Build your life on The Rock
My family and I love visiting the North Shore of Lake Superior. Last October we reserved a cabin near Gooseberry Park. The owner called me, asking if I would like to move to a cabin located on the rocks right above the water. YES PLEASE! My favorite part was sitting on the deck at night. There’s something about the sight of water stretching from one horizon to the other that restores my perspective. My worries and anxieties get smaller in the scope and majesty of God’s creation.
More often than I like to admit, my perspective gets warped by my own thoughts and fears. I worry about things that may never happen, or I’m disappointed by my unrealistic expectations. Several of my recent devotional readings have reminded me that God’s Word restores our perspective. God is the maker of all things. His Word aligns our understanding to what the world really is. His Word is more than just information. It is meant for us to build our lives upon, so that our lives conform to the reality our creator made.
Luke 6:46–49 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”
Jesus asked His followers: “why aren’t you doing what I’ve taught you?” This isn’t a piece of information meant to be regurgitated on a test and then forgotten. It is meant to be lived. J.I. Packer once wrote “we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.”
Commenting on Psalm 139, Packer wrote “the psalmist’s concern to get knowledge about God was not a theoretical but a practical concern. His supreme desire was to know and enjoy God himself, and he valued knowledge about God simply as a means to this end. He wanted to understand God’s truth in order that his heart might respond to it and his life be conformed to it.”
We don’t do this to avoid life’s disasters, but so that in God we can endure them. Through life’s trials, we often discover how we have ruined ourselves by doing things our way. But God’s grace intervenes in our disasters. Jesus says He has forgiven your sins, and offers to transform your heart. He will lift you out of the ruins, and set you on a secure foundation. In Jesus Christ we find true joy, delight, and contentment. In Him is the way of life everlasting.
Have a blessed Summer. Intern Sam