A Sure Foundation

by: Lou Lotz

I am staring out my window into an eastern sky that
is slate gray and stitched with
lightning. Dark, boiling clouds are hurrying in my
direction. There’s a storm coming.

What are you counting on to get you through the
storms of life? I have seen storms of
pain or misfortune slam into seemingly secure human
houses, and they collapsed in a heap.
But equally savage storms have beat against other
houses, and I have watched as people
endured the storm with dignity and faith. The difference
was not in the severity of the
storm, but in the sturdiness of the foundation upon
which the house was built. There is
only one sure foundation on which to build your life,
and that is Jesus Christ. “On Christ
the solid rock I stand,” goes the old hymn, “all other
ground is sinking sand.”

On Lake Superior back in sailing-ship days, so the
story goes, a sailor was washed
overboard during a violent storm. The waves carried him
onto a rock that jutted out of the
water a mile from shore. There he spent the night,
holding onto that rock for dear life as
the storm raged around him. The next morning the sailor
was spotted by a rescue vessel and
saved. One of the man’s rescuers said to him, “You must
have been shaking all night on
that rock.” The sailor replied: “I did shake. But the
rock didn’t.” Build your house, your
life, on the rock that doesn’t shake, the risen Lord,
Jesus Christ.