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On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not
prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of
power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away
from me, you evildoers.’ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods
came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it
had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does
not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain
fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and
it fell—and great was its fall!” It
is one thing to assert that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior. It can be
quite another to actually live the truth of those words. It is quite easy to
profess our faith in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It can be very
difficult at times to actually live out in our daily life what our faith in God
demands of us – as Jesus makes abundantly clear in this passage from
Matthew’s Gospel. If our faith is not built on a sure foundation, whenever
that faith is put to the test, there is the great likelihood that we will fail
that test. A
good contractor will tell us unequivocally that unless the foundation is strong
enough to support the building, only a fool would proceed with erecting the
structure. Although I have never built any house or other structure, I have this
sense that it probably takes more time and more energy and even more resources
to build the foundation than it does for any other part of the building,
proportionally speaking. It
takes a long time to build a strong faith foundation. In fact, it probably takes
a lifetime. That does not mean that we will never or should never live out our
faith because we are always working on the foundation. It simply means that we
will always have to tend to that foundation, checking it constantly. I have
lived in several houses that were over one hundred years old. One of them had a
firm foundation because the previous owners always checked to make sure the
walls were sealed from water erosion and the support beams were strong. They
even had the beams changed to insure the continuing support of the building. I
lived in another home in which you could see daylight through the basement walls
and see water on the floor from seepage. There
are times when my faith seems to have cracks in its foundation walls and there
other times my faith seems to have been built on the Rock of Gibraltar. But even
that proverbial rock of faith will erode away if it is not tended to on a
regular basis. The problem is that we often don’t check the basement often
enough or carefully enough. And before we know it, fissures in our faith life
appear and we wonder what happened, why we doubt, why there are problems. We
must be constant in examining our faith, strengthening our faith, living out our
faith. It is a never-ending process. I
pray: Lord, help me to grow in my faith in you each day of my life. Never allow
me to take this faith for granted but to always do what I must do to strengthen
it so that I can live it to the best of my ability each day. Amen. |