“The role of the intellect is to hear the Word, while the role of the will is to do it…‘Everyone who hears my words and does them I compare to a prudent man who built his house on rock. But everyone who hears my words and does not do them I compare to a stupid man who built his house on sand’ (Matthew 7: 24, 26)” (Secrets of Heaven 44).
Prudent = rock; stupid = sand. Prudent = hears Word and does it; stupid = hears Word and doesn’t do it. Rock and sand are made of the same thing, but rock is stuck together. Rock is held together while sand is all broken up into tiny particles. So to live what the Lord teaches is the glue that makes the truths we know a true foundation. This is such a perfect symbol but I never thought very deeply about it before. It doesn’t matter how much you know—how much sand you have—it won’t do you any good as support you can live on unless it becomes glued together through living what you know is true.
This meditation of mine happens to go very well with an idea presented in yesterday’s adult Cathedral service. There, Rev. Grant Odhner gave a sermon about the story of the Lord and Peter walking on water. He referenced True Christianity 73 where it reads,
“There are laws of the divine design imposed on human beings that indicate that we are to acquire truths from the Word for ourselves and that we are to base our thinking on them in an earthly way and, as much as we can, in a rational way. This is how we develop an earthly faith for ourselves. On God’s side, there are laws of the divine design dictating that he is to come closer, fill those truths with his own divine light, take our earthly faith, which is only knowledge and persuasion, and fill it with a divine essence. This is the only way for faith to become capable of saving. There is a similar process for developing goodwill.”
Water, he explains, is an image of our earthly faith. If we try to live, or walk, on a foundation of water, of only earthly faith (or build our house on sand), we will drown—it will not support us. The Lord walking on the water is an image of the Lord infusing our faith with his divine essence and so making it a strong foundation to live or walk on—this faith becomes a faith that saves. So before we, as Peter, can walk on our water, the Lord needs to walk on it first, that is, fill it with divine essence. So to connect it back to the imagery of the sand and rock, we open the way for the Lord to fill our lives with his divine light when we put the truths we know into practice; then the Lord takes the sand of our faith and turns it into a strong foundation of rock. Living the truth we learn from the Lord is how we cooperate in the process of our regeneration.