The Immovable Rock

I’ve just read two news stories in the last few days of extremely wealthy men, billionaires, who have apparently committed suicide. Though the first man had recently lost 100’s of millions of dollars, that still would have left him with more money than I can count. The second man was by all accounts happy and his business was thriving.

I don’t know if these men committed suicide because of recent economic pressures. But I know that riches, the riches that many of us think would make us happy, was not enough to make these men happy. This life is fleeting and so is everything in it. Riches are fleeting, fame is fleeting, and youth most certainly escapes us the moment we become mature enough to appreciate it.

There is only one thing that is not fleeting, and that is the Lord God. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. We will never lose Him due to economic strife. He will never leave us when we become unpopular. And He will never forsake us when we become old. There is nowhere we can go that He has not already been and has paved a way for us.

And having Him in our lives will not make us only happy, but will bring us a joy that will fulfill us like nothing else on this earth can. We can try to fill up our lives with the temporal, but when we stake our lives on it, we build for ourselves a very precarious house of cards that can come crashing down and our hopes will be dashed.

But building our lives on the Rock of Jesus is no risk. Oh, there are valleys and mountains, pits and cliffs, and deserts and even middle-of-the-ocean-holding-onto-a-life raft experiences, but beneath it all, beneath our feet, is always the Rock. Our Father is for us a firm foundation and we need never be afraid as long as we’re holding onto Him.

Our hope should always be in Him and Him alone. Any other hope is false and fleeting.

“Whoever comes to Me and hears My Words, and does them, I will show you to whom he is like. He is like a man who built a house and dug deep and laid the foundation on a rock; and a flood occurring, the stream burst against that house and could not shake it; for it was founded on a rock.” (Luke 6:47-48)