Let me begin with an illustration that I picked up online – “Imagine yourself as a home builder. You’ve acquired new clients who are excited to be building their dream home. You’re excited too. You love watching your hard work create a beautiful, lasting structure. Your clients bring in a file of all the things they want to see in their new home. Paint chips, magazine clippings, and carpet samples come pouring out. You start building right away, paying attention to every last detail they spelled out for you. The home is magnificent. Simply beautiful. There’s only one problem. Your clients never mentioned anything about the foundation, so you never put one in. They wanted a house they could see, not yards of concrete buried by dirt. The house is beautiful....today. But with the first passing storm, the grounds soften and shift, and your hours of hard work soon crumble before you. While pouring a foundation may not be as visually exciting as seeing a house go up in its recognizable form, it is critical to get it right. No one would ever risk putting hours of work into building a house if it lacked a foundation to keep it solid, strong, and immovable.”
And yet, sometimes that’s what happens in our spiritual walk; we don’t pay significant attention to building the proper foundation, or to change the illustration slightly to apply to those of us who have been Christians for some time, we neglect our spiritual foundation and it begins to deteriorate and develop cracks thus causing the entire structure (our faith) to become unstable.
Our world has experienced some, shall we say, interesting times over the last number of years – the usual hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and wildfires, but also a global pandemic, world-wide economic issues, political upheaval in the Western world, all sorts of military conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee for the upcoming US Presidential election, and a myriad of other crazy things.
The Christian response to these things is often very panicky. When we hear from a Christian organization that “The events in the Middle East are evidence that Jesus is returning soon” we get uptight. Or when a conservative (Christian?) pundit tweeted (or Xed?) the Sunday after the attempt on Trump’s life, “If your pastor did not address the assassination attempt in today’s service you need to find another church. There is a tremendous spiritual warfare being waged in this country. This is no time for limp-wristed wokevangelicals” we get fired up for all the wrong reasons. Particularly in North America, the Christian response to things like Pride month, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, and other cultural indignities are often met with overactive emotion rather than biblical informed interaction. I’m amazed at how quickly Christians become reactive to the world around us; how quickly they lose faith, grab onto conspiracy theories, fall for click bait, and jump down rabbit holes of political insanity.
What we need in order to properly evaluate what is going on in our world are solid biblical foundations. Or to change the metaphor, we need a rigorously biblical lens through which to look at what is going on around us at any given moment in history. In particular, we need to be reminded of the very important and oft neglected issues regarding the nature of God’s sovereignty, how he works in the world, and what his purposes are in history (past, present, and future - an emphasis in our last sermon series on Ruth). We need to make sure our theodicy is right as we deal with questions concerning the nature of evil and the purposes and reasons for the multitude of bad things that take place in our world. We need a biblical perspective about when God is going to bring human history to its final end and what that means for God’s people. In general, we need to make sure that our foundation is solid, built on the rock of Christian Scripture. When we do this we will find ourselves with a biblical world-view which will ground us and make us firm and unwavering regardless of what crazy sinful thing may happen next.
But to get to this point we must be highly self-critical. We need to pause regularly to examine our spiritual foundation to make sure it is able to stand up to the pressures of living in a fallen world. If we do not, we will find ourselves in very tenuous positions. We will find ourselves in danger of toppling over, faltering, becoming double-minded or worse, abandoning our faith altogether if we do not have a proper, biblical foundation for our Christian faith. Developing and maintaining our foundation must be the daily work of each and every believer.
This is why we as a church seek to provide you with so many avenues of teaching and so many opportunities for relationships that will shore up your foundations. We have many social events so we can fellowship and then disciple each other, men’s and women’s studies, Sunday school for all ages, youth group, a burgeoning young adults group, sermons, podcasts, and YouTube videos. As we approach the start of a new church year in only a few weeks, make sure you plan to avail yourselves of these things - both the teaching and the interpersonal relationships. You need both in order to be “. . . steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” Commit this year to be an active part of the church so that you will not be of “those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.”
Soli Deo Gloria
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