Building a Firm Foundation

This program was made from the following episodes:

"How Firm a Foundation"

"You Won't Drift into Godliness"

"Earthquake Ladies"

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Dannah Gresh: Would you call yourself wise?

Song:

The wise man built his house upon the rock,
The wise man built his house upon the rock,

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Listen, if you’re not growing, you will be carried away with error. You will lose your spiritual footing. You will fall.

Song:

And the house on the sand went splat.

Dannah: Today, we’ll talk about building our lives on the firm foundation of Jesus Christ.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh.

Well, friend, where I live, we call these hot end-of-season temps—the dog days of summer. I hope that as you're listening today, you're enjoying the air conditioning—or even a nice ocean breeze. 

You may be blowing up your inner tube right now. And if you are, I hope you have one of those cute pool floats that looks like a sprinkled donut or a flamingo—one that comes with a built-in pillow, of course. Ah, doesn't that sound relaxing? 

One of the best parts about spending an afternoon in an inner tube is knowing that you don't have to be anywhere else. Your job is just to lean back and let the current carry you away.

You know, if we're not careful, we can treat our spiritual lives like this. But if we want our lives to move toward Christ—and if our goal is to live in a way that honors Him—we can't expect to just float toward godliness.

At Revive '21 last October, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth talked about what it looks like to be intentional about our spiritual growth. Here's Nancy.

Nancy: How serious are you about becoming a grounded woman of God? Let me assure you that you will never drift into spiritual maturity. Coming to conferences like this may be a way to jump start the process. It may encourage you in the process. But it’s not going to do it for you.

Paul said in Colossians, “We struggle for you.” And we’ve done that. But I’m calling you to roll up your sleeves and struggle—in a good sense—to do the hard work, the labor, the birthing of the growing relationship with Christ. It won’t just happen. You have to be diligent.

Turn to chapter 3 of 2 Peter, verse 17. Here’s the warning: “Therefore, dear friends, be on your guard.” Paul had this same phrase in Colossians: “Be on your guard; be aware; beware.” Be on your guard about what? “So that you are not led away with the error of lawless people and fall from your own stable position.”

Now, Peter just said you won’t ever fall if you’re growing in these qualities. But now he says “Beware lest you fall.” That’s a warning. “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Listen, if you’re not growing, you will be carried away with error. You will lose your spiritual footing. You will fall. And not only will your life be damaged, but the lives of others around you will be impacted because they saw you claiming to be a Christian, claiming to love Jesus, and then they see you living in a way that is not obedient to God’s Word.

The wreckage, the carnage is horrific. That’s why we look to Christ. We lean into His grace. We say, “Lord, give me grace, and by the power of Your Holy Spirit, may I labor, work, be earnest, make every effort to add to my faith.”

We have to keep growing in the knowledge and grace of Christ. We never let down our guard. For how long? Until you’re eighty? No. Until you’re with Jesus, fully sanctified.

Rick Hansen was a paraplegic athlete in Canada. In 1985 he left Vancouver, British Columbia on a two-year, 25,000-mile trip around the world on his wheelchair to raise funds for spinal cord research. It was a grueling trip. He went through thirty-four countries on four continents. He faced all kinds of extreme weather—heat, rain, blizzards, windstorms. He made his way through deserts, forests, and mountains. Mile after mile after mile. Incredible weariness. Indescribable wear and tear on his body.

Finally, on May 23 1987, he returned to Vancouver. While he was still miles outside the city, people gathered along both sides of the highway to welcome him. As he got closer to the city, the crowd grew until there were thousands and thousands of people. They were cheering. They were applauding. They were throwing flowers.

And then Rick wheeled his chair up one final steep hill and headed towards the stadium where his two-year journey, 25,000-mile journey in a wheelchair to the stadium, where that journey would end.

Mark Buchanan describes the scene in his book called, Things Unseen. He says, 

A capacity crowd of 60,000 people, national and international dignitaries, rock stars, movie stars, television crews, family, friends, those lucky enough to get tickets waited inside, delirious with anticipation.

As Rick got nearer the stadium, the streets grew impossibly dense with people. Helicopters hovered overhead. Police in cars and on motorcycles flanked his side. Other wheelchair athletes joined him, coming up behind like a legion of charioteers.

As Rick came over the Candy Street Bridge, he could hear even above the din of the crowd around him, the roar of voices coming from inside the stadium. But not even that prepared him for what happened next.

Rick Hansen entered the stadium. He swooped through the wide lower gates and glided out onto the stadium floor, and 60,000 people went bezerk, leaping, dancing, blowing horns, exploding with applause, shouts of welcome and triumph, a roar to deafen, open the ears of the deaf, to raise the dead. And every time it seemed about to taper off, a fresh wind caught it and carried it higher, louder, brighter, fuller. Such a great cloud of witnesses.

We’re on a long, hard journey. We live in a world that is shaking. So I want to call to you, appeal to you: Be diligent. Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And as our theme verse says, Colossians 1:23, “Continue in the faith, stable and steadfast (grounded) not shifting from the hope of the gospel.”

“For in this way,” Peter says, “entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you” (v. 11).

Dannah: That was Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, speaking at Revive '21. 

Nancy's written a booklet on 2 Peter chapter 1, the passage she just walked us through. That resource is called, “Strengthen Your Faith.” It’s available to you as a free PDF download. You’ll find the link in today’s transcript at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend.

Friend, I hope that as you listened to Nancy you heard the need for us to build our lives on the solid rock of Christ. As she said, we’re on a long journey, and it’s hard. We live in a world that is shaking right now. That's why we need to build our life, our foundation, on the Rock of Jesus Christ.

Have you ever thought about how to strengthen a building? 

Every year, earthquakes cause mighty towers to collapse. One of the main reasons they fall apart is because they don't have a solid foundation. 

At Revive '21, a conference we hosted last year for women, my friend Mary Kassian shared about earthquakes. Here’s Mary talking about a special lady named Lucy.

Mary Kassian: Lucy Jones was two years old when an earthquake struck not far from her family home in Ventura, California. As the ground lurched, her mother took Lucy and her siblings and guided them into a hallway and shielded them with her body. That event impacted little toddler Lucy profoundly. When she grew up, she became a seismologist, and for forty years she has helped people in the state of California deal with earthquakes.

They affectionately call her the earthquake lady. She frequently appears on TV, educating and warning them about earthquakes and telling them what they can do to prepare. She coaches Californians on how to prepare for the big one, and she is the motherly voice of care and concern and calm that they turn to whenever the earth begins to shake.

I suspect that Eve learned how to be an earthquake lady. After the earth-shaking trauma of Cain murdering Abel, she bore another son, and she named him Seth. God’s promise that He would crush sin through Eve’s child had seemingly died with the murder of the godly Abel, but Seth was a bright ray of hope. Cain’s kids were becoming increasingly wicked, but Seth grows into a man and begins to have kids of his own. Look what it says in verse 26:

At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.

The increasing wickedness made them desperate for God; it made Eve desperate for God. You moms and grandmas with prodigals know that feeling.

There’s something else tucked into this passage that really excites me. Chapter 5 starts with the words, “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” and then it traces Adam’s family line from Seth to Noah.

Now, in the Bible, family records are introduced with these words: “These are the generations of so-and-so.” In Hebrew, this record is called a toledot. There are lots of toledots throughout Scripture, but this one is unique. It adds a phrase that is absent from all the others. It says, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” There’s only one other toledot in all of Scripture that uses those words, and it’s found in Matthew 1:1. “This is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

Luke traces Jesus’ human ancestry back even further. We find out that Jesus Christ is the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

So in the Bible there’s the book of Adam and the book of Jesus, the last Adam. Jesus Christ is the exclamation point at the end of Adam’s wild and crazy story. Cain was Adam’s firstborn son, but he isn’t listed in Adam’s toledot. After Seth was born, Adam and Eve had lots of other kids and grandkids, but they aren’t listed either. Seth’s family line, which pointed forward to Jesus, was the only storyline that mattered.

Every person in the human family has been born in a fallen condition, in the likeness of Adam, but Jesus rescues us from Cain’s fate. He redeems the massive fault line that sin has created in human sexuality. The incredible hope to which even this passage in Scripture points is Jesus.

God’s good design for human sexuality is not something we bash people over the heads with. Our goal is not to make people heterosexual, our goal is to introduce them to Jesus, the Lover and the Redeemer of their souls!

So, how do we respond to the cultural shaking that’s going on in gender and sexuality? We quake-proof our minds in truth and we become spiritual earthquake ladies. Earthquake ladies love people. They love others; they are compassionate, and they lovingly help others withstand the quake. They pass on truth from generation to generation to generation, to all their physical and spiritual babies and grandbabies.

Earthquake ladies call upon the name of the Lord. They are intercessors who wrestle on their knees for this generation, for their children and children’s children, against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of the dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms; because, it’s a battle.

In Colossians, the passage that Nancy talked about, we see that there is a battle for our minds. Human philosophy wants to pull us away from the truth of the Word of God. Earthquake ladies—and this is the most important point—always point people to Jesus, because Jesus is the only one who has the power to recreate and to redeem.

This is a tough topic. We are going to go out into the world, and this is not a popular stance—that God created us male and female. Many of you in this room have had quakes in your heart along this fault lines of sexuality. Maybe it isn't in regards to your gender, maybe you are very firm and convinced in who you are as a woman. Maybe it is in terms of other sexual behavior. That's your point of vulnerability because of the Fall. But because of Jesus, He wants to take that and write a new story.

Dannah: Amen. That’s my prayer for you today. I hope you’ll be an earthquake lady!

These messages from Mary Kassian and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth came from the Revive Our Hearts two-day teaching conference, Revive '21, last fall. This September, we will be hosting women from all over the world for True Woman '22, a three-day event that will strengthen your faith and equip you to follow Christ in this shaking world. You don't want to miss it. 

To find more information and register for this event, use the link in our transcript at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend, or head straight to TrueWoman22.com. 

It's hard to imagine anything shaking your world more than the news that you have cancer. But it was during her journey with breast cancer that Margaret Ashmore discovered where true strength is found.

Margaret shared her experience with Nancy DeMoss Wohlgemuth. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: You told me that you wouldn’t trade your experience with cancer for all the money in the world. Why would you say that?

Margaret Ashmore: Well, I’m reminded of the words of the old hymn, “How Firm a Foundation,” that says,

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.

I will tell you in all honesty that I had a considerable amount of dross that needed to be consumed and a great deal of refining that I needed to go through, and I just saw it as a God who loved me.

The Scripture says how blessed is the man that God chastens and corrects. God’s only real motive through chastening is to draw His child back to deeper fellowship with Himself. That’s exactly what God did through the cancer that He allowed in my life. His severe mercy—it did draw me closer to God. It did give me a clearer idea of what is important in life.

Interestingly, too, what I thought were such problems—after cancer, those things seemed so trivial. I just didn’t get upset about the little things in life anymore, for the simple reason that I was so glad to be alive! Just going for a walk in the morning and being able to breathe, being able to walk, being able to think, being able to see . . . it just made me realize what was important in life.

Nancy: Margaret, through your breast cancer process, did you think about death? Were there times when you thought you were going to die, or that you might die? How did you process that?

Margaret: When the New Testament speaks of death for those who have rejected Christ, it uses the Greek word thanatos, which means “separated from God.”

The real problem of death is the separation from a holy God. But when He speaks of the death of a believer, He uses, interestingly, the word depart. You’re just going from this world to the world God has prepared for you, to His eternal kingdom.

This is a story that someone told me that helped me deal with the prospect of my death. It’s a story of a person who was going to an intersection, and they saw what they knew was an eighteen wheeler just careening toward them They were on a collision course with this eighteen wheeler.

They said they just literally braced themselves, closed their eyes, and waited for the impact. What they didn’t know is that the eighteen wheeler was going over a bridge, and just its shadow had crossed over them.

I thought, “That is why the Scriptures say ‘through the valley of the shadow of death,’ because that is all it is for a believer” (Ps. 23:4). It is just a shadow that will pass over us, and we’ll instantly be translated into God’s eternal kingdom.

So when I dealt with the idea of death, I thought, Jesus Christ has already taken the impact of death through His death and resurrection—the impact of sin.

He’s taken it upon Himself, and He’s paid for it judicially before God, and now death to me is departing, and it is as painless as a shadow. I don’t mean in terms of physical pain but just the fear of death. 

Dannah: Did you hear how strong Margaret Ashmore is in what she believes? Margaret’s been reminding us that Christ is our firm foundation, no matter what we face. 

She shared from Psalm 23. I don't know about you, but I never tire of hearing those words: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me."

God's Word gives us hope. It tethers us to Christ. It's a life-changing resource we have right at our fingers—but we have to grab onto it. Will you do that today? 

Song: “Psalm 23” 

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil.
You are with me.
You rod and staff they comfort me,
They comfort me.¹

Dannah: If you're looking for more ways to ground your heart in God's Word, make sure you get a copy of one of my favorite books from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Lies Women Believe is the perfect handbook to help you stand firm in God's truth. 

When you make a donation to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts this month, we'll send you the new softcover edition of Lies Women Believe. You can do so by calling 1-800-569-5959, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. 

Building a strong foundation takes time and knowledge. As we’ve talked about today, building our lives on the Lord Jesus Christ is the sure way. Next week, we’ll take this idea of building foundations and apply it to marriage.

Thanks for listening today. We are all about building strong foundations around here. Thanks to our production team for making today possible. I asked them what their must needed tools are when building a project: CJ Raymond said Google. Rebekah Krause loves a sharp chop saw. A dependable nail gun is always on Justin Converse’s list. Michelle Hill feels powerful with her power drill. Erin Davis and Katie Laitkep are sitting this one out because they are writers. They’ll document how to build a solid foundation. But Phil Krause is going to start from the very beginning. He’ll cut the tree down, use the hydraulic log splitter, and have fresh cut wood to begin his project! More power to you, Phil. And for Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh, and I have to say, "Hey, Farmer Bob . . ." (That's my husband.)

Revive Our Hearts is calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

“Psalm 23,” The Corner Room, Psalm Songs, Vol. 1 ℗ 2015 The Corner Room.