Sorry, I’ll make sure we all know a song before we start it again.
The wise man built his house upon a rock—the Rock.
This morning, we want to begin considering foundations. We say it is a foundational series. It is not a basic lesson series; it is a foundational series. What do we build our lives upon? We need to be clear about what we are building our lives upon.
We are building our lives. We are building our lives.
So we just felt like maybe it was time to stop for a moment and consider the Rock, the foundation, that we are building our lives on.
We may have known these things. We may have been building for years. We may not have known these things. But whatever the case, we want to go back over the foundations.
Could we read Hebrews 2:3?
Remember, Hebrews was a book about foundations, about exhortation, to be clear on our foundations. So, in Hebrews 2:3:
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?
Don’t neglect so great a salvation. That is what we want to think about during this series: don’t neglect so great a salvation.
Our salvation is great. It is beyond great. It is immense. It runs from eternity past to eternity future. It is infinite and beyond our natural comprehension. We cannot comprehend it with our minds; it needs to be comprehended in the spiritual realm.
Our salvation is first and foremost spiritual. Bill Bright, in The Four Spiritual Laws—raise your hands if that means anything. Mostly the older ones. Bill Bright started Campus Crusade in 1954. I had no idea. Time flies when you’re having fun.
Anyway, in The Four Spiritual Laws, he opens by saying that just as there are physical laws that govern the physical universe, so there are spiritual laws that govern your relationship with God. Not laws, perhaps, but let’s call them spiritual principles that are active, and we do well to consider these spiritual principles.
I think one of the cautions is that we get an idea that we lay hold of these truths with our minds. If we can sort out the teaching and get it, then we have got it. Absolutely, we need good doctrine and good foundational teaching, but I also believe the Lord is calling us to spiritual experience.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He would have us enter into life.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians was, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened”—spiritual comprehension. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That is what we are called to live out: to experience spiritual life, not merely mental life.
That is a burden for this series. Today is kind of a big-picture message—an overview—not attempting to give an outline or a syllabus, but simply sharing my burden for the big picture in spiritual things.
The first word of that verse was “neglect”: do not neglect. The spiritual antidote to neglect, in one great measure, is remembering. Our Bibles are full of remembering the Lord and remembering what He has done.
Vine says that to remember is to remind oneself of, to be mindful of, and to call to mind.
Remind oneself, be mindful of, and call to mind. All those activities seem to me to require active participation. We need to participate and be engaged, not drift and simply go along. Remembering is good for all of us.
One reason we do not remember may be that we have never heard these things, or have heard them only in a passing way. In Acts 19:1-2, Paul asked the Ephesians whether they had received the Holy Spirit when they believed, and they replied, “No, we did not even hear whether there is a Holy Spirit.”
So, as we remember today, we want to remember God’s truth and call to mind our so great salvation.
Another reason we need to be reminded is because we have allowed things to get in the way. We may have received a real revelation of a great salvation, but stopped our pursuit.
Why do things get in our way? Is it because there are too many things? Is it because the world is too difficult? Well, I believe other things get in the way because we let them. We let things get in our way.
I believe the Lord deals with us and gives us trials to get us out of our circumstances and to consider Him. We are too often self-centered in our gospel.
I have a little illustration. This is still part of the introduction. It has to do with a fishing trip I went on probably fifty years or more ago.
I know you cannot believe I could have gone on a fishing trip fifty years ago. But anyway, it was in high school. Our high-school shop teacher owned a fishing camp at the end of the road in Canada. He paid coaches and different people in the high school to recruit groups and bring them to his camp. Our football coach had a bounty for taking us up there.
Maury, I hate to say it, but that was the first and last time I ever went on a fishing trip. I know how much you love to fish, but I hate fishing. You can go over to the grocery store and buy all the fish you want, take it home, and cook it. Go to Costco and get salmon.
Anyway, Red Lake is a big lake. We had to drive through International Falls and the town of Red Lake. We went to the end of the road, and then we had to take a seaplane to fly in.
We were up there. It was pretty wild. We went to a place called Big Bear Lodge. Big Bear Lodge still exists, you know. No running water, no indoor plumbing, but it is up there.
The story I want to tell is that one afternoon we went out fishing in our motorboats. We were determined, as young men, to find the secret fishing hole on Red Lake. Finally, we saw this little cove, and we went motorboating into it.
A storm blew up, so we sheltered in that little cove. We stayed there because we did not want to get swamped out on the big lake.
The storm blew over, and we tried to head out, but we could not find our way out.
What we learned later was that a floating bog had been driven across the opening by the wind. A floating bog is rushes and cattails that grow on organic matter that floats. It is just a mat of moss and everything, and it looked exactly like the land. Anyway, we could not get out.
So here is the application. I wish Kenny were here. I would say, “Do you get it?” Hopefully, he will watch anyway.
We had been transported a great distance and at great cost from the Chicago suburbs. In the Chicago suburbs, you fish in muddy waters and catch carp and catfish. That is it.
We had been transported up to the far, clear north to fish for walleyes, musky, and northern pike. Maury, I am glad you are there, because we went out the first afternoon and literally, on the first, second, or third cast, my football teammate pulled in a thirty-nine-inch, thirteen-pound northern.
It did not even fight. It did not know what was going on. It almost jumped in the boat. Anyway, that is the kind of afternoon it was.
But on that afternoon, instead of being out on a forty-five-thousand-acre lake of fishing nirvana, we were stuck in a little cove because the floating bog drifted in front of us.
The application, obviously, is that we are recipients of so great a salvation, but sometimes we limit it. We just stay in the little inlet.
It is possible to fish there. I guess you could have been happy there. But our calling is out to Red Lake. It is out to the forty-five-thousand-acre lake.
I was thinking: what if we came into this room and said, “This is it. Here we are. Praise God, I’m saved”? Instead of seeing the larger reality, we settle into a little room. Yet we have such a great salvation.
The gospel today is self-centered, and we can be very self-satisfied in our salvation. But God is not satisfied unless we go on to maturity. He has saved us for His purpose, for Himself, and He is after full-grown sons to serve Him.
The goal of our salvation is full-grown sons to serve Him.
I have six points for the note-takers. Number one: as we consider our so great salvation, we have been anchored to eternity. Our salvation engages us from eternity past to eternity future.
His salvation is infinite, and it transcends time and space.
John 1:1-5:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.
In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” Eternity past.
John 17:5—we read this Friday night:
And now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
Eternity past to eternity future. Let us look at eternity future. This is a pretty long passage, but I just love this passage. It is in Revelation 22:1-5.
Then he showed me a river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb,
in the middle of its street.
On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
There shall no longer be anything accursed; and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him.
They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads.
There shall no longer be any night; and they shall not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they shall reign forever and ever through the eternities of the eternities.
That is from the Amplified because it uses the phrase, “the eternities of eternities.”
Why is eternity important to our so great salvation? It gives us perspective. It fixes our heavenly perspective—our perspective on heaven.
Our natural perspective is birth, life, and death. That is pretty depressing if that is our hope. If we have hoped in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied, as Paul told us.
Eternity is very important to our perspective.
Number two: man was created. Why was man created?
Man was created by God. We are not some cosmic accident, some great big bang. We have not evolved from primordial slime—is that what it is called, Maury? Can you spell that? Primordial slime, does that sound right?
Anyway, we are not some cosmic accident. God created man, and He created you and me for a purpose: to come to sonship and serve Him.
Believing that we are the fruit of some random cosmic accident can get us into real trouble. We do not have a heavenly perspective.
Let us read a little of the creation story. It speaks of our creation by God. Genesis 1:26-28:
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
God created man with a definite purpose and gave man charge over His creation.
Brother Kong, in his last book on Revelation, made a statement. He said:
Man was intended by God to be prince regent or governor general over the whole world. That is to say, God placed the world in the hands of man for him to dwell there and subdue and govern all things back to God’s rightful possession as Creator and for His glory.
We were created to be delegated authorities under God’s authority. It is difficult to comprehend, but it is true.
Number three: what happened? We had the Fall. There has been an interruption in God’s progress toward attaining His plan.
Genesis 2:9:
Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Then Genesis 2:16-17:
The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
We often think this is a nighttime Bible story. It is not. It is fundamental. It is foundational. We were created to live out from the tree of life, and we chose in the garden to live from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
We are meant to serve God and serve His purpose as those under authority. But Satan wanted the authority. He always wants to be first; he wants to have preeminence. So he tempted them in the garden.
It is God’s idea that we live out from God’s authority and not in our natural strength. Satan tempted us to live in our natural strength.
Genesis 3:1-7:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.
And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’”
The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
We could talk about covering. We could talk about God’s order in that, but perhaps we will do that another day. We need to be aware of God’s covering and order.
Man moved from dependence and communion with God to independent life, free from God. Sin entered in.
Not only sin, but the tree life was cut off—much deeper than just sin. The life of God was cut off. Our spirits became dead.
The result was that God cut Adam and Eve off from fellowship. At the end of Genesis 3, it says:
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—
therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.
So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
Saints, we live out from some source of life deep within. We have to have life beyond biological life. What drives us? What moves us? Is it our natural soul life, or is it the life deep within our spirit?
God desires for us to be spiritual people, to live out from that source of life. That is a lifelong process. He is calling us to live out from the spirit.
What happened in the garden was that man began living in his natural strength. He was commanded not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he ate from it. There was great loss—great loss.
We were in a lost estate, separated from God and cut off from His life.
Number four: Jesus Christ is our so great salvation.
What a terrible state we found ourselves in: cut off from God, cut off from fellowship, cut off from His life, living in time and not eternity, hopeless and without God in the world. But God, being rich in mercy—
In Ephesians 2:12, Paul said to the Ephesians:
Remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
I do not think it is profitable to do a great deal of introspection and self-examination, but I do think it is good to know that we are hopeless without God. When we came to the Lord, did we know we were hopeless? We had to put our hope somewhere else.
I think it is good to consider how hopeless we are. That is definitely a part of my personal testimony. I was hopeless—really hopeless. But God, being rich in mercy, redeemed me.
On the cross of Calvary, what did the Lord say? “It is finished.” It is finished, brothers and sisters. Our sins have been atoned for, and our fellowship with God has been restored. The sinner has been dealt with. The sin nature in us has been dealt with.
Our heavenly destiny, instead of hell, has been restored and regained. We have been born again to new life.
So great a salvation: lost, without hope, but God has opened the door. We talked about the door today. The door has been opened.
Romans 5:6:
For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
Christ died for our sins. He became the payment for our sins. His death satisfied the Father, and as we accept that provision by faith, we regain peace with God.
Romans 5:1 says:
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
God has made every provision for our sins. We need to accept it and believe it. Praise God for the indescribable gift: peace with God.
The door is open. In these passages from Hebrews, the way has been made for us to commune with God. At the same time, our life in the spirit has been restored. We have been born again.
In John 11, Jesus said:
I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies,
and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?
We have been born in spirit. Romans 6:23 says:
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life.
Our life in the future, throughout all time, has been restored. We are beneficiaries and recipients of that life even today.
Nicodemus came to Jesus at night. He said, “Lord, I know You are a great teacher.” Jesus stopped him because He knew the real issue in Nicodemus’s life.
Jesus said:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.
You must be born again. Have you been born again?
If you have not been born again, Romans 10:9 says:
If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.
I always feel that we need to talk about being born again, particularly with young people who have been born into this environment and raised in a good Christian environment.
Sometimes parents encourage young people to ask Jesus into their hearts when they are young. Perhaps they do not know exactly what they are doing then, and our lives are the development of that initial thing. But, brothers and sisters, are you born again?
Do you know that you have spirit life within you? Young people, you have been born again. You did not just escape hell; you have been born again.
We need to know that we have been born again, with no doubt in our hearts.
At the Fall, our spirits became nonfunctional, and we had to base our lives on natural capacity—on that which comes from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Lord is after delivering us from that into living life in the spirit.
We were born again. Our comatose spirit came to life. Praise God. It is a great work, and the Lord has called us to walk in newness of life.
Number five: He is determined that we have spiritual growth, that we come into sonship.
It struck me that this could sound like a basic thing. We need good teaching when we are little kids. We need to grow up. I think our growing never stops. If we ever think we have arrived, if our spiritual growth stops, I believe we are in trouble.
Most of you know our youngest son, David, runs a coffee roasting company. It is appropriately called Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting Company. I think that was a good name.
I was visiting with him about a month ago. He quit his day job and is working full-time in the coffee company. We were talking about growth.
He said he has no dreams of being some mega coffee company. He wants to have a good, solid income. But we said, “If you ever stop and do not think about growing, what happens?” You die.
We always have to have the idea of growing, gaining, and going forward. That is true of any organization. Unless you work for Dominion Power, perhaps—they are updating the whole grid. Think if Virginia Power stopped; we would be in big trouble.
Anyway, as believers, we have to always think of growing and gaining Christ.
Remember the charge in the garden: “Be fruitful and multiply.” God is looking for His co-workers on this earth.
We were sidelined. We were out. But He has put us back in the race. He is after full-grown sons to serve Him. Who can serve Him? Full-grown sons—mature believers.
We need to guard against thinking that God’s end is simply our being saved. Is that God’s end? That is God’s beginning. Being born again, being saved and rescued, and being given new life is God’s beginning, not His end.
The author of Hebrews was aware of that. In Hebrews 6:1, he says:
Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God.
This maturity is not a PhD. It is not something where we gain a certain amount of maturity and become big Christians. No, it is being full of Christ. It is being full-grown sons.
The Apostle John, in 1 John, talks about little children, young men, and fathers. The Lord wants us to grow up into Christ so that we can please His heart and serve Him.
As a parent, what could make you happier than knowing your kids grew up and were self-supporting? Self-serving—that was a bad choice. But anyway, that they could stand on their own. The Father is after that.
Ephesians 1:5 says:
He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.
That adoption can rightly be translated as the placing of grown sons—placing sons in God’s work and in God’s place.
In Romans, Paul lays out our great salvation, and in Romans 8 he talks about sonship. Romans 8:18-19 says:
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.
We talk about the church. We talk about reestablishing God’s testimony. If God’s people were going on to sonship, what a great testimony there would be.
Romans 8:29 says:
For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren.
We have been saved with a purpose. We can come to the realization of that purpose as sons. Sonship is not a special class. It is not something special; it is normal. It is normal Christianity. Let us press on to maturity.
Number six, the last main point: serve in spirit.
In the first eleven chapters of Romans, Paul lays out his gospel. Remember, at the start of Romans he said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” So he lays out the doctrine and the principles. Then, in chapter 12, he comes to the application.
Jim is a teacher. He can tell you that is a good way to do things, right? Lay out the principles. But if they are not life, if they are not spirit and life, they become head knowledge.
Paul presents an application. Let us read Romans 12:1-2:
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that ye may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
This is part of our salvation. This is fulfilling our salvation here.
Because we are recipients of so great a salvation, I believe God is looking for a response. That response is to give back the life He has given us, to present to Him our saved selves.
It says, “Present yourselves.” He does not want your self-life; He wants your saved life—life as a son, life as a Christian.
Let us be careful that we do not consider this some kind of heavy-duty requirement: “Oh, I have to be active in the church. I have to do this.” No, it is a normal life. It is expression. It is the full life of Christ.
It is a spiritual response—spiritual service of worship—not a great duty. We need to serve, but we need to do so for the right reason: presenting our bodies as sinners saved from death.
There are a couple of troubles we can get into with this matter of presenting ourselves in service, and we might back off. One reason we do not go forward is that we think presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice should be visible and big.
We say, “Yes, I want to be a preacher. I want to be an evangelist.” Do you remember when Brother Kong told us that when he was first saved, he went up to the map? Was it Manchuria? Mongolia—sorry. He was going to serve God in Mongolia, way out there.
God has called us to serve Him, but I think, first and foremost, He has called us to serve Him absolutely where we are. He will take care of the size and character of that service.
A couple of things keep us from presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice and serving God. One is that we think we do not have any gift. We think we are just common people, and because we do not have a great gift, we cannot serve. We are not a preacher or an evangelist.
Brothers and sisters, this is one of the things that made me sad when Dennis went to be with the Lord. He was a living stone where he was. He did not have to be a great preacher.
He brought the ice. God bless him. He brought the ice faithfully. He brought chips and salsa, right? God bless him. That is what we need to do.
We need to be living stones as we present our bodies a living sacrifice. We are not part of a religious organization. We are part of the body of Christ, and we need to express ourselves as living stones in His house.
1 Peter 2:4-5 says:
Coming to Him as to a living stone which has been rejected by men, but is choice and precious in the sight of God,
you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
If you think about what Dennis did and how he lived his life, another thing that can keep us from being part of this is that we can consider what we do to be too small and insignificant. So who cares?
God cares. Do not bury your talents. He has called us to full expression: to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, serving Him.
Perhaps I will close with this. We have been called. We have been redeemed. We have been rescued from a great fall, redeemed and purchased by the blood, and given His new life for a great purpose: to serve Him.
Not out of duty, not out of some great compulsion, but because we have a new life within us. Because we are Christians at the bottom of our being, we are Christians.
If we are not functioning as living stones, we are not meeting our designed goal. We are not doing what we were supposed to do. We are going to find ourselves half-dead living stones in the house of God.
This might not seem to fit directly, but it really touched me. I was reading a Tozer book—or perhaps it was a Tozer quotation from another book. I think it may have been from a Frangipane book. But Tozer said that faithfulness to the local church is a good thing.
He does not use the same words or usage that we might use, but he did see that the local church is the local expression of the body. Faithfulness in the local church is a good thing.
This is my testimony:
The true Christian will, by a kind of spiritual instinct, find a body of believers somewhere, identify himself with it, and try by every proper means to promote its growth and prosperity.
The body of Christ is not a teaching; it is a spiritual reality. God has called us to be living stones.
Faithfulness to the local church is a good thing.
The true Christian will, by a kind of spiritual instinct, find a body of believers somewhere, identify himself with it, and try by every proper means to promote its growth and prosperity.
We could go on for a long time. We could speak of these things for eternity, and we are going to go on for some weeks as the Lord leads us into these messages. I have just tried to paint a big picture of our so great salvation.
What we have said today is that we were chosen. We were lost without hope, but God saved us from our hopeless situation to serve Him, to grow into full-grown sons, and to serve His purpose in simplicity.
These messages in the days ahead have been called basic lessons. Today, I want to call them foundations.
The importance is stated in Luke 6:46-49. That is where we started today in the song we sang:
Why do you call Me, “Lord, Lord,” and do not do what I say?
Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them, I will show you whom he is like:
he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.
But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great.
The wise man built his house upon the Rock and brought forth fruit for God’s purpose from that foundation.
Lord, I want to tell You this morning that I want to repent and say that I have not rightly valued so great a salvation.
But might this be a day—might these be days—of turning from that into so great a salvation: a full salvation, mature sons, mature Christians, building up Your body, preparing a bride for Your return.
Lord, have mercy on us and give us leading in the days ahead in these messages. In Jesus’ name.