Is Your Foundation Built for This?

Luke 6:46-49

Understanding the truth about Jesus the Christ is the foundation of the Christian faith.

Foundations matter in relationships (being equally yoked), for highways, houses, and buildings. Establishing a good foundation isn't optional; it's critical. The foundation is one of the most critical components of any building. It secures everything built above it and must meet specific code requirements. 

With football season upon us, that same principle is on full display every day at practice. Players don't get handed a playbook before they've earned it; they must master the fundamentals first. They spend hours on footwork, body mechanics, and technique long before anyone discusses strategy, because that groundwork is what everything else is built on. No team advances a player who hasn't put in that time. The fundamentals aren't the boring part before the real work starts. They are the real work, the foundation on which the rest of the game rests.

Many homes here in Central Texas sit on soil that requires special treatment because of the area's sandstone and shifting clay. Most rest on a concrete slab: the ground is excavated, rebar is embedded in the concrete, and that rebar helps the slab withstand the pressure from shifting soil during dry spells. Psalm 1 says something similar in a different key. The one who delights in God's law is like a tree planted by streams of water, bringing forth fruit in its season. There's something to being planted deep.

Here's a truth: the taller the structure, the deeper and more rigorously tested its foundation must be. Height without depth is instability. Foundation specifications vary by structure. A house doesn't need what a skyscraper needs, and a skyscraper doesn't need what an oil rig or a seismic zone requires. The foundation is sized to the threat. That's the theological point, too. The fidelity Scripture requires isn't a one-size-fits-all rigidity; it's a foundation deep enough, anchored enough, and flexible enough to withstand whatever will actually test it. Shallow faith doesn't fail because it's wrong in calm conditions; it fails because it was never built for the conditions it will eventually face.

And when a foundation isn't firm, the trouble doesn't show up right away. It shows up later. Isabel Wilkerson captured this in Caste, describing how this country's foundation was laid with racism embedded in it, a fault line that still surfaces today, a legacy inherited by generations who didn't build it but now live with its cracks. Foundations must be built correctly, including our foundation of faith in Jesus the Christ.

The 96-year history of Progressive Missionary Baptist Church is remarkable, and it's worth understanding how it developed.

The Milam County Historical Museum has two main sites, the Main Museum Building and the 1895 Milam County Jail. Ms. Keri Harris, Resource Manager for the Museum, provided a document showing that the church's organizer was never called to serve as its pastor. A 1977 document by Barbara Phillips, Junior Historian at Yoe High School, recounts the story: while living in Oklahoma and newly married to Miss Christine L. Johnson, Rev. E. M. Roberts had a dream in which the Lord appeared to him and spoke of work in Cameron, Texas. God told him to organize a church there, one that would honor and magnify His name, but that he himself would never serve as its pastor. The document also traces the hardships of the young congregation, including being denied use of the O. J. Thomas High School auditorium. She also provided information about O.J. Thomas School and its historic development as a Rosenwald School. They found space anyway. The rest is history.

That history didn't make it into the Cameron Herald or the other local church pages. Segregation saw to that. During the same period, the Herald covered the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco and Will Stanley in Temple, along with other lynching activity in the region. Between 1882 and 1968, roughly 493 people were lynched in Texas, according to NAACP/Tuskegee-era records commonly cited in lynching statistics. That's the contrast: the violence made the paper. The church did not, and this serves as an urgent reminder that we must preserve our own history and reclaim our place in it, especially now, as that history is being removed from public access and from our schools.

That absence is exactly why Clyde McQueen's Black Churches in Texas matters. It's the record the Herald never kept. It documents congregations that have stood for more than a century, including several right here in Central Texas: Cameron Grove Baptist Church, organized in 1882; Old Providence Baptist Church, 1869, on F.M. 485 in Branchville; Stephen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1889, on Highway 190 in Gause; Zion Hill Baptist Church, 1890, in Gause; and Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1875, on West Cameron Street in Rockdale. Books like this one make the case plainly: we have to tell our own stories because those who are erasing our history today have no interest in preserving it. We need to be ready to pass it on and teach it ourselves.

Progressive Missionary Baptist Church's founding followed the same pattern. At the Lincoln District Congress meeting in Temple, hosted by Corinth Baptist Church under Rev. P. H. Hinton, Bro. Thompson asked the Moderator, Dr. H. I. Williams, for authorization to organize the Cameron group as a regular Missionary Baptist Church. Dr. Williams declined to assume the responsibility himself but sent the Vice Moderator, Rev. A. L. Taylor, who set the date for the formal organization: the second Sunday evening in August, 1930, in Cameron, Texas.

Don't overlook that timeframe. This occurred during the Great Depression, just a few years after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — an event long hidden from public memory, with work only recently begun to locate the graves of those killed. Jim Crow was not history to these founders. It was their reality. And the Black church was where hope lived anyway.

Churches are, first, places of personal worship. But they are also deeply woven into the social fabric of African American life. A people's religious life reflects what it values most, and for African Americans that has always meant family, community, and freedom. Before the Civil War, the church was the only space for social bonding outside white control for both enslaved and free people. After Emancipation, church-affiliated benevolent societies supported needy members through hard seasons. Church schools, staffed by Black principals and teachers, taught everything from Scripture to advanced study for young and old alike.

If the goal of an argument is to hollow out foundational truth, what's left behind is erroneous theology, one that works against God's intent. We see the same move whenever foundational truths are redefined to mean whatever is convenient.

So here we are, 96 years later, and the question remains the same: what foundation are you resting on? "Built for this" has become a popular saying, and I want to offer it here not as a slogan but as a statement of fact. We are built for this because the Lord our God has already prepared us and the way for whatever this moment demands.

Let's turn to the text. It's a familiar passage. My prayer is that God gives us a fresh perspective and a fresh anointing as we sit with the question Jesus poses to His disciples, to everyone within earshot that day, and to us this afternoon. Our anchor passage is Luke 6:46–49, though the whole chapter builds toward the pivotal, provocative question Jesus asks there.

Jesus had just finished teaching His disciples, and Luke 6:46 records the climactic moment of that teaching, when He named what would define His new covenant community. The timing itself shows how urgent this is to Him.

That instruction given to His disciples, the newly appointed apostles, and everyone else gathered to see and hear Him remains no less relevant today. It still guides us through the turmoil we live in.

I'm reminded of a grandmother and her grandchild coming home from church one Sunday. Over Sunday dinner, the grandchild asked her, "Why don't you just stop going to church? It's not working." When she asked what he meant, he told her plainly: "How you talk and act here doesn't match what I've learned from Scripture about how to live."

Now that I have your attention, how would you answer Jesus if He asked you the same question this afternoon, in this hallowed space? "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, yet do not do what I say?"

That grandchild didn't yet understand that we're all a work in progress. Jesus looks beyond our faults and sees our need, and in that grace we grow in grace and in the knowledge of God. But grace doesn't excuse us from the question. James Baldwin put it plainly: "I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." That captures the whole issue of alignment in one sentence.

Jesus wants his followers to be good examples and witnesses, but this can't happen if behavior doesn't match words. For Jesus, the issue is always the heart. Spiritual fruit reveals what's truly inside a person; there's a direct link between inner character and outward conduct.

Jesus’ instructive teaching offers guidance for Christian behavior. These instructions remain relevant and urgent today. Consider the following.

Toward those who oppose you

• Love your enemies

• Do good to those who hate you

• Bless those who curse you

• Pray for those who mistreat you

When wronged

• Offer the other cheek when struck on one

• Don't withhold your shirt from someone who's taken your coat

• Give to everyone who asks of you

• Don't demand back what's been taken from you

General posture toward others

• Treat others the way you want to be treated

• Love, do good, and lend expecting nothing in return

• Be merciful, as your Father is merciful

• Do not judge

• Do not condemn

• Pardon and forgive

• Give generously, without holding back

Toward self-examination

• Take the log out of your own eye before addressing the speck in your brother's

The unexamined life is not worth living is a quote by someone

Here's what I offer for your consideration and application, based on this text:

Understanding who Jesus Christ is is critical to establishing your foundation of faith.

Faith is developed and honed through our lived experience.

Faith requires alignment between profession and practice.

Embracing these actions will strengthen your foundation or help create it.

When I first read this passage, it felt very familiar. After a couple of readings, that question stopped me. Why this question, at this moment? Why do you call me Lord yet not do what I say?

It took me back to my upbringing, to my dad asking me why I didn't just do what he said. I think Jesus is asking the same question for the same reason.

I. Understanding Who Jesus Christ Is Critical to

1 Corinthians 3:10–15

According to the grace of God given to me, I, like a wise builder, laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each one must be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any other foundation than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.

Paul is clear: there is only one foundation, and it's Jesus Christ Himself. Everything else, including how you build and what you build with, is downstream of first knowing who that foundation is. This is echoed in John 1:1–14, the Word made flesh, and in Matthew 16:15–16, where Peter confesses: "Who do you say that I am?" Both passages are about knowing Christ as He actually is, not as a model of Him we've reconstructed to suit our convenience.

Scripture doesn't stop at calling Jesus the foundation; it calls Him the chief cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20; 1 Peter 2:6–7; Psalm 118:22). On a job site, the cornerstone isn't decorative either. It's the reference point against which every other stone is measured, the line every wall, every angle, every course of brick must stay square with, or the whole structure drifts. That's what alignment means here: not just having Christ somewhere in the foundation, but letting Him be the fixed point against which everything else in your life is squared. A wall can be plumb on its own and still be out of alignment with the rest of the building if it isn't set against the right corner.

Frederick Douglass and Howard Thurman offer two perspectives from different time periods. In the appendix to his Narrative, Frederick Douglass drew the line himself: "Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt and wicked." That is a crisis of wrong knowing. A counterfeit Christ produces a counterfeit foundation, one that can bless bondage, enforce silence, or settle for a domesticated gospel and call it faith.

Howard Thurman picked up that same question from the other side, asking what the real gospel, not the counterfeit, offers to the people the counterfeit was built to exploit. He opens Jesus and the Disinherited by asking what the teachings of Jesus have to say to those who, at a moment in human history, stand with their backs against the wall. Douglass names the counterfeit. Thurman asks what the true foundation holds for those standing on nothing else.

There's a difference between a foundation poured on surveyed bedrock and one poured on assumption. Here's the hard truth: you don't find out which you have until the structure is tested.

II. Faith Is Developed and Honed Through Our Lived Experience

Isaiah 30:18 says that the LORD longs to be gracious to you and waits to show compassion, because the LORD is a God of justice. It also says that those who wait for him are blessed..

Romans 5:3-4 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵ and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us.

Faith isn't fully installed. It is developed through hearing. Consequently, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. Isaiah 40:31 says that those who hope (or wait) in the Lord will renew their strength—they will soar like eagles, run without growing weary, and walk without fainting. It is a promise of strength for those who trust in God. The exile texts and Romans 15:13, Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit, together present a whole theology of hope forged under pressure, not despite it.

I remember that Mrs. Bertha Minor would watch our youngest child before and after school for a while. She would often sing, or rather, say the words to this song: I’ve been through the storm and the rain, but I made it. That was a testimony to life’s challenges and to holding on to God's faith. She is a blessed memory now. 

I find myself wondering what songs the founding members of this church sang as they worked through the obstacles of building a congregation in a segregated Cameron. The songs they had access to and knew offered hope and encouragement, and they were born of lived experiences of bondage and struggle. That forging is exactly what made them theologically load-bearing.

The spirituals themselves were born in the hush harbors, secret gatherings where enslaved people worshipped beyond an overseer's reach. Many of them doubled as coded instructions, carrying directions for freedom routes within the language of praise. That's not incidental to their theology; it's central to it. These were songs of deep faith and trust in God, sung by people who kept pressing on-- Stony the road we trod,Bitter the chast’ning rod,Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;Yet with a steady beat,Have not our weary feetCome to the place for which our fathers sighed? Singing them was itself an act of persistence and resistance, proof that the faith inside the song was real enough to walk on. Not decorative. Load-bearing.

III. Faith Demands Alignment Between Profession and Practice

James 2:14–17: faith without works is dead. A faith tested by fire, not one that only ever gets spoken from a place of safety.\

Think of a car with its wheels out of alignment. It drives just fine in the church parking lot, slow and controlled, with no real pressure on it. But get it out on the highway, put some speed and distance on it, and it starts pulling to one side, wearing the tire unevenly, fighting you in your hands. The misalignment was always there. It just took real conditions to expose it. That's a faith that looks fine on a Sunday morning, in comfortable company, but was never actually squared against the cornerstone that does the driving Monday through Saturday. Profession is what you say your alignment is. Practice is what shows up doing seventy down the highway.

Which brings us back to the freedom songs, not as illustration this time, but as evidence. They are what it sounds like when profession and practice become one and the same.

He is Lord, he has risen from the dead, and he is Lord, every knee must bow because he is Lord.

We come this far by faith, leaning on the Lord, trusting in His holy word. He has never failed me yet.

On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, You who have brought us thus far on the way; You who have by Your might led us into the light  keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we meet You; lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget You. Shadowed beneath Your hand, may we forever stand true to our God, true to our native land.

And that brings us back to where we started. The pointed question Jesus asked: why do you call me Lord but don’t do what I say? Our response: I now understand, and I will do better because you prepared us for this!