Gooding, David: The Gospel of the Cornerstone

Now shall we read together in the scriptures from Acts chapter three? And commen- commencing at verse eleven. Acts chapter three, commencing to read at verse eleven and going on to verse twelve of chapter four. And as the lame man which was healed held Peter and John, all the people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon's, greatly wondering. And when Peter saw it, he answered unto the people, ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? Why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk? The God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his son Jesus, whom ye delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate when he was determined to let him go. But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life, whom God hath raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses. And his name, through faith in his name, hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know. Yea, the faith which is by him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all. And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance you did it, as did also your rulers. But those things which God before hath showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled. Repent ye therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord, and he shall send Jesus Christ, which was before preached unto you, whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me. Him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that every soul which shall not hear that prophet shall be destroyed from among the people. Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days. You are the children of the prophets and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, and in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed. Unto you first, God, having raised up his son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning every one of you from his iniquities. And as they spake unto the people, the priests and the captains of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them, being grieved that they taught the people and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. They laid hands on them and put them in hold until the next day, for it was now eventide. Howbeit, many of them which heard the word believed, and the number of the men was about five thousand. And it came to pass on the morrow that their rulers and elders and scribes and Annas the high priest, and Caiaphas, and John and Alexander, and as many as were of the kingdom of the high priest, were gathered together at Jerusalem. And when they had set them in the midst, they asked them, by what power or by what name have you done this? Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel, if we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole, be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole. This is the stone which was set at naught of you builders, which has become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. I'm sure God will bless that lovely portion of his word to all our hearts. It is an exceedingly simple observation to make that all of us are builders. In many different ways, and with varying success, we build. These young people here present with us this evening are building their physical physique. By God's help, with their parents' care, with food, with exercise, with sleep, they are still engaged building their bodies. They may enjoy their lives later on. And some of us a bit older are engaged in building our careers, teaching ourselves skills, laying in our stores of knowledge, that later on we may pursue successfully the employment we have chosen for ourselves in life. And some of you are building families and building homes, and some of us build businesses, and all of us, without exception, are building character. We may build carelessly and shoddily, but we build. And none of us, but what sees, I trust, the importance of how we build. It matters how I build in my daily studies. It matters how I do the housework at home. Let me do my building there, shoddily, then is the result unfortunate, but more important still it is that I am building a shoddy character with every piece of shoddy work I do. It matters enormously how well we build. But tonight I do not choose to speak on the question of how we build. Rather, I invite you to consider with me a far more important and fundamental thing, not how we build, but where we build and upon what foundation. There is a very real distinction. Suppose I go to an architect and tell him I have decided to build a house. I say to the architect, I plan to build a house worth six thousand pounds. To the limit of my money, I intend to put in the very best materials into this house, and I have chosen such and such a site to build it on. And the architect examines his plans, says he, but my good friend, first of all, I want to tell you that the site you have chosen to build on is clay. And because the site is clay, before you start to build your house, you must first lay yourself a foundation bed of solid concrete. If you don't put in that bed of solid concrete, then you will find that in the course of years that clay will swell in water and dry in heat, and your house will be racked and pushed here and pushed there, and presently your house will crack, and it could be its downfall. So the architect says, my friend, it is not enough that you build your house well as houses are built, but it is all important that before you consider how well you are going to build, that you make certain that you build on a proper foundation. And I want to remind us all here this evening that the architect of this universe has told us plainly that while it is important how we build our lives, it is vastly more important where we build our lives and upon what foundation. Other foundation can no man lay, says the divine architect. If he wishes to have a successful life and build a character that will last this life and last eternity, other foundation can no man lay than Jesus Christ. It matters on what we build. It matters around what we build our lives. God has likened Jesus Christ to a cornerstone, that stone around which the building is built, that is the key to the building. It gives character to it all, and all the building rests its weight upon that cornerstone. Jesus Christ is that cornerstone, says God, and every life that's built around him will last eternally. But every life that is built not around Him, however well that life is built, will eventually perish. We do well to get that distinction. So very often people have it in their minds that Christianity is concerned solely about how well we build. And people will argue, but you see, I can build my life without Christianity just as well as I could build it with Christianity. I'm as honest without Christianity as you are with Christianity. I am as diligent in my life, in my studies, in my profession. I am as diligent there and as successful without Christianity as you are with Christianity. And for the moment, I would not dispute the point. But you see, the question is not merely how well we build, but on what we build and round what we build. Our Lord said that the situation was likened to two men. One man built a very good house, but he built it on sand. The other man built, and I do not read that he built a better house, but he built it on rock. And when the storm came, the deciding factor was not how well the houses were built, but solely where those houses were built. My good friend, the Bible reminds us each one this evening, that in the last analysis, it is not merely the quality of our building that will decide the issue. It is altogether whether our lives are built on Christ and round Christ, or whether we have built on some unsatisfactory foundation. May I ask us all then honestly for a moment to look within and ask ourselves round what our life is built? What is the cornerstone of your life? Has it a cornerstone? There are some folk that have no better cornerstones than their gardens and their hobbies. Their life is built around that. If you took that away, they'd have nothing. And others more seriously inclined are building their whole, their lives around their family life. To some, the cornerstone in life is their bu- their business, to others success, to others fame, to others knowledge. These are the things round which their lives are built. I want to remind us all that the Bible says that noble as those things are, they are useless as cornerstones. One day they shall be gone. Then, if we have no cornerstone left that is worthy, our building will disintegrate and perish. This is a challenging thing. For our help, I have read that story in the Bible where men more famous than we were challenged with this same kind of situation. I wonder if you would allow me to remind you about them. About that tremendous question that they had to consider. About the colossal emotional conflict that went on within them as they faced the issue. The men I refer to were the Sadducees who crucified Christ. These men were respectable as men go. They were not particularly vicious according to the standards of their age. They were men with very definite ideas. The Sadducees, we are told, believed that there is no resurrection. Their view was that when we die, we are done for. We die like an animal. This life is all there is. There is nothing beyond. They held it that there is no angel. They weren't prepared to believe that there could be beings in this universe that you couldn't touch or see. They poo-pooed the idea of a heaven with angels flying around. They said that was fairy talk. That was fable fit away, fit to be put away with their childish books. There's not such a place, they said. They believed that there was no spirit. That is, if you had asked them, what is man, they would have said to you, man? Why, man is what you can feel and touch. That's all. There is no such thing as spirit, and in consequence, there is no such thing as spiritual experience. The idea that man is spirit and can get in touch with God, who is spirit, nonsense, they said. All life is is what you see it to be, what you can touch, what you can taste, what you can handle, and that is all. Oh, they were religious. They had a temple in their city, and every now and again they went and joined in the services. They held it was a decent thing. It kept men within bounds. It stopped people from kicking over the traces and becoming rather nasty and vicious. They thought it was a good social custom to meet together and sing some psalms and read a code of ethics. But they held it fundamentally that when that was done, when life was finished here, that was the end. No judgment, no heaven, no hell. Then they met Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ said bluntly that there is a heaven. And Jesus Christ said bluntly, there is a hell. And the Sadducees brought their reason and they said, nonsense, rabbi. They brought their objections to the resurrection. They said, what on earth would happen? Consider this case. There was a woman once, and she had seven husbands, one after another. It was a silly story, but they made it up as a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, to suit their theory. She had seven husbands, one after another, and then they all died. If there were a resurrection, rabbi, they said, look what a muddle that would be in heaven. Silly argument. The Lord exposed their folly and again asserted there is a heaven. There is a hell. There is a resurrection, and this life does not finish things. And there is a God, and man has a spirit, and if we would enter the kingdom of God, we must go through that spiritual experience that is being born again. Verily, verily, I say unto you, said Christ to these men, you must be born again. Life is not just the bread and butter we eat, the physical things we can touch, the gardens we dig, and the homes we build. There is a spiritual side to life that is life indeed. And if we would enter God's heaven, we must be born again. It became obvious the Sadducees and our Lord Jesus Christ were at opposite extremes. And in the end, the Sadducees put him to the cross. They weren't quite so refined as moderns. They demonstrated what their hearts felt. They got rid of him, not by a polite turning on the heel, but by putting him to a cross. Imagine, can you, their consternation when fifty days later, there stood up in their city certain men, uneducated men for the most part, who dared to assert before the ears of all and sundry that this Jesus whom they had crucified was risen from the dead? It can't be, said the Pharisee, there isn't such a thing as a resurrection. We won't have it. But the evidence wasn't to be got rid of like that. Here were otherwise uneducated men, but boldly preaching the gospel in the center of the city. Here was a lame man, lame from birth, risen, walking, dancing, leaping. The evidence wasn't to be got rid of. And it was a very solemn meeting of the Sadducees council that met to decide what they should do with the preachers that preached that Jesus Christ was risen from the dead. The issue was plain. If Jesus Christ was really risen from the dead, these Sadducees were wrong. And it wasn't wrong about a little thing in life. They were wrong from the foundation up. If Jesus Christ was risen from the dead, then these Sadducees, in killing him, had killed the very fountain of life. They were at cross purposes with the very architect of the universe. They were wrong with God. They were living in direct contradiction of the very fundamental principles of life. And it's a shattering thing to face that alternative. You must excuse those Sadducees if they felt violently about it. But if Jesus Christ were risen from the dead, there was no alternative if they would be sane men but to surrender to him. To start right. To go down to the foundation once more. To unwrap their lives from the cornerstones around which they had been built, and receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and build on him. It was nothing short of what the Savior had always said. Gentlemen, he said, it's not a matter of improving a brick here or cutting out a habit there. It is a matter of starting from the foundation again. You must be born again. Nothing less than that. And I would like us all to see that the same issue confronts us. I may speak freely for many of you I do not know. Maybe I speak to somebody here, and you have always believed that when you die, you're going to be done for, and there is nothing for you to face. You would like it that way. You have tried to convince yourself that there is no heaven and there is no hell. You have tried to convince yourself that salvation about which Christians speak is a mere fanciful imagination. I want to remind you that I'm not here tonight to exhort you to build with better bricks. I'm here tonight to challenge you that you're building on the wrong. Before we can start to consider how we shall improve the building, we must come to this vital issue. We must face Jesus Christ. We must be prepared to surrender to him and receive him as chief cornerstone. What would that involve, you say, receiving Jesus Christ as cornerstone? What do you mean when you say it isn't a question of how well I build, but something else? I can do no better than quote the words of scripture. What does it mean to build on Christ as foundation, as cornerstone? It means this. There is no other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. Have we noticed the times? Jesus Christ comes into our life, and he says, my good man, you must be saved. This is the foundation. Forgive my laboring the point. So many folk have got the idea that Christianity comes to us and says, look here, you must be kinder to your aunts than you have been hitherto, and you must be a little bit more charitable in public-spirited than hitherto, and you must cut out some of the bad language that on times you indulge in, and not be, uh, and be sober more frequently than is your custom. And that if we patch up the buildings of our lives like that, then God will be satisfied. It is not so. Jesus Christ says that there's something more fundamental wrong with us than that. There's a need that goes deeper. It is this, not that we must be try and be good, but that we must be saved. You say saved from what? Saved from the guilt of our sin. It see, it matters. It matters deeply that as natural men and women, we have lived in contradiction of God's law. We are guilty before God, says Jesus Christ. It is not merely that we don't always make a good job of living, it is that sin has brought in a great barrier between us and God, that we have offended our creator. We need to be reconciled to God and made right with him. That's what we need. We need to be saved. We need to receive God's Holy Spirit. We need a new power and a new life. We need to be born. We must be saved, says Christ. And then the Bible adds, there is none other name given among men whereby you must be saved. How this does challenge the human heart. We like to think that there are many roads to heaven. And some will argue, well, you, you live your life according to your system of ethics, and I will live mine as I think. And surely, if we are sincere, we shall, we shall end up at the right end. Not so, says Christ. If it were merely a matter of a system of ethics, then you might have yours, and I might have mine, and it mightn't make all that amount of difference. But it isn't a question of a system of ethics and following out a golden rule. It is a question of being saved. Without the shedding of blood, says the Bible, there is no forgiveness. What mankind needs is a savior that can come between him and God and take away the guilt of a man's sin by the sacrifice of himself. What a man needs is someone to come between him and the God he has sinned against. Someone that can die for him and bear away his sins. There's only been one who could ever do that. Unashamedly, the Lord claimed it. It wasn't religious pride he'd gone astray. It was in the very nature of the case, there can only be one savior and one way of being saved. And you say, how may I know that that is true? How may I know that it's true that I need to be saved? Then how may I be sure that Jesus Christ is this savior? I think the Bible is one of the easiest books to prove true. Would we like to be convinced that we need to be saved? Then I submit that we spend a week or two deliberately in the company of Jesus Christ. Have you ever tried sincerely to carry out his instructions that he gave us on the Sermon on the Mount? Have you ever made the experiment of really trying to love your neighbor as yourself? You try it. You will begin to find that what Jesus Christ said was, is utterly true. We can't. We can't. I challenge us one and all in this room tonight. We just can't love our neighbor as ourselves. There's something radically wrong with us. You come and tell me if you dispute it, if you think you have succeeded. The Bible says that we are lame, lame from birth. I wonder what man would dispute the fact. Oh, we need not be like that lame man whose ankles were weak and had never walked from birth, whom they laid as a beggar on the steps of the temple. All of us by nature are lame like that. When we fail, we go and worship God and live a decent life and walk straight. Have we not all found it that there's a curious lameness within us? We don't go straight. And the reason is not always that we don't want to walk straight, the reason is that we just can't walk straight. The gospel in all its realism comes not us giving us advice that we ought to walk better than we do. In all its realism, it comes to men and women who can't walk straight. And gently it tells them that they must be saved, and then gladly it tells them that they can be saved. And bluntly it tells them that there is only one who can save them. Oh, my friend, there's many a one that will give you advice. There's been many a prophet this world through that has told his fellow men that they ought to live a little bit better, but there is only one man in all history that ever has come near us to tell us that he, we need to be saved, and he has come to save us. This night, by God's grace and help, I want to introduce you to him again. To the only man in all history that has dared to face us personally and say, my friend, you need to be saved. You must be saved, and I have died to save you. We must turn around and face a man that talks like that. We must make our decision about a man that talks like that. We must turn round and say, but I don't need to be saved. But what man of us will say that? What man of us in front of our fellows will say that we walk perfectly and that we are sinless and holy? What man of us would claim that from now on, if we determined to do so, we could live sinlessly? We just can't. Jesus Christ says, look, I love you in spite of that, and I've come to die for you, and I've come to save you. When a man talks like that, we must make our reply. We turn around and say, look here, I don't want you to save me. Get out. It's none of your business. I don't want your love. This is an outrageous intrusion on my privacy. I won't have you invade my personality. I don't want anybody to love me and die for me. I build my own building. Or else we must turn around and say, yes, Lord, at our very hearts we haven't a cornerstone that's worth relying on. We do need a savior to die for our sins, a savior who rose again to give us power to overcome sin. Says Jesus Christ, you must be saved. How can I know his claims are true? There's nobody else ever made him, made them. You shan't be worried to t- make the decision scores of times. There's only one man in all history that ever claimed that he died for you. You shall only have to make the decision once. Said his apostles, as Jesus Christ himself said, this Bible that we handle starting in Genesis and going through its pages, compiled down the years and centuries of history, has in reality been all of it about him. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever considered how unique this is in all Earth's history? Many books, I say again, that have told us to behave, only one book in all this world that has dared to say for centuries upon century that God was going to send a savior. That God was going to send that savior through a particular nation, the Jewish nation. Only one book that's dared to say that. And it dared to say it centuries before Christ came, and it kept on saying it all the years through. That the Jew had a special place in history to bring in God's savior. One day, according to the long string of ancient prophecy, he came. It's open to anybody to test it. Pooh, you say. That's no proof. Why did not the Jews write the Old Testament? And was not Jesus a Jew? You see what happened. The Jews first of all wrote it and said the savior was coming, and then they produced the man, and they put the two together, they knocked their heads together, and they made the one fulfill the other. But it wasn't so, was it? For the Jews decided that Jesus wasn't the Christ. And as Peter very forcefully put it to the Sadducees who crucified him, gentlemen, he said, you didn't believe that Jesus was the Christ, did you? And the last thing on earth you ought to have done was to have crucified him. Gentlemen, can you not see that in crucifying Jesus of Nazareth, you gone and fulfilled exactly what that Old Testament said would happen? You say, where does it say it? Does it not be through the places? And here explicitly said the old prophet Isaiah that God's son and servant should come, he would be wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace would be on him, and by his stripe we should be healed. Oh, my friend, there is evidence enough. This great man offering to be the cornerstone of our lives, this man is the cornerstone of God's history. This is the meaning of life. This is the cornerstone. I ask us in the closing moments of our meeting here now, that we face him. This Christ of history. This Jesus of Nazareth, yes. This Christ of Calvary. But more, the Jesus Christ that is risen from the dead and stands beside each one of us now, saying, my friend, you must be saved. And I am the only one that can save you. My friend, you need a cornerstone, else your life on earth will be a miss. And in eternity to come, without a cornerstone, you will disintegrate and perish. The Christ that comes and says, I've done it all. You can be saved. I'm not asking you to try and live now, henceforward, a little bit better, to improve the rooms, to add on another story, to build with better bricks. Says Christ, I'm asking you to receive me in and start from the beginning, to receive me as a foundation. Thereafter, you will do your best to build, no doubt. Whether you build well or not so well, the main thing will have been secured, you have a foundation that is sufficient for life here, for life eternal. Then have I made it clear? And as presently we turn to prayer and make our response to God, it isn't a question whether we shall promise God to try and do better. It is a question that we shall answer, what shall I do with this Jesus Christ who confronts me with his love, with his insistence that I need to be saved, I need to be born again, I need a new foundation, I need him as a cornerstone. What shall I do with this Jesus that is called the Christ? God grant that those of us who have already received him may tonight praise God the more and seek God's grace the better to build upon this foundation. God grant the grace to any who have not yet been born again and have not yet received him, to face his challenge. And may we see the issue so clearly that we shall stop trying to sit on the fence about it all. May we see the issue so clearly that we receive him into our hearts gladly, or else spit in begone. The Bible says that he that believeth in him shall I'll never never be be let let down. down.