How Firm Is Your Foundation?

Behold, I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious corner stone, and he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.
–1 Peter 2:6

Late one Sunday evening in August 2013, the guests at a Florida resort near Disney World began to hear some loud, unusual noises. Then windows began cracking and breaking, and door frames collapsed. One woman was sitting in a bathtub that suddenly levitated. The guests left most of their belongings behind and ran outside. As they watched, the ground underneath the resort collapsed in front of their eyes into a sixty-foot-wide crater known as a sinkhole.

A sinkhole is a massive pit that forms where instead of solid bedrock, there is an underlying layer of soft rock that easily dissolves. Over time, the ground becomes riddled with caves and cavities. When there is the right amount of groundwater in these cavities, the water helps keep the ground stable. But when streams under the surface are drained away by drought, the surface is left with no support whatsoever. Eventually, the earth gives way and swallows whatever is built on top of it, and that is what happened at this Florida resort. About forty minutes after all the guests were safely evacuated, much of one building collapsed into the sinkhole. What hours before had been a three-story structure was reduced to debris.

Obviously, a sinkhole is not the best place on which to build a resort. In fact, the only thing more foolish than building upon a sinkhole is building your life upon anything other than a commitment to Jesus Christ. That is the truth of the parable we are going to look at this week.

This is the parable Jesus told at the end of perhaps the greatest message He ever preached, which we call the Sermon on the Mount. In this sermon, Jesus covered every conceivable topic. He talked about divorce and remarriage. He talked about how to keep the center of your life on the spiritual rather than the material. He talked about how to live a pure life in a corrupt world. He talked about how to pray. He talked about how to respond when you are mistreated by others.

And when Jesus was wrapping up this sermon, He did so in a way that many preachers also do in their messages: He decided to close with a dramatic illustration. It is the story about two builders who constructed similar-looking houses on very different foundations.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “How Firm Is Your Foundation?” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2008.

AnneClaire Stapleton, “Florida Sinkhole Swallows Part of Resort near Disney World,” CNN, August 13, 2013, https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/us/florida-resort-sinkhole/index.html.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org