Dr. Roger Parrott, Belhaven University Chapel Series

It was 15 years ago, homecoming weekend. We'd been having some trouble with one of our buildings, older buildings, having a crack in the wall. Fitzhugh hall, you know it, Science building.

And so we hired a structural engineer to come and to study the problem and to see what we could do, kind of patch it up, do whatever. And I got a phone call. It was late on Friday afternoon. And the structural engineer said, I need to see you today.

I said, well, you know, it's homecoming weekend. I'm kind of busy. It's four o'. Clock. I really can't do this today. How about we do it next week? He said, no, I need to see you today.

I said, well, like right now? He said, yeah, right now. Wherever you are, I will come to you.

He came to my office and he said, you need to move everybody out of Fitzhugh hall immediately. I said, what do you mean? We got a few cracks in the building. It's 125 years old. Of course it's going to have cracks in the building.

He said, no, that building is going to fall down. I said, fall down? I see the cracks. Yeah, they're bad, you know, but we've had bad cracks before. He said, no, the building's going to fall down.

I said, well, we can't move everybody out right now. We're in the middle of a semester. How about we wait until the end of the academic year? We'll make some plans.

Because we had all our coaches in there, we had administrative offices, we had classrooms in there, all kinds of stuff going on. He said, no, you can't wait. I said, well, how about if we wait till the end of this semester in December and we'll do it then?

He said, no, you can't wait. I said, well, when do you want them out? He said, Monday, no later. He said, the building's going to collapse and kill somebody.

And I sat at the football game the next day and I had my administrative team with me, and we made plans to move 65 people out of that building and put them other places on campus on Monday of that next week. You see, what had happened is that building was 125 years old. And when they built that building, they built it on a foundation of sand.

It did not go down to bedrock, but there was sand that was hardly hard packed. And because the sand was hard packed, the building held up for 125 years.

But we had a water leak up on the third floor of the building that nobody saw that was running down through the walls and it was going into the foundation, and over time, it was starting to erode that sand, and eventually that sand eroded so much, it was bringing the whole building down, which eventually we did. Took the whole thing down, replaced it, built it like it's 125 years old.

But we replaced it with a new facility built on rock that'll stay for the next two, 200 years or more. You see, a building can look strong. A building can look beautiful. A building can be functional. A building can have even expensive materials in there.

But if the foundation is wrong, the entire structure will not stand up to the test of a storm that comes, even if that storm is only a little water leak that just drips and drips and drips. Jesus at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, what we consider the greatest sermon ever preached ended with a parable.

And the parable is a story, you know, well about two builders, two houses, one storm, one success, one enormous failure. Jesus tells this parable right at the end of the amazing Sermon on the Mount that summarizes the whole Gospel message and the whole kingdom message.

And out of that, we see several things. The first is, both builders had the same vision. They wanted a house. They had dreams. They had hopes. They had desires.

They had an outlook for their life. They. They wanted the same thing. They wanted a life worth living. They wanted a home of significance. They wanted somewhere that was going to be theirs.

They both wanted some vibrancy in their life. They both wanted to live strong. They both wanted to stand up to the test of time. You see, both men had the exact same vision.

There wasn't any difference between the wise builder and the foolish builder in what they wanted. Second thing that we see in the Scripture is that both builders listen to divine truth. Both builders listen to divine truth.

See, Jesus tells us at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, which is the blueprint for how to live our lives. You know, some people say this is. I understand why they say it, but some people say, well, I just can't figure out the Bible. It's too big.

It's too complex. I just can't figure it out, so I can't do anything with it. The Bible. Listen to me. The. The Bible is not difficult to understand.

If you want to understand the Bible, don't worry about the whole thing right now. Go to Matthew chapter five, six and seven, the Sermon on the Mount. And that's where Jesus summarizes all of his key teaching in three chapters.

You can read it in 15 minutes. If you read it for 15 minutes the rest of your life, every single day, it'll change how you live.

Jesus, you see in those days preached the same message many times when Jesus was teaching. People didn't sit around with a notebook or a power book and say, I'm going to take notes and write this stuff down.

Most of them couldn't read, most of them couldn't write. Paper was nearly non existent and if you did, you used a quill pen and maybe you could get out five words in a minute or two.

So that wasn't an option. So they memorized. They memorized.

And because they did not have the ability to take notes like we do and to read and to go back and look at it again, they had a gift of memory that we've kind of lost in our modern day. And so these messages of the Sermon on the Mount were preached that day, but they were probably preached many, many, many times.

And Matthew, who records this, memorized that and years later had it written down.

Well, in the Sermon on the Mount, at which at the end he tells about the wise and foolish builders, he covers 23 very specific topics, very specific topics, three chapters and here they are.

He talks about grace, he talks about worldview, forgiveness, hypocrisy, mission for your life, planning, money, possessions, contentment, judgmentalism, discipleship, prayer, holiness, anger, integrity, revenge, love, marriage, generosity, religion, self righteousness, visible fruits, and doing unto others. He summarizes everything that's important in the Christian life. In living in the kingdom of God, remember all the other parables.

He begins with that phrase, the kingdom of heaven is like, or the kingdom of God is like. Well, in this one he doesn't have to say that because he just laid out the whole thing in all these topics. And so that is the kingdom of God.

So if you want to understand the Bible, don't worry about the whole thing for now. Go to Matthew 5, 6, 7. Learn it, study it. That is the blueprint for how we are to live. And Jesus said at the end of that, you have a decision to make.

He said, I love you so much that even though sin corrupted the world, I will give my life to be the sacrifice for you. And I will give you, here in these three chapters, the design of how you are built to function effectively.

It's essentially, you know, the instruction booklet for how it's Designed to be lived. Life is to be lived like we would for a computer or some other mechanism. So he says, I love you that much that I'm going to do that for you.

And he lays it all out. But he also says, I love you so much that I will give you the freedom that if you don't want to do that, I'm not going to force you.

You can do it your own way. And then he says, I just want you to know if you do it your own way, there are going to be consequences, and it's really, really going to hurt.

He says, in telling this story, the wise and foolish builder, he says, anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a builder who builds on the rock. So that's what we find here. We find that there is a option. We have to listen and do it or listen and ignore it. You see, because both builders.

Excuse me, let me go back to that list again, because that's important. Both builders had heard the truth. And you've heard the truth. You've heard it in chapel.

Now, maybe you come to chapel and you flip your phone, you try to ignore it. That's your choice. You've heard it in class. You've heard it from coaches.

This year in chapel, you've heard 19 messages on the parables of Jesus, the core design of how God designed it. And then you have a choice. Jesus said, you can follow that and be wise and build on rock, or you can choose to do it your own way and build on sand.

But you will fail. He outlines what the kingdom of God looks like when we live there in the Sermon on the Mount.

Well, the third thing we see about both builders is they both face the same storm. Same storm. They lived in the same neighborhood because he said, the same storm came to both of them.

So they weren't living in two different countries. They were both hit by the same storm. I want to tell you something about storms.

If you don't hear anything else I say today or all year, I want you to hear this storm in your life is not a matter of if you will have a storm. It's only a matter of when you will have a storm, because you will have a storm. Storms come to all of us.

All of us get hit, and all of us get hit hard. And it's just a matter of when, not if. We knew we were gonna have a cyber attack on the campus.

We didn't know it was gonna be last week, which it hadn't been. Kind of messed up my week A whole bunch of other people's. But we knew it eventually would come. So three years ago, we began planning for that.

We began putting protections into the system that weren't there before. We began restructuring things and separating out servers so they couldn't talk to each other in certain ways.

We raised our insurance from a million dollars to $5 million.

We were prepared building a foundation for the storm of a cyber attack that we knew would come because it comes to every organization and every college in America gets hit. University Medical center got hit three weeks ago, really hard. Everybody gets hit. So we prepared the foundation and you're going to get hit.

You are going to get hit. Sometimes it hurts because I know it's going to happen to you. And I see your faces. I love the happy, I love the optimistic. I love the smiles.

I love the hope I see in your eyes. I love the dreams you have. But I also know eventually some of you are going to face a bankruptcy.

Some of you are going to face a spouse who walks out on you. Some of you are going to face fraud. Some of you are going to have children who rebel, break your heart.

Some of you are going to have illness in your family that totally consumes you. Some of you are going to die before I do. You see, storms will come. It's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when.

And both builders face the same storm. So we had these two builders, same vision for their lives. They heard the same truth and they faced the same storm.

And that's where the story deviates, you see, because each built a different character into their life. This is where the differences get radical. A very different character.

A character that's so different that Jesus called one of them wise and one of them a fool. Now, in those days, 2,000 years ago, using the word fool was really strong. Really strong.

You see, in Scripture, wisdom is the ability to take divine truth and apply it. And a fool in Scripture is not a person who lacks information. They're not stupid. It's a person who does little or with the information they have.

And Jesus said, I just preached on the Sermon on the gave you the sermon on the Mount and gave you the whole blueprint for your life. And if you don't follow it, you are an absolute fool because you are going to crash your life. It's just a matter of time.

The fool is selfish, full of self, short sighted. The fool is self taught. They think they know better than the one who designed them. The wise are obedient to the one who created Them.

You know, there are a lot of people who are kind of wishy washy on their faith and they don't want to commit because they get all hung up on this word obedient. You know what obedient means?

It means to be smart, to follow the that teaching that Jesus gives and how we were designed to make life productive and happy and meaningful and abundant. And it's a response to love. My kids aren't obedient to me because they always agree with me and see the bigger picture.

I see they're obedient because they love me and they know I want the very best for them. Obedience is not about. God's going to give you a list of all the stuff you can't do, and now life's not going to be any fun.

You're missing the point altogether.

Obedience is finding out how you were designed to function at the very best level and to make that work and to do that because God sent his son as a sacrifice for sin to restore us to God so we can have fellowship and live that life in the kingdom right now. So each of these builders started by building a very different character. One was wise and one was a fool.

And then we see that each built a different foundation. The last really big building we built here was a University Village. We've built some others since then, but that one was really big.

And through the years, university president, I probably built about 25 buildings. And the most important part of every building is the foundation. Now, you may not know this, but Jackson, Mississippi sits on top of a volcano.

The volcano, the crust of the volcano is where the Mississippi Coliseum is. If you went to Anime Fest this weekend, you're sitting right on top of the volcano. That's where it was. And all this area is part of that area.

And so we have what's known here as Yazoo clay that goes down very deep and it moves. And that's why it various things like the front door of my house, half of the year it lines up perfectly.

And the other half of the year I can't get it open because the clay moves and it moves back, back and forth. Well, that may work for my little house, front porch, but it sure doesn't work for a big building like University Village.

So when we built University Village, we had pilings that went down so deep and they were so expensive because unless we could get them on rock, there is no way that building would stand up. And we spent not only a lot of money but a lot of time digging down, down, down. Foundations are Slow work. Foundation building is not glamorous.

Nobody takes pictures of foundations, how great they are. But a foundation in a building or in your life and mine determines everything.

You see, sand is anything we build our identity on other than security and obedience to Christ. That's what the sand is. So we say, you know, if I succeed enough, I feel secure. So we build a life built on the sand of achievement.

Or if people admire me enough, I must be doing well. We build on the sand of reputation.

Or if I'm ahead of others, I'm going better than they are, and I'm more successful than they are, I must be on track, right? So we build a life on the sand of command comparison, or something feels right, it must be right. And we build our life on the sand of feelings.

Or if the culture celebrates the kinds of things I do, it must be good. And we build a life on the sand of cultural approval. The sand foundations, whatever they are, have one thing in common.

They only hold up until the pressure comes. The foundations of your life are poured right now. Your habits, your convictions, your integrity, your worldview, your spiritual disciplines.

You see, because it comes down to this, the direction of your life will not be determined by the storms you face. It will be determined by the foundation you build before the storm arrives. You see, our foundations have to be built before the storms come.

As I said, I built a lot of buildings, and so I've learned a lot about foundations. And here's what I know about Cannot pour the concrete if it's raining. You can't pour the concrete if the cold front comes through for the storm.

The foundation has to be poured when the weather's good, before it rains. Now you can pour it after it rains. And there are a lot of people in life who do that. They mess up so bad and they crash so hard.

Then they finally go back and try to rebuild it. But why wait? But you can't do it while it's raining. It's too late.

And if you wait till the storm of life comes to try to build that foundation in your life, it's too late. Well, each experience different results. One stood in the storm and one fell. And Jesus didn't say the house just fell down. It said it greatly fell.

A mighty crash. It was a total collapse, you see, because only in a storm is your foundation revealed. You don't see the foundation when it's all going well.

You only see the foundation when the storm comes. Now, the foolish house stood for a while. It may have looked strong, it may have looked successful.

But when the storm came, it exposed the foundation and it collapsed totally.

Jesus is warning us, he's trying to warn us that a life built on popularity or achievement or money or reputation or feelings or peer approval may appear stable, may appear attractive. But when the storm comes, it reveals what the founded point, what the house is built on. And it will collapse as long as the sun's shining.

Looks pretty good. But Jesus said the rains will come and the floods will rise and the winds will beat against the house.

He said these are major storms, hurricane type storms. And when those storms came, each had a very, very different result. Well, the difference really comes down to a decision.

It wasn't about intelligence, it wasn't about opportunity, it wasn't about background. It's a decision to live in obedience to Christ. They both heard the same teaching. One acted on it and the other said, I think my way is better.

You see, Christian maturity is not measured by what we know. It's measured by what we do with what we know. And that's what Jesus is telling us.

You've been at a Christian college and you've heard all this stuff, and if you haven't done anything with it, I'm sorry, it's not my words, but Jesus says you're a fool because your house is going to crash. And what we do with what we know determines where we anchor our trust with when the storm comes.

This cyber attack has really pretty much consumed my life for the last 11 days now. I think we're on. I've had an awful lot of nice notes. Some of you have written really nice notes.

And I appreciate other students, faculty and others have written really nice notes. And people have kind of said the same thing.

They said, thanks for keeping us calm in the storm or keeping us calm during all this or sure, lots going on. But you don't seem worried, and I'll tell you I'm not. This thing could cost us millions of dollars. We could lose millions of dollars over this.

You know, it costs a million dollars a week to run this university. It could cost several million dollars. We could lose students. For the last 11 days.

We don't know who's tried to apply, who said, couldn't get in and said, well, I'm going someplace else. We could lose reputation, we could lose people's confidence that we know how to run a place.

I'm not worried because my foundation is built on the rock of Jesus. This is not my university. This is not the Board of Trustees university. This is not even your university.

As much as I hope you'll always love belongs to God.

And the God I serve is a lot stronger than a couple of evil guys stuck away in a basement someplace in the world who think about nothing every day other than how to be evil to people they can't see. And my God will take care of them. I'm not worried one bit. I'm not fun. That's a lot of work, but I'm not worried.

Our foundation is strong, you see, A secure life is built long before the storm arrives. I could not feel that way if I waited till the storm came and then tried to sort all that out.

I've lived that way for years and years and years because the foundation's strong. Jesus sends a sermon on the Mount with this decision. It's not a theory, it's not an idea. It's a decision.

When he finished the sermon on the Mount, he didn't ask the crowd, well, what do you think of what I taught you? No, he asked him, what are you going to do with it? You see, everybody builds a life. You're building one right now.

The question is not whether you're building the. The question is, what are you building on? Because someday, a storm will test the life of every single person in this room.

Pressure will come, loss will come, injustice will come. Hurt will come that will crush you. And when that moment arrives, the strength of your life will not come from what you intended to do.

Yeah, I'm going to get right with God when I just finish. No, it won't come from what you intended to do. It will come from what you actually built. So hear the words of Jesus and do something.

Build your life on them. Build it before the storm arrives. The storm doesn't determine whether or not the house stands. The foundation does.

It wasn't the house that weathered the storm. It was the foundation. The foundation of your life is a choice. Jesus said, if a storm hit you today, would you hold steady?

If you're building your foundation on the rock of Christ Jesus, then our benediction verse is a prayer of confidence. Let's say it together one last time to end this academic year of chapel. No eye is seen, no ear is heard.

No mind is conceived, but God has prepared for those who love Him. Thank you for listening so well all the way through the year. I really have enjoyed this time. I've learned a lot about the parables.

It's been a great time, and I hope they've spoken to you. God bless.