she has like questions A and then 1A and then 2A listed out for every instruction he has for her.

And my guy's like, put on your harness, take a seat. And when I call you, we're going to go over to the shed on the field. And I was like, okay, cool. Next step. Then we go over. We get to the shed. Then he goes, when the plane lands and I tell you two, you're going to go up. We're going to be the first ones on the plane, but you have to let me go in front of you. I was like, okay, cool. That's step two. And that's what we did.

You sit on it like you're riding a horse. So it's like you're on either side of it like this. And then he is way too close behind you. And then there's somebody else way too close in front of you. And you're just stuck on this thing, on this little itty-bitty plane, all the way up.

I was very quiet because that's what I do when I get a little bit nervous. I just get really quiet. We're going up little by little. Then we get a little higher and I can feel him pull the harness on my legs and tighten them. And I was like, okay. Then we get a little bit higher and I can feel him tighten it around my chest. And I was like, okay. A little higher, now it's on my shoulders. He's tightening it. A little bit higher, I hear the click. He's connecting me to his harness. And I was like, okay. Okay, we're doing this. We're getting up there.

And then all of a sudden I'm all the way in the back of the plane and all of a sudden the side of the plane opens like a garage door and then I feel myself go. He pulled the harness and flattened me up against him and I was like, okay, something's happening. Then without my permission, completely involuntary, I'm moving further up on this bench and he's scooching me along on this bench and I'm watching one by one people just falling out of this plane. It's amazing how quickly they disappear. They're just going. My sister's in front of me. They scoop her off. We do the opposite thing.

When I get nervous I get really quiet. When she gets nervous she talks to her guy the whole time. He's not even talking about, he literally takes her head and leans it back and then they're gone. Then it's just the wind coming into the plane and me and this dude on the edge of this bench. He goes, pick up your feet.

One thing about me is when I'm scared I'm obedient. He knows what he's doing, you know what I'm saying? So I picked up my feet. Then he is walking to the edge of the plane and I am just dangling there with my feet up. Before I know it he has his feet on the edge of the plane and mine are already dangling off the edge. I'm just attached to this dude. I'm looking down like, wow, this might not have been a good idea. This might have been a little extreme. You know, I said I wanted to say goodbye to my teen years. I didn't say I wanted to say goodbye, period, you know what I'm saying?

And then he's like, are you ready? And what is the right answer to that in a moment like that? You know what I'm saying? So I was just like, sure. He said, okay, you have to lean back. And I didn't understand that question or that command. But you know what sounded like a good idea? Because he said so and he was the one in charge, right? He's the one who's done this before. So he said lean back. So I put my head back and before I know it I'm looking at the bottom of the plane and I'm on my way to the earth.

I'll be honest, it was the most amazing experience I've ever had. I'd love to go again if anyone wants to go skydiving, let me know. I'm down. It was incredible. I literally have a video of it and I'm just screaming, this is awesome, the whole way down. It was incredible.

But when I got down to the ground and it was over and we had done this whole thing, all I could think about was:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.

Proverbs 3:5-6

And I had this moment of realization. There are things I knew about jumping out of this plane, right? If I had been more responsible and had watched this safety video, I would have heard that you're supposed to count during the free fall in case your instructor for some reason doesn't pull the parachute. So you know when to pull it. I didn't watch the safety video. So thank God he pulled it on time.

But like, you can have all the understanding in the world and like, especially after talking to my sister about her experience where she counted the whole way down, one, two, three, four, she counted the whole way down and she did not enjoy her experience. In case you're curious, she doesn't plan on going skydiving with me again.

I had a great time but I just thought about the peace I had in trusting the guy that knew what he was doing. It was nerve-wracking. It didn't make jumping out of a plane less scary. But I knew he knew what he was doing even though I didn't. And that gave me a lot of peace.

That if I could just lean back and trust the person that knows, it's okay that I don't know. And just this realization that that's exactly what it means to trust God. It's not saying trust the situation. If the situation is sketchy, it's probably sketchy. Trusting God doesn't necessarily make the situation less sketchy. But God is who God says he is. And if Jesus is who he says he is, then you can trust him. You can lean back and you can choose not to lean on your own understanding but to trust the God that knows what's happening next.

We all face storms

We all get faced with unknowns. We all get hit. We all know what it is like to just be minding your business, living life, and then just get knocked out of nowhere. But we can trust Jesus. He knows what he's doing. It is who he is, and we can lean back and breathe deep and go with it and see where he leads us.

And we might turn around and say, I loved that. Or we can keep trying to do it on our own and fighting through it on our own and leaning on our own understanding and tiring out and getting to the end of this and going, man, I don't know if any of this was worth it. You still ended up in the same place. But you took all this energy not leaning on your own understanding and not trusting God as who he is.

Closing prayer

I'm going to close today really simple, and I'm going to pray with us. I'm going to ask you to go ahead and get up on your feet. Everybody could close their eyes and bow their heads.

I have just one really simple point that I want to make in prayer today. And I want to encourage you today that if this is you, as we go into prayer, just put your hands out in front of you in a posture to receive and in a posture of surrender. If you struggle with trusting Jesus, there's a reality that life is not as simple as we often want it to be.

And sometimes things happen that just aren't fair. Sickness comes. Situations and relationships come. We're rolling, doing life, and then all of a sudden we realize we have a big decision to make. And big decisions are scary. New beginnings. We mourn and we grieve. Life happens. Our finances. And nine out of ten times we're left wondering: can I trust Jesus with this? Whatever it is, can I trust Jesus with this?

And today I just want to say if you're struggling to trust Jesus. One, that's okay. It happens to all of us. Two, that's okay. That's why we get to say, Jesus, help me in my unbelief. Give me more faith. Help me to trust you. And he's faithful to do that. We serve a faithful God even when we are faithless.

So today if you're struggling to trust Jesus in any way, I want to pray for you.

Lord, we thank you because you really are a trustworthy God. Because the storms that hit our lives, those hurricane force winds, you're bigger than all of it. And you see the beginning to the end and you hold our future in your hands.

Jesus, we thank you because your word says that nothing and no one can take those that are in your hands out of your hands. We are in the safest place we can be. We are hidden in you and we are safe there.

So Lord, I pray that those areas of our hearts, those areas in our thoughts that struggle to trust you, those lies that come and tell us that this situation is too big, this issue is too messed up, I'm too far, those lies that tell us that you're not enough. Lord, I pray that you come and you speak truth into those areas. That you come and be near to us.

Because Lord, where we need more peace, we need more you. So come and be closer to us. Where we need provision, we need more of you. So come and be closer to us. Whatever it is that we need, you are every single promise fulfilled. So come and be near to us because we need you.

I pray that you grow our faith, that you surround us by people that can pour and pour and pour more faith into us, that we can lean on each other as community, the way the church was meant to. And Lord, I pray that as we face the circumstances of life, even when it's scary, even when our legs are shaking with every step, that we might stand firmly on the foundation that is you. That we might know if the roof flies off the house, I'm still going to be standing.

Jesus, it's in your holy name that we pray.

Amen.