You Cannot Build Your own Life

"Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." Continuing City Parish's Summer in the Psalms series through the Songs of Ascent, guest preacher David Allen (Lead Pastor, First Baptist Church of Ukiah) opens Psalm 127 with an honest question: where do you actually find the strength to get through the life you live?

We know the right answer is Jesus. But nobody lies to us more than we lie to ourselves — and many who profess the strength of Christ are among the most tired and anxious people the world has seen. We chase the next side hustle, burn the candle at both ends, and sacrifice sleep to get ahead, having quietly believed the oldest lie ever told: you can be like God.

Solomon uses the image of a house to picture a whole life. Build it by yourself and you labor in vain. This is the same wisdom David sang in Psalm 1 and Jesus preached at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: two houses can look identical until the storm comes. Two lives can look exactly the same and yet carry drastically different eternal weight — because of their foundation and their motives.

This isn't a call to stop working. Christians should be some of the hardest workers in the world. But the world hustles to make a name for itself because it is missing an identity. We already have a name — Christ has placed his own name on us. So we work, we raise our children (the most glorious inconvenience), and we build our households not to prove ourselves but as a display of the gospel to a world that desperately needs Jesus.

We build our lives off the finished work of another. And that frees us to eat, drink, and do everything to the glory of God, saying with joy: "Yet not I, but through Christ in me."