The Construction Principles of the Carpenter

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I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32)

“The bathtub has arrived!”

A huge man waddles in carrying a heavy bathtub.

It’s a new house. The walls are up. The smell of sawdust is in the air. And it’s time to install the bathtub.

The man sets it down in the only place it can go, touching the walls on three sides. Then he looks down the drain and says, “Uh oh.”

Uh oh. That is something you never want to hear. You don’t want to hear it from your dentist. You don’t want to hear it from your potty-training toddler. And you sure don’t want to hear it from your plumber.

What happened was, he set the bathtub down, looked down the drain hole, and what did he see? He should have seen nothing but a black hole, but instead he saw the floor. No hole. No drain.

What he didn’t know was that a few weeks earlier, when his assistant was installing the tub drain pipe, he didn’t follow the blueprint. He installed the drain where he THOUGHT it should go. He followed his gut, not the blueprint.

That’s a disaster, right?

But we do that daily with the blueprint of life.

What is the blueprint of life?

Jesus talks about the blueprint of life at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter seven. He actually gives us a construction analogy.

He said, “Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who builds his house…”

There’s your construction analogy. He compares building our life to building a house. And he compares His teachings to the house’s blueprint. A blueprint tells you how to build a house, and God’s word tells you how to build your life.

A blueprint is drawn up by an architect. The architect is the designer.

In life we have an architect with a capital A. It’s the Lord God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. And we have a blueprint with a capital B. It’s the Word of God, the Scriptures, the Bible.

But we often don’t treat the Bible like a blueprint. We treat it like an optional book of wisdom that we don’t really have to pay all that much attention to.

And we pay a price for it.

To the degree that we follow God’s blueprint is the degree to which we build our life well. And to the degree that we don’t follow God’s blueprint is the degree to which we build our life poorly.

A good architect thinks of all the details ahead of time. He fits everything together perfectly, but the builder has to follow the blueprint or things WON’T fit together perfectly. In fact, if the builder messes up just a few things, that building project will become a royal disaster very quickly.

The same is true for our life. If we follow God’s Word fairly well, but we decide that we know better in just a few things, it’s not going to work.

Some people say, “Oh, I don’t want to be all LEGALISTIC.” But imagine this. You’re spending a half a million dollars to build your new dream home, and your architect has cooked up a beautiful blueprint. Do you want the builder to be legalistic about following your blueprint? Of course you do! This is your home and you want it done right.

And when it comes to our life, don’t we want to build well? Don’t we want a good life that is solid and holds up under the pressure of the elements?

Jesus told us how to do that. “Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.”

We can build our life well if we build according to the Blueprint with a capital B, drawn up by the Architect with a capital A.

And this is what I call The Construction Principles of the Carpenter.

May God bless you today.

I’m Doug Apple.