A Solid Foundation

When the bottom drops out of your world, what's holding you up?

I wrote in an earlier post that "there is something about looking at your own son in a casket that makes you assess whether you truly believe that God is as good as He claims to be."  It's when your very foundations are shaken that you truly discover whether your life is founded on something solid or not.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm getting older, or maybe it's the starkness of recent events, but in the last few weeks, I have found myself to be more pensive, more contemplative.  Thinking back over the week after David died, I recall my cousin's husband asking how we were holding up.  That had been a very hard day; we had been choosing a grave site for our son and for ourselves.  Brings you face to face with your mortality, let me tell you! I remember saying, "Of all the things a dad longs to do for his child, choosing a casket and a burial plot are not on that list." And I look back and ask, "What kept us going that week? How were we able to keep putting one foot in front of the other and do what we needed to do?" As we took care of things needing to be addressed, we had several people in the "business" tell us, "You're doing very well, considering ..." So why?

We all tend to live under the illusion that we have some control over our lives.  Poet William Ernest Henley wrote, in his poem "Invictus", "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul." Are we? Are we really?

It's when tragic and overwhelming events occur, such as the death of a child or spouse, or a betrayal and divorce, or the confirmation of a life-altering or life-threatening disease, or some other foundation-shaking situation, that we realize we are NOT in control; we have little, if anything, to say regarding the circumstances of our lives. 

In times like these, religion isn't going to get you through, not with calm assurance.  It's just not enough, because it's not what we were designed for.  Here's what I mean. 

Timothy Keller writes:

How Religion works: If I obey and please God, then He will accept and love me.

So when someone says to me, "Good thing you have your religion/your faith to see you through." my concern is that they are thinking, "Mike and Judy, they're good people and they have faith in God. Their faith will give them the strength to see them through."  Inadvertently, there's a thought that the source of the strength is me, is my faith, is my belief.  Please, let me assure you, that's incorrect; I am not a good person; I fully agree with the Bible (Jeremiah 17:9) that my "heart is deceitful, above all else, and desperately wicked".  And my adherence to a set of rules or traditions, or my membership in an institution, no matter how devoted, will leave me wondering, when my world is rocked, "What was it all for?"

Timothy Keller goes on to remind us that the message of the Bible is that God is already loving us while we are waving are fists in His face and saying "NO!"  It was out of His love for us that He created us in the first place.  He desired to have a relationship with us.   He created the first man, had him recognize his need of a partner and created a woman for him, and then spent regular time with the two of them in relationship.  How do we know that?  When they had rebelled against Him and eaten the fruit from the one tree out of thousands He had instructed them not to eat of, it says that "they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden ... and the man and his wife hid themselves..." (Gen. 3:8)  How did they recognize the sound of God walking in the garden, unless that was what He did on a regular basis and it was familiar to them? He's not a God of religion; in fact, time and again in the Old Testament, He tells the nation of Israel things like "...this people ... honour Me with their lips, but have removed their hearts far from Me, and their fear toward Me is tradition by the precept of men..."  Does God desire the "tradition"? Or does He desire a willing heart?

In Acts 19:11-20, some men who were the "sons of Sceva" were trying to do what Paul had been doing, in terms of healing people and freeing them from demonic spirits.  They tried to use Paul's words, "In the name of Christ whom Paul preaches ..." to invoke the power, as if it was about using some kind of algorithm to manipulate God into doing what they wanted.  It went very badly for them! I guess that's what I think of when I hear the term "religious".  When I was "religious", I treated God somewhat like a lucky rabbit's foot.  I'll "do church", live clean, behave morally, and thereby God will be obliged to do what I want of Him.  It was all a facade, a thin veneer.  Underneath it all was a heart that was very broken and rebellious!  God had to teach me that He wanted my heart; He desired my obedience and devotion as a result of seeing His overwhelming love for me, a love willing to go to the extent that He did not even withhold the Son He loved, but sent Him to die to make it possible for me to be forgiven and to be in relationship with Him.

Knowing how much I am loved by the God of the universe is the only thing that is constant and certain when all around me seems to be crumbling.  At David's funeral, we sang an old children's hymn, that I had learned when I was a little boy and that I would often sing to both my kids when they were little and lying in bed, getting ready to go to sleep.

I am so glad that our Father in heaven

Tells of His love in the Book He has given.

Wonderful things in the Bible I see

This is the dearest, that Jesus loves me!

Though I forget Him and wander away

Still He does love me wherever I stray

Back to His dear loving arms would I flee

When I remember that Jesus loves me!

Oh, if there's only one song I can sing

When in His beauty I see the Great King

This shall my song in eternity be:

"Oh, what a wonder that Jesus loves me!"

Chorus:  I am so glad that Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me!

I am so glad that Jesus loves me, Jesus loves even me!

Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, says (I Cor. 13:13) "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."