31 January 2008 Devotion for Today "Foundations" Psalm 82

31 January 2008 Devotion for Today "Foundations" Psalm 82

This text in Scripture takes me back to the First Baptist Church
of Zelienople, Pennsylvania in 1990. We were constructing our first
unit building. Escavations were going very slow throughout the entire
summer because of rain. Mud kept sliding down the hillside into the
giant crater that had been dug for the church basement and cracking
the cinder-block walls. No matter how much we tried strengthening
them-filling them full of iron bars and cement-the walls kept
collasping because of the pressure of the mud. The trenches were
redug again and again until someone in a volunteer work crew from
South Carolina spoke up and said, "Isn't this church supposed to be
built upon the Word of God?" I said yes, but I didn't understand his
comment until later that week, after a lot of trouble rebuilding the
walls and laying new drainage tile, the walls stood firm. I asked
the volunteer team what they had done to make it work this time. It
came out that one of the team members had a pocket sized New Testament
that he had been reading while on the job. He had laid it on the wall
next to his lunch sack. When he returned for it, he noticed that the
New Testament was gone. Looking down into the hole of the cinderblock
where it had been laying, the man could barely see the corner of the
cover of the testament way down deep into the crevice. He tried in
vain to retrieve it by sticking his hand down into the hole. His hand
was too big.

The construction worker decided to leave it alone, and more blocks
and cement were built on top of it where it remains to this day. And
since then, I am told, there has has not been one problem of the walls
cracking, or any leakage of water in the church's basement.

You might be thinking that this is purely coincidental. Perhaps it
was. But the truth is, there is nothing like God's Word to correct our
foundations. The Psalmist laments his society in Psalm 82:5 "They know
not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the
foundations of the earth are out of course." The reason- man builds
on the shifting sands of his own limited reason. We may determine to
set our foundations in one way, but time and deterioration will inevitably
cause them to shift if they are not built upon God's Word. The pressures
of the world may cause them to buckle and crack if not reinforced by
the iron bars and cement of godly resolve.

What are your foundation built upon? Go around and examine them.
Are there any cracks or places where they have shifted from whence they
were originally set? Go back to the Word, my friend. Have a blessed day!

(from 29 September 2000)