Nearing Home - Billy Graham [49]
SHIFTING FOUNDATION OR SURE FOUNDATION
No one escapes life without difficulties. Some experience bad health even in their youth. Some born into wealth lose everything. Some seek love and find only rejection time and again. Without a firm foundation, life’s load is harder to bear. God has a purpose for each of us, and He desires that we build upon Him, the very foundation He has put in place. Scripture speaks of craftsmen fastening the work of their hands with pegs “that it might not totter” (Isaiah 41:7 NKJV). When Christ’s hands were pierced by spikes and fastened to the cross, He became our secure foundation. D. L. Moody once said, “Give your life to Christ: He can do more with it than you can.”
Recently I heard about a family who built a house several years ago in the Appalachian Mountains not far from our home. The site was on a hillside with a beautiful view overlooking the nearby valley and facing a range of mountains in the distance. After they drew their plans and chose their builder, the project proceeded on schedule, and some months later their new house was completed. They were delighted with the result and soon were settled into the home of their dreams.
But after a year or so, their dream turned into a nightmare. The first hint of trouble was a slight depression in the soil around a certain section of the foundation; then as time went on, the depression deepened and cracks began to appear in the walls of the house. They became alarmed and called in a structural engineer to investigate. He discovered that part of the concrete for the foundation had been poured over a pit filled with debris—old tree stumps, loose rocks, even wood left over from their construction project. As this wood decayed, the ground gave way, and the walls began to shift, making the whole house dangerously unstable. Whether by ignorance or neglect, the contractor had built their house on a defective foundation, and his error proved both costly and time-consuming to correct.
Just as this house needed a solid foundation, so we need a solid foundation for our lives—an unchanging system of beliefs, goals, and moral values that will keep us stable and secure, even in the midst of life’s storms. No matter our age, nothing prepares us for the future like a solid moral and spiritual foundation based on God’s will for our lives.
As I was reviewing this chapter, the world learned of a 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami that devastated parts of northern Japan, causing thousands of deaths and even slightly shifting the earth’s axis. I was grieved by the suffering and loss of those who survived, and my first reaction was to pray for them and ask God to help us assist them in whatever ways we could. My son Franklin immediately went to the affected area and began working with Japanese churches to bring aid to those whose lives had been turned upside down by the disaster.
I couldn’t help but think of those who had once lived there and now had lost everything. They had built their houses on what they assumed were secure foundations; living in an earthquake-prone area, many probably had taken extra precautions. But when the ground suddenly shifted beneath their feet and the tsunami’s massive wall of water rushed across their land, those foundations crumbled, leading to one of the greatest natural disasters in recent memory.
Terrible events like this remind us of what can happen if we build our lives on the wrong foundation—on one that may seem adequate in normal times but can’t withstand life’s stresses and strains. Tragically, however, many people never stop to think about this or examine the foundations on which they are building their