so many of us have built houses that are lies.
And because of that, when the rain comes
and when the winds come, when the storms come in our life,
our lives crumble.
The single family home is a hallmark of American culture
and society.
I remember growing up and always hearing
that a man's house is his castle.
And it's really important that a home, which
is probably the best investment you have in your portfolio,
is strongly built, foundations are laid well.
And we live in a house that was built in 1962.
And this house is at 7,000 feet above sea level
here in Colorado Springs, Colorado,
where we have over 120 inches of snow
every year in the Black Forks area
where our house is located.
And it's been solid.
It's just been very solid.
And it's a warm, inviting house.
I've been through blizzards.
Liz and I have been through blizzards in that house.
We've been in that house with up to three feet of snow.
And it stays warm.
It's never leaked.
It's been a phenomenal house.
Well, so is building a house of truth.
This is actually a habit.
Just like a construction contractor
who's building a house.
And he just studies those plans.
And he makes sure that he lays good foundations, strong walls,
strong insulation throughout the house, good roof.
Same way in your life, you need to build a house of truth.
Because so many people build a house of lies.
And their house is built on lies.
I was recently in a meeting with a young man
that's trying to get off drugs.
He's addicted to heroin and takes other hallucinogen drugs.
My challenge to this young man was,
when are you going to quit lying?
And he wasn't expecting that.
I think he was expecting me to talk about discipline.
I really wasn't interested in talking to him about discipline.
I was more interested in talking to him
about being truthful and honest in his life.
Because if you show me a man or a woman
who can be honest about every detail of their lives,
and I'll show you someone who can walk in freedom.
Because Jesus said, you shall know the truth,
the truth shall set you free.
So knowing the truth means you're experiencing the truth.
It means you're living the truth,
you're speaking the truth, you're listening to truth.
So I want to talk about a habit,
building a habit of building a house of truth.
Because so many of us have built houses that are lies.
And because of that, when the rain comes,
and when the winds come, when the storms come in our life,
our lives crumble.
So in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7,
Jesus is explaining the ethics and the integrity
of the kingdom of God.
And at the end, he says, it's like a man
who built his house on the sand.
And when the storms came, it fell.
Over against the man who built his house on a rock,
and when the storms came, it was solid.
So I want to build this habit into you,
of not just believing what everybody tells you,
but you becoming a truth seeker in your own life.
So I want to talk about some building blocks.
Like we have building blocks that build a home.
This is the building blocks that build a house of truth.
And the first one is the Bible is your foundation.
Well, you might say, well, I'm not a believer in Jesus.
I don't believe in the Bible.
Well, fine.
But I'll just tell you that you're
going to have a hard time building a house that's
going to stand unless you have a foundation.
And the most truthful, most powerful foundation
you can have is the book that all of the founding fathers
in America believed in.
Most of the great leaders of the world,
I'm talking about good leaders, not bad leaders.
Good leaders believed in, built their truth from the Bible.
Johann Sebastian Bach, arguably the greatest musician
of all time, was spoken of as one who built his music
on the book, on the Bible.
In 1 Chronicles 25, Bach wrote, quote,
this chapter is a true foundation
of all God-pleasing music.
One scholar said of Bach, he was a Christian
who lived with the Bible.
Abraham Lincoln, who built his entire presidency
and his leadership around this book, the Bible.
said that it is the best gift God has given to man.
All the good Savior gave to the world
was communicated through this book, the Bible.
Billy Graham, the great evangelist,
probably the greatest evangelist of the 20th century,
said, the Bible is God's book of promises,
and unlike the books of men,
it does not change or get out of date.
So I wanna challenge you,
if the Bible's not a foundation in your life,
that you would make it so.
Building block number two, follow time-tested precedence.
Follow time-tested precedence.
There's a legal word, a Latin word,
that lawyers use called stare decisis.
It's a Latin term meaning to stand
by the things already decided.
That's what I mean by precedent.
Looking at precedent, looking at what other men,
other historians, other scholars have said about something,
we can trust that.
Not all of it, it's not perfect,
but I'm saying that when we come to a conundrum,
we come to a place where it's an impasse
and we're not sure what to think or believe,
look back in history, look at other civilizations,
look at good cultures,
those that have been successful and prosperous,
and we can see precedent in that.
One of the biggest struggles in the American church right now
is we don't use precedent.
We don't look back in history.
And so because of that, we're just driven by the culture.
Every wind, every storm of the culture,
you see pastors and leaders changing their view,
constantly changing their perspective
based on what's the latest, most popular idea.
And for me, I've always looked at history and the Bible.
So I look at the Bible, theology,
but also I look at history
and judge things based on history.
And so some of the big questions
that we're faced with right now about life,
about gender, about marriage,
all those different areas that are under attack right now,
precedent tells us what to believe.
Other great men have grappled with this
and have come to some conclusions
that are very, very helpful.
This is not rocket science.
Building block number three,
seek the uncomfortable truth and be skeptical.
Seek the uncomfortable truth and be skeptical.
And what I mean by that is don't just take
what quote unquote the experts say,
which I think we found out in COVID
that the experts were wrong on a lot of things.
Well, when our first child was born,
we were living in Japan and we had gone through Lamaze
and we had gone through all these different trainings
for how to have a natural birth.
And then on the day of the birth,
things didn't work out the way we had planned
and we had a very highly intervention C-section.
And we thought that it was amazing
that this doctor had the ability to do a C-section
and saved our little Anna.
But as we did more research,
we figured out that actually this doctor
had set in place a number of things
that actually caused a C-section.
He didn't mean to, but he made some basic mistakes
that we didn't know about at the time.
And so we learned from that.
We sought out truth, we figured it out.
And the next time we had a child,
we were able to have more maturity
and also more knowledge in dealing with the doctor.
And same thing with COVID.
When COVID hit, Liz and I just did not believe
what we were hearing 100%.
So we started, we put together a health team at our church.
We began to do the research and we found out
that actually what we were hearing,
not only was not based in good scientific investigation
and research, but it was making a lot of money
for a lot of people and we weren't buying it.
The reason we had a skepticism about what was happening
from the scientific community about COVID
was largely because of our experience
that had happened in birth, as well as in foods
and things like that that we had experienced over the years.
So when you're building, here's what's exciting.
When you're building a house of truth,
you can go back on what you've learned
and you can build a library of truth in your life
that makes it easier and easier to believe what truth is
because you're developing your truth muscles
by seeking God and also doing your own research.
Building block number four, learn the art of listening.
Now, this is the hardest one.
And what I mean by that is to make yourself available,
even to those you disagree with,
even those you would say that you guys.
They're on opposite, polar opposites.
Always good to listen, learning to listen.
And I really experienced this a lot with my parents.
They were very involved in the civil rights movement.
And because they listened to the black community,
it affected their view of what was happening
in the Jim Crow South.
That was powerful.
And this is really hard
because a lot of people don't wanna listen.
They don't really wanna listen
to what other people have to say.
And I wanna challenge you
that listening is really, really important.
And then lastly, building block five,
develop a passion for reading.
Develop a passion for reading.
So in fifth grade, I was a lousy reader.
And Mrs. Milton, my fifth grade teacher,
gave me a hunger and a love for reading.
And ever since then, I've been hooked.
And so I love biography.
I love history.
I love theology.
I love real life stories.
And so I tend to be one
who gravitates toward those subjects.
But with the dawning of the new age
that we have right now
that has brought in so much craziness
within the healthcare industry,
I've shifted a lot of my research
and my reading into those arenas.
So I wanna challenge you to read.
Be a good reader.
And in my book, I give you lists of books
that I think are helpful to you,
that can be helpful in your reading.
So these are the building blocks
of building a house of truth.
It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn
who said in his last speech
and his last treatise to the Russian people
before he defected,
live not by lies.
Live not by lies.
So I wanna challenge you.
Don't live by lies.
Live by truth.
But you've gotta do the work.
You've gotta put in the time.
Seek it out.
And with all of the podcasts
that are available today,
all the different ways in which truth is getting out,
start looking, finding,
and be skeptical about what you're hearing
and go after truth passionately.
It'll set you free.
It will really set you free
to know that you're laying good foundations for your life.