Dear Friend,
Wish you a very Blessed New year !!!
How do people best discover the presence of Christ in our lives and say, with deep desire in their hearts, "We have heard that God is with you"? Most likely it when they see how we confront the storms of life. During recent months, I have talked to many people who have seen their lives severely disrupted by the economic downturn. All of us have been affected by these forces.
Being a Christian does not exempt us from these storms. At some point, we all face hardships. Each of our lives can change instantly through illness, death or catastrophes of all kinds. The longer we live, the more storms we will face. The question is how we respond when the storms hit. If we respond in the right way, we have the potential to win many people to Christ.
Jesus helps us to prepare for these inevitable storms. At the end of His Sermon on the Mount, He tells the parable of the wise man who builds his house on a rock. When the storm hits, his house stands. The foolish man builds his house on sand. When the storm hits, his house falls.
Clearly, Jesus tells us in this parable that the key to successful weathering of the storm is the strength of the foundation. It is possible that on the outside, the two houses looked the same. The difference lay in the foundation.
That foundation, Jesus says, is learning to do what Jesus says.
Go to any church, and you will meet many people who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ. They go to the same church services, Bible studies, Sunday school classes and other activities, but not all of them have strong foundations. Building a strong foundation for life takes time. It takes effort. It takes commitment. These are things that many so-called "believers" are not willing to give. We live in a culture for which commitment is foreign. Instead, we are encouraged to live for the moment, to commit ourselves to nothing and to no one. We are distracted by many things. As members of our society, we are all guilty to some degree of having weak foundations. We all have tendencies to laziness and passivity. But we must fight these tendencies.
Jesus’ admonition to do what He teaches is later echoed by James when he says, "Faith without works is dead." (James 2:17)
What are the elements of a strong foundation? Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has already told us. They include:
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