Christ is the one and only foundation, and all the materials, wiring, windows, and roof,

must fit, must accord with the foundation. There must be a pervasive influence of the foundation.

You don't put Christ down as the foundation and then ignore Christ in the kind of walls you put

in the kind of lights you use. Everything conforms to the foundation.

How important is the foundation of the church to the quality of what's built upon it?

That's the question that John Piper answers from 1 Corinthians 3, 10-17, in this episode of

Light and Truth. This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on March 6, 1988.

The picture of the church that we spent time on last week in the text just preceding what Andy

read was the picture of a field and Paul was a planter in the field and a policies a waterer

in the field. Now we have a different picture that emerges at the end of that text and that's

picked up here, don't we? The first picture, field, the second picture, building. That's the new

picture. You see it in verse 9. It says, we are fellow workers for God. You are God's field. That

was the first picture of the church. God's building. That's the second picture. So Paul is shifting

now and we'll spend all of his time in the rest of this chapter on an architectural model of the

church rather than an agricultural model of the church. And not any longer is he a planter. He is

foundation layer and a policy is no longer a waterer. He is a brick mason or carpenter. He's

building the structure on this foundation that Paul has laid. So he has the same kind of thing

in mind, but a different picture. And now you can see that confirmed. If you drop down to verse 16,

do you not know that you are God's temple? So if you say what kind of building does he mean in

verse 9? The answer is he means a temple. The church is the temple of the living God in which

the Holy Spirit dwells. So he shifts from a field where people are growing and bearing fruit to

a temple where the people are stones, I guess you could say, living stones from 1st Peter 2,

...