Today we will take one final look at Jesus’ parable of the wise and the foolish builder. Through this story Jesus has shown us His definition of wisdom and foolishness, that the only thing that separates the wise from the fools is obedience to His teaching. He has taught us that endurance is found in the condition of our hearts; that the storms of life are inevitable, it rains on the just and unjust, the wise and the foolish, the believer and the unbeliever, those that endure the storms are those that have allowed God’s Word, God’s love and God’s character to dig deep into their hearts and become the foundation of their lives. The storms of anxiety, fear, pride and circumstance are difficult but they are endured by our preparation, by our confidence in God’s love, by our trust in God’s fatherly character and by our choice of God’s Word. Today we are going to talk about the end of the parable, the fall of the foolish man’s house. If storms are inevitable and foundations are necessary for endurance then we have to be willing to accept and understand that a lack of foundation in the midst of a storm will create a collapse. Storms reveal our strength, our character, our heart condition and what our lives or foundation is built upon. For us to be able to talk about this rightly we are going to have to see the perspective that Jesus speaks from, we are going to have to understand and accept the necessity of testing and we are going to have to confess that falling is the outcome of our choices not God’s punishment. This parable is not just the end of the Sermon on the Mount it is the conclusion, it is the culmination and it is a prophetic look at the outcome of our response to Jesus’ teaching. The entire Sermon comes down to this, if we obey this teaching, if we walk in this character, we will be tested and come forth, as Job said, as gold, if we hear this teaching and choose our own way, our own interpretation or our own application, we will be tested and we will fall and like the foolish builder, our fall will be great. In all of this the one point I want us to come away with today is that this final parable of Jesus is not God promising to punish us if we stray, it is God warning us of the impending danger of disobedience, our outcome is not determined by God’s action, He has and always will do His part, our outcome will be determined by our response to God’s Word.