The Surest Foundation
Sometimes a life’s momentary experience is worth a little publicity, if it can help one’s fellow man.
Recently I have been through the battle of my life.
It has been a most testing experience, yet one that has brought me closer to my God, my wife and my offspring and has greatly enhanced my compassion for the suffering of others.
Suffice it to say that this testing experience has been a significant health challenge of life-threatening proportions.
This has been the catalyst for me to look back over my life and adjudge just what it is that has, and that remains, of supreme importance. Just this morning, I read again the most succinct summary of that most important aspect of life, it’s surest foundation. It is contained in Psalm 111.
In the latter verses of that Psalm, the author declares of the great Creator God: “The works of his hands are verity and judgment; all his commandments are sure. They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in truth and uprightness” (verses 7-8).
For all my adult life—over half a century—I have been in free possession of that revelatory knowledge.
It has given me the surest foundation for moral judgments; it has provided the foundation for my life consecrated to my Maker. It forms the foundation for my marriage. It did so for the way we raised our children, and it continues as the anchor for our grandparental responsibilities. To the extent that my life’s calling as a pastor of God’s sheep may be regarded as a career, it is retained, under His government, as that “career’s” most sure foundation.
I would be the last one to set myself up as any example of success to anyone else, for God knows me for the sinner that I am. Yet I do claim to know by reason of 50 years’ experience that there is no more sure foundation for life than my God, His truth, His judgments and His sure commandments. And there is no more important work on Earth than His work of preaching the gospel of the coming Kingdom of God, wrapped in the warning of the impending Great Tribulation ahead that triggers the events leading to our Savior’s now so imminent return (Matthew 24:29-30).
As I pull through this momentary test of a lifetime, in complete faith that my God will heal me His way in His own good time to fulfill His purpose, I do so with a renewed commitment to teach, with ever more vigor and commitment, the great reality of the most sure foundation to success in life—to yield completely to, to fully embrace, and to strive with God’s help to live a life of absolute submission to His truth, His judgments and His commandments.
For it is only with such total submission to that most sure foundation in life that true redemption from man’s sinful state is possible (Psalm 111:9). It is the only way to live a morally responsible life.
As the psalmist declares: “The fear of the [Eternal] is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth forever.”
