A Shaky Foundation

My house has a problem.
It was built as part of a planned development of eight-three homes.  The developers were in a rush to build,  so they skimped on the foundation. Before a foundation was laid, the ground should have been pounded solid before the concrete blocks were put in place. This was not done, so now cracks appear in the wall and doors and windows stick.  the longer it goes without fixing the foundation, the worse these cracks become.
Foundations don't sell houses.  Vinyl siding, landscaping, front doors and hardwood floors sell houses.  People react to flash and elegance. They usually don't see the problems with a foundation until it is too late.
What some developer did with our house, most of us do with our lives. We focus on  the visible, "showy" parts, but neglect the foundation.  We want to impress the world with our beauty,  strength and creativity--and it works at first. But as time goes by our flaws become apparent to everyone.
This is what Jesus means at the end of Matthew 7 24-27
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.  And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
When we build our lives on a good  foundation it lasts. When we build a show cover over a bad foundation, it will eventually collapse. It isn't the floors or the doors or the windows, but the foundation that makes or breaks a life.
Mother Theresa once said that if you want to change the world, go home and attend to your family. Jesus said that if we are faithful in a few things, we may be rulers over many.   It's not the big projects we undertake in the world, but the little things we do in our tiny sphere of influence that makes the difference. 
The church in America institutionally has chosen to focus on the big things--evangelism, social reform,  building megachurches, and world missions.  This is great, if the foundation is in place, but it isn't.  There is a deep groaning today from within the Body of Christ, an ache that something is seriously wrong.  Cracks are showing in the walls of the church.  People visit and go away with a queasy feeling of vague disappointment.  The music is good, the preaching is great, but something isn't there. 
Within the church, we feel it, too. We know that somehow we are not so much professing Christians as professional Christians. We follow Christ professionally, but inside we are not followers.  We are employees of Christ,  but we do not know him.
We tell ourselves that our neglect of an  inner relationship to God is perfectly normal. We may even argue that it's an moral necessity. Why take time from an busy schedule of serving God to pursue an inner life of prayer? Why struggle with our inner thoughts,  when there is so much sickness in others?  We excuse our feelings of distance from God as the natural result of being so publicly active for Him.  We do not realize how much we resemble those builders who failed to look after a foundation, because they were in such a hurry to put up all those showy doors, floors and walls.
Now, we are seeing the results of this. Institutional churches are collapsing as the veneer of faith which we esteemed so highly crumbles. Christianity in America has great looking walls but no foundation.  We don't really believe what we say we believe and do not seek what we say we seek.
We have ignored the building of our own faith matrix to impress others with our showy success. Now our neglect comes back to bite us.
 The true foundation of our lives is faith--our ultimate concern.  It's more than just belief, but a  basis for all our thoughts,  feelings, and habits.  If we neglect Christ as our ultimate concern, then the  institutions we build will not survive.
What does it mean to build on God as a foundation? 
It doesn't mean to just mean to follow as set of godly rules, like the Ten Commandment.  That would be like having a house with strong crossbeams and braces, but still built on sand.  Strong crossbeams and floor joists will probably keep you together longer if your house is washed away in a flood, but it won't keep you forever. It isn't just God's foundation but God as a foundation that keeps us together.  It is building on an awareness of Him being alive and real.
Smith and Lundquist  in their book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers  coined a phrase that describes the commonly held view of God among many Christians--Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. This the idea that God gave us moral principles to follow that will help us with our lives, but nevertheless has little to do with us personally.  It sees the Bible (and in some cases nature) as an instruction book which gives us good advice  but does not require any personal connection with the writer.  It is religion reduced to "click bait.""Six principles God wants you to know about marriage." "Five principles that will make you happy." or "Six habits of an effective leader."  The principles are there and work up to a point, but ultimately it is moral structure to help us achieve our therapeutic needs, not connect us to an eternal, transcendent Deity.  They could be practiced by anyone of any faith and are not unique or different to ours.  There is nothing uniquely Christian about them, and they do not answer the basic question--what am I here for?
To press the metaphor of a house, we can talk about a three-step process of building our lives.
Foundation comes first--which is our ultimate purpose in life. The eight aspects of the faith matrix, previously discussed are how we connect to our central concern. For a Christian this is God, revealed in Christ.  It is not only to practice faith in Jesus but the faith of Jesus, who said his ultimate concern was "to do the will of My Father."  (John 8:28)  He found His ultimate concern in His earthly life by staying centered in the presence of His father.
How do we stay connected with God's Presence?  We can reflect at the end of the day on when and where that day did we felt close to God.  If it has been weeks or months without some sense of the Divine presence, we need to find out why.  Our foundation may be shifting.  We should not flippantly dismiss this lack of feeling by saying it doesn't matter.  It does matter whether we feel His Presence or not.  If we don't we need to find out why. The message of the Bible, both Old and New Testament is that God wants to have a personal relationship with us, and wants us to be with Him. If we have no sense or desire for His presence, then something is seriously wrong.
We build on the foundation of faith with the habits of the heart.  These are the spiritual practices that are like pillars which joists and frame to the house, joining eternal purpose with everyday life. These include for the Christian worship, prayer, fasting,  meditation, Scripture meditation, and intercession.  Then comes the horizontal habits of our lives,  like the joists and frame, which link us together with others.  These habits include soul conversations,  fellowship, forgiveness,  tolerance, and love.  These connect Christian with Christian, and strengthen us in mutual faith.
Outreach, justice, and social concern are also part of who we are as Christians, and are important. But these grow out of our inner life--the cannot substitute for it.  As important as our ministry in the world may be, it can and does easily become a way of hiding the fact that we can't get along with our churches or families.
I once met a college student who was an outspoken anti-war protestor. He told me that he was protesting because he loved love others and therefore hated all wars.  But he also disclosed that he  hated his parents and his family, who he thought didn't understand him. It was soon revealed that his   protest was not an act of love at all, but a way of escaping the obligation of caring for his parents. If he loved the world in general, he felt free from his obligation to love his own family.
Many churches and social movements get started this way. Instead of investing our love in the imperfect world  around us, we invest in an imperfect world that doesn't yet exist, and may never exist. We are like a contractor who can't build a straight wall, so hides his mistakes under the best vinyl siding.
Don't try to change the world before you make your part of the world livable. Invest time and effort into building a good foundation.   Build your faith matrix, and you will have something to give the world.
Good habits and value grow outward, like rings on a tree.  First we love God, then we love ourselves, our family, our fellow Christian, and finally our neighbor. Each level depends on the strength of what the one beneath it.
These articles are intended to lead us to the foundation of our faith, which is in God through Christ.
As we look at the ways we discover Him, we also discover the ways we can reveal Him to the world.


How strong is your foundation? How do you stay connected with it?  Do you find that is it easy to hide a shaky foundation from the world with religious or social activity?

Write a comment below, and let me hear from you.

Three Kinds of Faith

All people everywhere have some system of faith, whether it based on the truth or not.  Without faith in something,  life would be impossible.  Not all faiths lead to heaven, nor do all people believe in heaven. We can build our lives around all kinds of things. 
 It is not always obvious what category a person’s true faith lies, not even to the person themselves.  Many people who profess a religious belief,  do not hold that religious belief very strongly.  The center or their being is not located in religion, but in the pursuit of something else. This is what the Bible calls idolatry—worshipping a false god rather than a true one, or worshipping a true God without sincerity. God is merely a means to serving something else, though what we serve may be unclear. Their spiritual selves are double-minded and confused, and moral choices or necessarily belief becomes difficult.
Generally, we can divide these faith systems into three broad categories—self-based, community-based, and God-based. 
Self-based faith
Self-based faith finds its meaning in a person’s inner being, not in outer relationships.   No exterior standard or truth is necessary.  The poet William Ernest Henley in this kind of faith in his poem Invictus:
            “Out of the depths that cover me

Black as the pit from pole to pole

I thank whatever gods may be

For my own unconquerable soul.”

Or as Frank Sinatra put it,
         “For what is a man what has he got? If not himself then he has not.
            The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.”
In self-based faith, doing it our way is all important. Self-fulfillment or self-actualization is our ultimate concern.
This kind of spirituality goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Hedonists and Epicureans taught that the ultimate goal of life was personal pleasure—not the passing desires of the flesh, but the higher pursuits of the human spirit, which included personal self-discovery, self-expression and well-being.  This is not necessarily a selfish faith since love is usually considered one of the highest personal pleasures. A person can be loving and generous to others, but they do it to make themselves feel good. 
Another variant of self-spirituality is the modern “self-esteem” movement, which puts our own personal growth above everything else.  Getting in touch with our “inner selves”  is the same as getting in touch with God.  Relationships and activities that do not bring us self-fulfillment are considered detrimental to our spirits. 
 C. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy.
That Jones shall worship the "god within him" turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon - anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners."
Self-based faith is its lack of outside checks on morals or behavior. The only true discipline is self discipline. The only true morality is being true to ourselves.
 In anxious times, self-based faith easily becomes sheer selfishness. If we are on a sinking ship, why should we obey the cry “women and children first” if self is our own ultimate good?
The other problem with self-spirituality is that it has no real mirror.  Other people give us a measuring stick that helps us see ourselves. If we are absorbed totally pursuing our own self-esteem, we cannot discover our true selves.  We are like a person, living in a room without a mirror, who cannot see our own faults, or even our own beauty. We need other people to help us realize our own best interests.   
Community-based faith
Community-based faith finds its meaning in relationship to a community.  This community can be very large or very small--It can be all of humanity, our family, country, ethnic group, circle of friends, or even one other person.  Being part of any other set of individuals, losing our identity in a group, is the essence of community spirituality. Nationalism, patriotism, regionalism, racism, family values, and school spirit are all expressions of this kind of faith.

One of the most striking expressions of community-based spirituality I ever saw was while I was traveling in a van from Moscow to Bryansk, Russia.  Along the road was a monument to a battle fought in World War II. A woman in a wedding dress was there, stopping traffic. She spoke to our driver and we drove on.  The driver explained that in this province, brides on their wedding day stop cars at war monuments to remind people of the men who died, who never had a chance to marry.  

 It’s hard to imagine American brides spending their wedding day doing something patriotic. But in her mind patriotism came before marriage. Personal lives are secondary in Russian culture to the welfare of the whole, even on your wedding day.  

Conservative talk-show hosts talk about “family values,” as if family and God are the same.  Liberals talk about community values in the same way. We put American flags in our sanctuaries and national anthems in our hymnbooks without ever thinking that patriotism and godliness are the same thing.  Holy days like Christmas seem more about family and the universal kinship of humanity than the incarnation of a transcendent God.  Christmas stories like The Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life that are more about loving others than meeting Christ. 

Community-based faith produces altruism and self-sacrifice more easily than self-based faith.  But it creates problems. What happens when the many different communities of which we are a part do not agree with each other? When we have to choose communities which one comes first?

Another problem with community-based faith is how we treat those not in our community.

 In the Godfather movies, Michael Corleone chooses loyalty to his family (the Mafia) over life as a law-abiding citizen, and destroys his family in the process.  Soldiers like Irwin Rommel fought for the Third Reich because they believed that their country came first. Marxism, which claims to stand for uplifting of the common person, has produced more bloody dictatorships than any ideology in history.  Community-based faith can deny the value of those outside our community, even when it claims to serve all. Those who do not go along with community values are usually treated as enemies to be crushed. Morality is situational, absolute, based on what one community views as “the greater good.”

In the end, community-based faith has no outside source of morality, patriotism devolves to nationalism, creedalism become oppression, families become clans, and churches become cults. 

 God-based faith

God-based faith finds meaning beyond self and community in an all-wise Creator Who is the source of all truth and goodness.   God judges the actions of all countries, communities, races, and families.    

God based faith does not have all the answers, but it at least acknowledges the fact, which community and self-based faiths do not. When our ultimate concern is something in this world, we can only make moral choices based on what we see around us and the needs of the moment. But God-based faith looks for truth beyond ourselves, which keeps us humble.

One drawback to God-based faith, is that in order to have it, you must actually believe there is a God. Not only that, but you must believe He has spoken. Not only that, you also have to believe He is still speaking.   If we are not sure, or if we believe He is not speaking, there is no   lreason to make Him the central concern of our existence.  Deism, which believes God started the universe but is now has nothing to do with it, rarely produces anything like real faith.  If God is absent from the world, then there is no reason to base our lives around Him.  God may be our Creator,  but He is an absent one, and or no real value in our daily living.  Without faith in God,  we necessarily fall back on self-satisfaction or community life as the reason for existence.

Here are some questions to get you thinking:

Is your ultimate concern in life God, some community, or yourself?  Which one  do you serve on a day-by-day basis? If you had to live without self-fulfillment or family connections, could you find fulfillment in life?    If you believe in God, do you serve Him so you can be a better person or have a better community, or do you seek to be a better person or have a better community so you can serve God? 

Write a comment and share what you think.