Dear Friends,

With tsumnamais, mudslides, floods (in our area now--the Ohio River looks more like the Ohio Ocean), and the recent (about a month or so ago) unusual-for-us 22" of snow (at our very doorstep) in the news, I have been thinking of "for sure and for certain" things. The most important one is not what we build our house on, but what we build our lives on. The wise man, Scripture tells us, builds his house upon a rock (Matthew 7:24). Jesus compares the man who hears and does His words as the wise man building on a rock.

A friend who writes a "Monday Morning Thoughts" column on another listserver makes some interesting observations below about "foundations" in her column this week:

"Rattling around in an eclectic belief system, modern man finds himself against a brick wall. Reason has failed, bringing alienation between man and God, himself and others, and himself and himself. Modern man, in elevating reason to an absolute, has found reason lacking and is left without moorings. To be intellectually honest, any truth which relies on itself for verification is not reliable.

"Without absolutes revealed, from without, by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers." --John Owen

Reason collides with self-opinions producing an intellectual minefield. Modern man must either get accustomed to ever changing foundations for thinking or find something solid on which to stand. The loss of solid ground for intellectual and spiritual anchoring can be cast on God, who acts in behalf of truth, humility and righteousness, displaying Himself (Psalm 45:4). To cast oneself on this God who can show Himself is to wait in an instant world for understanding and wisdom. With the psalmist we pray, "Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long (Psalm 25:4,5)"

Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.
Psalm 43:3
(From "Monday Morning Thoughts", a column written by Donna J. Newton)

I found further writings regarding trustworthy "foundations" from a post I sent to another list several years ago. Excerpts are included below.

May we all be diligent in building on the one sure Foundation in a broken and unstable world. May we see and follow the paths of the One who ever loves and cares for us.

In Him,
Elaine

August, 2001
I've just started reading a book titled _Seven Reasons Why You Can Trust the Bible_ (Moody Publishers, 2001) by Erwin W. Lutzer (Senior Pastor at Moody Church in Chicago). I've gotten past the table of contents and as far as the preface and introduction (and have "scanned" some through the book), and already I'm wanting to "share" with someone what has been written! So without further ado, here are some excerpts . . .

" . . . As Francis Schaeffer told us, only a strong view of Scripture can withstand the powerful pressure of relativistic thinking.

"When the Bible, which is rooted in the soil of history and logic, is either rejected or reinterpreted to fit any belief, everyone is on his own to guess at the answer for ultimate questions. Since there is no umpire to judge various belief systems, the game of life is played with every participant creating his own rules. . . . .

"If there is any good news it will have to come from Christians who know what they believe and why. We are called to bring a message of hope in the midst of despair; we are asked to suffer if need be for the only message that shines a light in the darkness. Without a strong belief in the Scriptures, we simply will not be able to stand against the encroaching darkness. Francis Schaeffer told us many years ago, "Here is the great evangelical disaster--the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this--namely accommodation; the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age."

" . . . I emerged from this study more confident than ever that God has spoken to us. He has not stuttered. We have a word from outside the universe, a love letter from a personal God."

"With the onslaught of the modern _zeitgeist_ (spirit of the age) which chips away at the notion of biblical authority, I trust that this rigorous review and restatement of the trustworthiness of Scripture will stimulate discussion and inspire confidence. I pray that those of us who already love the Bible will love it more; and those who have, for whatever reason, come to distrust it, will be led to the conviction that God has indeed given us a letter that can be believed. Thankfully, we are not alone in the cosmos."

"If I were the devil," wrote J.I.Packer, "one of my first aims would be to stop folk from digging into the Bible. . . . I should do all I could to surround it with the spiritual equivalent of pits. thorns, hedges, and man traps to frighten people off." Thanks be, the devil cannot keep us from probing the depths of Scripture.

"The Scriptures themselves give us this promise. 'Blessed is the man [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. And he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers' (Psalm 1:1-3). . . . "

"Voltaire said that in a generation the Bible would be outdated, but after his death, his house was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society to spread Bibles throughout Europe. As we shall see, the Bible has often been pronounced dead, but the corpse never stays put.

"In France there is a monument to the Huguenots who died as martyrs for the cause of Christ. Acknowledging that the Bible has been able to withstand the hammer blows of its critics, these words are inscribed on the monument:

Hammer away, ye unregenerate hands
Your hammer breaks, God's anvil stands.