Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com
I was 28 years old and working for Clear Channel Communications in
I signed up anyway. I vividly remember the very first night of the class because I had to be late. I had agreed to fill in on the afternoon show on KVET, the country radio station in
I was terrified. There I was 28 years old and I had never read the Bible. I didn’t know Leviticus from Philippians. I didn’t know there was a New Testament because I didn’t know there was an Old Testament. Heck, I didn’t know what a testament was. I had heard about the Good Samaritan bit had no idea it was biblical. My total sum of my biblical knowledge came from claymation show Davey and Goliath although I had now idea that David and Goliath were actually biblical characters. I was pretty sure the Bible was just a bunch of thees and thous and shalts all strung together.
People who are thinking of signing up for Disciple Bible Study with me are always saying something like, “I don’t know enough about the Bible.” Trust me, the only way to know less about the Bible than I did involves being from another planet.
I was terrified. I didn’t overcome my fear to take Disciple, I just went anyway and it was one of the most important things I ever did. More of that in a moment. Let’s look at today’s text.
For people have spent much of their lives in the church, this story is so familiar that it is hard to hear anymore. Many of you finished it in your head before I was done reading it. But let’s slow down and read a little more carefully.
24“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
When I first moved to
So here in
Well maybe. Here is where it might not be as clear as we think it is. What is the firm foundation? Christ? God? The Church? Prayer? All of the above? Those are good answers, in theory.
There is a difference between what we think we know and what we actually know. I know that to properly build a house I need to lay a firm foundation. I have watched enough houses being built to know that there is some digging and leveling, there is some framing with wood and there is a whole lot of cement. But do actually know exactly what goes into laying a foundation? No.
We may know that to build a firm foundation in our lives we need God, we need Christ, we need prayer, but do we really know what goes into that foundation. Perhaps scripture is a little more specific.
24“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
We are trained to read as quickly as possible and look for the main idea. With scripture, we have to slow down. One of my seminary professors insisted we always read scriptures in Greek or Hebrew. He didn’t insist for especially scholarly purposes. He made us do it because he knew most of us had to read very, very slow. When we read this quickly our brain picks up the main idea.
Listen closely:
24“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
If we do this, it will be like we build our house on what? The rock.
We will be like what kind of man? The wise man.
How do we do that? That is the part many of us miss:
We may get the idea that we need to build on a strong foundation, but we are fuzzy on the details. According to a poll conducted by
And I would think that those numbers are a little skewed. If someone asks you, “are you a Christian” and you say yes and then they ask you if you read the Bible, you are inclined to say yes.
I don’t need the polls to tell me that people don’t read much scripture. I am not talking about anyone in particular and I do know a lot of people in the church who know the Bible better than I do. However, as a church, we do not know or read or study scripture as we ought. I have heard this same sort of message delivered by a pastor with a wagging finger, saying “shame on you for not reading scripture.” That is not what I am doing. There is no shame or guilt here. God still loves you even if you don’t know that Zephaniah is actually a book of the Bible or that 3rd Gillipians is something I made up.
It is not an issue of shame or sin, it is an issue of building the foundation for your life.
I don’t read instructions. When I get something with ‘some assembly required,’ I put the instructions aside, try putting them together and only refer to them when the thing I am assembling starts to look nothing like the picture on the box.
Well I didn’t read instruction until last week. Last week, Alisha and I went out and bought a crib for a baby who is going to be living with us. I got it home, ripped open the box, started trying to figure it out. Then I stopped and thought, Oh my gosh, a helpless infant is going to be sleeping in this thing. Then I read the directions word for word to make sure I put that thing together right so it would be safe and solid for the little one who would be sleeping there.
It is important that the crib be solid, just as it is important that out lives be built on the firm foundation of Christ through scripture.
We don’t read the Bible like we should and that hurts as a church. We cannot build a solid foundation in our lives or in the world unless we act upon the word of God and we cannot act upon the word of God unless we know it. And I don’t mean knowing it in the way that we know it when we let people feed us little snippets to support hurtful or hateful ideas that are contrary to the overall meaning of the Bible. I mean knowing it for ourselves. The Bible is an incredibly complex, rich text, a text that does not always yield easy answers, a text that challenges us to struggle with the deep and complicated call of God on our lives.
We need to study the Bible and we can’t really do that alone. It is a catch-22: a lot of us feel like we don’t know enough about the Bible to join a group Bible study, yet we have trouble learning much about the Bible on our own.
I encourage people to read and study the Bible on their own, but there is no substitute for gathering together with a group of people and listening for the call and claim of scripture through each other’s voices.
I started out talking about my experience of Disciple Bible Study. That class I went into with trembling knees was made up of old and young, married and single, parents and grandparents, a happily married couple and a single mom, lifelong church members and people new to the faith, people who knew the Bible and people who had never read it. And each and every one of those people came out transformed. Transformed by the word of God, transformed by the power of the Spirit, transformed by the experience of growing and learning together, transformed by the power of God that flows through us when take the opportunity to seek together.
It wasn’t too long between the time I took Disciple and started leading it. What is amazing is that it is always different. The group dynamics are never the same. What is amazing is that it is always the same. People are always transformed. What amazes me is that I am always transformed. Every time it is the same scripture, the same exercises, the same study guide. And every time, the words come alive for me in a different way through the lives and experiences of the new group I study with.
I could go on forever, but I want you to hear from someone else, someone from this year’s class of Disciple Bible Study.
Thank you to Roberto Rios and Gordon Merritt who shared their experience of Disciple Bible Study with us in worship. They both spoke from the heart without a text so you only get my part. However, feel free to ask them or any graduate of Disciple Bible study to tell you more about the experience.
I challenge you to read and study the Bible in a group. If you have never taken Disciple, sign up for Disciple I. If you have taken one, but stopped there, consider joining the group who will be exploring Disciple II together. If you aren’t ready for that, join a Sunday school class, join a small group. If there is nothing that fits your lifestyle or schedule, find some friends and start your own. You find a time to meet and I will help you with what to do.
Build your house on the rock, the rock that is the word of God. Amen
[1] Alec Gallup and Wendy W. Simmons, “Six and Ten Americans Read the Bible at Least Occasionally”, Gallup Poll News Service, Washington, D.C., http://poll.gallup.com/; accessed 7 August 2006; internet
