What will you do when you realize that the foundations of your life aren’t as permanent as you thought?
Before D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones became one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century, he had been a promising young medical doctor, trained at the best British medical school and the protégé of the most well-known surgeon at St. Bart’s Hospital in London. Just as he was reaching the apex of his medical career, one of his colleagues, another rising star, was dating a young woman who unexpectedly got sick and died.
A few days later, the man appeared at Lloyd-Jones’ door and asked to sit with him by the fire. They sat there for two hours, in silence, as the man kept his gaze on the fire. Lloyd-Jones’ friend had seen the joy of his life taken from him—and he had no response.
This encounter changed the trajectory of Lloyd-Jones’ life. Seeing the vanity of all human greatness, he left medicine to become a preacher, reasoning that even the best medicine, valuable as it is, cannot stop death.
Our perceptions and best wisdom are always in flux. Everything is crumbling, no matter what it is. Tim Keller once said that many seek the Lord after realizing their “cities” have no foundation. Like Lloyd-Jones’ friend, they encounter some crisis so acute that they aren’t equipped to handle it. It feels like the ground itself is giving way under their feet.
We all need a city with a lasting foundation. Hebrews 11 tells us that’s what Abraham realized (Hebrews 11:10). When God blessed him, he called Abraham away from what was familiar and secure to an unknown place where the only thing Abraham had left was to depend on him. Abraham knew all about the impermanence of this life.
False Foundations and Crumbling Cities
The “cities” of this world seem secure, but it takes wisdom to realize that they provide no solid foundations. Think of how difficult, for instance, it can be to keep a group of friends, or even family, connected throughout the years. It seems as though someone is always moving on or changing.
Or think of how our beauty and talents lack foundations, as our bodies grow and slim, wrinkle and age, all while we try to cling to our youth. Those cities simply don’t last.
Or look at the changing value systems of our world. One hundred years ago, Christianity was attacked by Enlightenment thinkers for being too pessimistic about human nature. Progressive thinkers at the time said humanity was basically good; thus, reason, education, and science were all that was needed to achieve a perfect society. Well, is that what the twentieth century offered us? Not so much. Instead, we got WWI, WWII, Communism, the Cold War, institutionalized racism, and the #metoo movement—all of them in the most educated and scientifically progressive nations in the world. Now, more than ever, we’re convinced of man’s innate depravity. The irony is that Christianity’s attackers now repudiate the Enlightenment and try to associate Christianity with it, saying Christians are too positive about human nature.
Every generation attacks the previous generation’s ideas because they don’t work. Often, those critiques are valid. But Christianity offers a solid foundation in the midst of chaos.
God’s Severe Mercy
What if you experienced those crumbling foundations, not as a reason to despair, but as God’s mercy toward you?
Sheldon Vanauken, a student at Oxford who had been led to Christ by C.S. Lewis, was a gifted, intellectual student who bantered with Lewis about faith. In a similar event to Lloyd-Jones’ friend, when his fiancée died, Vanauken began to see the emptiness of all his intellectual philosophy. The letters he and Lewis exchanged, included in his book A Severe Mercy, are fascinating. One day, Vanauken wrote,
It’s like I was standing on this cliff, and over there was Jesus, but to get to him I’d have to leap, to take a leap of faith, which I didn’t want to do … but when I looked down, I realized that the cliff I was standing on was also crumbling. I had a choice. I could jump out to something that seemed uncertain, or stay standing on something even more uncertain. Either way it was a choice.
It is terrifying to realize our foundations are crumbling. But only if there is no safe way out. God doesn’t shake our foundations to make us despair, but to make us trust in him. He shows us the uncertain terrain we’re standing on so we’ll take the leap to him.
A Lesson from the Lumberjack
I love the story of the lumberjack who was preparing to cut down every tree in a certain section of a mountain forest. Just before he began, he noticed a bird building its nest atop one of the trees. Not wanting to harm the bird or its young, the lumberjack took a mallet and pounded on the base of the tree until the bird flew to another tree and began to build its nest there. But since the lumberjack knew that tree was coming down too, he repeated the process with that tree. So the bird moved to a third tree, which the lumberjack knew was coming down also, so he did it again.
He knew that every tree in this part of the forest was coming down, so the lumberjack and the bird repeated this dance a half dozen times, until the bird, highly annoyed, flew away and built its nest on the side of a rock face. The bird probably never understood why the lumberjack attacked each tree he attempted to build his nest in, but the lumberjack’s motive was not cruelty, but compassion. The lumberjack knew that every tree in the forest was about to come down, and he wanted the bird to build its nest in a place axes couldn’t touch it.
That is often why God shakes the foundations in our lives—not out of cruelty, but in compassion. He wants us to build on a better rock, to be inhabitants of a more eternal city.
God told Abraham to leave everything familiar and comfortable. Why did Abraham say yes? Of course he realized God was God, but Hebrews 11:16 says, “But as it is, they [i.e., people of faith like Abraham and Sarah] desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (ESV). Abraham not only knew who God was, he knew that whatever God could offer him was better than anything he was leaving behind in Ur.
At some point in our lives—physically, relationally, intellectually—we realize we’ve built upon unstable foundations, watching as our world crumbles around us. In those moments, we have a choice: Will we cling to faulty foundations or follow God’s lead into something better?
