Letter No. 4: Freedom from Hardship?

Should Christians expect trouble-free lives? What Jesus actually promised.

Dear Friend,

I wonder whether you’ve believed this common lie. It’s told quietly in a thousand small ways, often by people who love us, mean well, and don’t know better themselves. The lie is this: that if you follow Jesus closely enough, your life will somehow be spared the storms that fall on everyone else. Pray hard enough, obey carefully enough, give generously enough, and the rain will fall on your neighbor’s roof but not on yours.

I believed versions of that lie for a long time. And then life taught me otherwise. So did the Lord Jesus in the closing lines of the greatest sermon ever preached.

He ended it with this short parable:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24–27 ESV)

I have read those verses many times. For much of my life, I interpreted them as a contrast between belief and unbelief—the Christian and the unbeliever, the one who prays and the one who does not. I thought of Jesus as the “rock.” But that is not quite what He said. Look again at the two men in the parable. The difference between them is not that one heard Jesus’s words and the other did not. Both of them heard. The difference is that one heard the teaching and obeyed, while the other heard and did not obey.

That is worth sitting with for a moment. Jesus was closing the most searching sermon in all of human history—the Sermon on the Mount. Blessing the poor in spirit. Loving enemies. Refusing to worry. Forgiving as we have been forgiven. And then He tells us it is not the hearing of this that preserves your life through hardships. It is the doing of it.

So here is something to consider, and I want to say it plainly. In this parable, the rock is obedience. It is not sincerity. Not church attendance. Not a warm feeling during worship. Jesus does not say that the wise man is the one who volunteers as an usher or serves on the church board. He says the wise man is the one who hears His teachings and does them. The foolish man hears the very same words—and does not. The foundation is not what you feel about Christ’s words. The foundation is whether you build your life on them.

Now watch what happens to the two houses, because this is where the comfortable lie falls apart.

The storm comes to both of them. Read it slowly: “the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house.” Then, of the second house, the exact same trials: “the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house.” Jesus does not soften the weather for the obedient man. The identical storm visits both addresses.

And notice that the storm comes from every direction at once. The rain descends—trouble from above, the things that fall on us out of a clear sky, the diagnosis, the phone call, the loss we never saw coming. The floods rise—trouble from below, the ground giving way beneath us, the foundations of our finances or our health or our family eroding. The winds blow and beat—trouble from the sides, the pressure of other people, the criticism, the betrayal, the relentless push of circumstance. From above, from below, from every side. Tried on all fronts.

I want you to hear what this means, because it is the thing I most needed to learn. The obedient follower of Christ is not spared a single one of these hardships. Not one. The wise man’s house took the same rain, the same flood, the same battering wind as the fool’s. If you are still walking through the storm, you have not done something wrong, and you have not been abandoned.

I learned this the hard way. I’ve had buried hopes I was sure God would protect. I have sat in a doctor’s office and heard words that emptied the room of air. I have known the particular ache of a ministry that did not turn out the way I gave my life for it to turn out. None of this hardship was withheld from me because I was a pastor. None of it was withheld because I loved the Lord. The rain fell on my roof exactly as it falls on everyone’s.

So if obedience does not buy us a life-sized umbrella, what does it do? Here is the difference, and it is the whole point of the parable. After the same storm beat on both houses, one of them “did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” And the other “fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Same wind. Same water. Two completely different outcomes—not because one man was spared the storm, but because of what was underneath him when it came. The disobedient life, however impressive it looked in fair weather, comes apart under pressure. And Jesus lingers on the wreckage: “great was the fall of it.” It is total. The obedient life takes every blow the other one took, and stands. Battered, soaked, leaning into the wind—but standing.

That is the promise. Not exemption from the storm. Endurance through it. The doer of His word is not given an easier life; he is given a life that holds.

Friend, I cannot promise you that following Jesus will spare you the rain. The Bible never makes that promise, and my own life has proven it a dozen times over. What I can tell you is this: when you take His words and actually do them—when you forgive the one who wronged you, when you tell the truth that costs you something, when you keep your vows in the dark, when you trust Him with the thing you cannot control, leaving the outcome to Him—you are driving your foundation down to the bedrock. And when the floods come, as they will, as they do, your “house” will still be there in the morning.

So let me ask you: how have you understood these verses before, and do you see them any differently now? Sit with that for a while. Ask yourself, have I taken Jesus’s words seriously? Do I believe them at all? If you have time, read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5–7), asking yourself the whole way through whether you have actually put these teachings into practice. Is your life built on bedrock, or on the shifting sand of circumstance, emotion, the world’s values, even your own desires? Leave a window open for the Holy Spirit to press His thoughts on you. A foundation matters not because the storm will miss you, but because it won’t.

If you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments.

Grace and peace,

Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth

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