#dailydevotions, #cornerstonesinlife

Sacred Stones

Isaiah 28:16-17 “So this is what the Sovereign Lord says, “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed. I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line.”

What mother hasn’t found a pocket full of rocks in her child’s jeans?  Little kids seem to love to collect rocks. It doesn’t matter the shapes or the size.  They are treasures from their daily adventures outdoors.  They are part of the imaginary story of that day.  They slay monsters with them, they use them as pretend food, they build boundaries from the enemies. Sometimes I think this generation has missed a very healthy part of growing up because they can’t roam their neighborhoods and have space to freely use their imaginations.

My mom has alway had a great creative imagination. Last week, one of our cousins whom we have not seen in a few years came to visit.  My cousin said she was staying with my mom one afternoon and to keep her occupied Mom took her outside.  Mom collected small rocks and with them she drew an outline of the house they would use for their play house.  My cousin said she designed where everything would be.  Here is where we will have the kitchen, and over here we will have the living room and so on.  I thought about how she used to make up things for us girls to do outside too.   Rocks… who knew they could be so entertaining.    It amazes me that the Word of God uses the simple things to teach us life’s lessons.  There is a lot in the Bible about rocks! We will look at some of the scriptures about “rocks” for the next few weeks.

Last week we looked at Stones of Remembrances. Stones that were markers in our lives.  They were special memories of places that God met us in a personal way.

Today, I want us to look at a stone that is part of foundations. From ancient construction, we find the cornerstone is the first stone laid in a foundation.  Usually it is the largest, most solid and the most carefully placed stone in the building.   I am told when preparing to build any structure it is extremely important you get the foundation right.  Without a “square” foundation every material you add to it gets a little farther off.  This is known as compounding defects and it means that mistakes grow.

This is true in our spiritual lives also. If we don’t pay close attention to the beginning foundations of our belief systems, we get tangled up in half-truths and we build our lives “off-center”.  Just like the building that isn’t “square” if it doesn’t have the right cornerstone, we build on incorrect doctrines and we add our own convenient concepts to that doctrine. The  foundation for a life well lived is God’s truth.  We can rest assured that when we build on His truth, we will have a firm foundation and we can build a life that is strong and will stand through the storms of life.

In God’s words to Job (Job 38:1-4), God answers Job in the midst of his storms of life. “Why are you using your ignorance to deny my providence? …Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much.  Do you know how its dimensions were determined, and who laid its cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

God’s truth is the foundation.  Truth begins with Him.  Jesus who is God, who is creator, redeemer, and who is Truth is our cornerstone.  We build our faith upon Him and upon His truth.

Ephesians 2:20 “What a foundation you stand on now: the apostles and the prophets; and the cornerstone of the building is Jesus Christ himself! We who believe are carefully joined together with Christ as parts of a beautiful constantly growing temple (sanctuary) of God.”

1 Peter 2:6 “As the Scriptures express it,’See, I am sending Christ to be the carefully chosen, precious Cornerstone of my church, and I will never disappoint those who trust in Him.”

My sincere heart and my prayer is that we will walk in these truths.  We have a cornerstone, a squared beginning for building our lives so that we do not end up with a life that looks like the tower of Pisa.

How is your life’s building looking?  There are so many ideas about what “truth” looks like today.  Most of the time, today’s society lives by whatever truth is convenient for them.  It is all relative. Build your life on whatever lifestyle you feel is truth.  Do whatever makes you happy.  The problem is the foundation laid is off and each decision and every day we live contrary to God’s foundation makes our lives farther from an abundant life and leads to closer to destruction. What we see is more depression, more mental illness, more suicide.  We can disguise it by giving nice long medical names and call it a disorder but the truth of the matter is we all have a flesh that desires our own way.  Somewhere along the way whether we have made poor choices or someone has damaged our souls in some way,  it all leads back to not building the foundation of our lives the way God intended.  Rebuilding and correcting the foundation is hard, extremely hard but God is good and he can and will restore and rebuild what the enemy has long desired to destroy if we will turn to him and trust him.

As fellow sister and brothers are you living a life build on God’s truth?  If you are, then there is a fellow struggler who needs a helping hand to guide them to find their way to the cornerstone who can set their life on a solid foundation.   You and I are not the cornerstones but we are “living stones” which we will look at next time.

(scriptures used today came from the New Living Translation)

https://youtu.be/GcvfiuKZT7s

Christ the Rock by Kim Walker Smith and Skyler Smith