he same thought
when he says, 'Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid. Let
every man take heed how he buildeth thereon.' Jesus Christ is the
foundation of our lives, if we have any true life at all. He ought to be
the foundation of all our thinking. His word should be the absolute
truth, His life the final all-satisfying, perfect revelation of God, to
our hearts. 'In Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.'
The facts of His Incarnation, earthly life, Death, Resurrection,
Ascension, and present Sovereignty--these facts, with the truths that
are deduced from them, and the great glimpses which they afford into the
heart of God and the depths of things, are the foundations of all true
thinking on moral and social and religious questions, and on not a few
other questions besides. Christ in His Revelation gives us the ultimate
truth on which we have to build.

He is also the foundation of all our hope, the foundation of all our
security, the foundation of all our effort and aspiration. His Cross
goes before the nations and leads them, His Cross stands by the
individual, and anodynes the sense of guilt, and breaks the bondage and
captivity of sin, and stirs to all lofty emotions and holy living, and
moves ever in the van like the pillar of cloud and fire, the Pattern of
our lives and the Guide of our pilgrimage. It is Christ Himself who is
the foundation, and His death and sacrifice which are the sure basis of
our hope, safety, and blessedness; and it is only because He Himself is
the Foundation, and what He has done for us is the basis of hope and
blessedness, that He has the right to come to us and say, 'Take My
commandments as the foundation on which you build your lives.'

The Rock of Ages cleft for us, is the Rock on which we build if we are
Christians; the other man built his house upon the sand. That is to say,
shifting inclinations, short-lived appetites, transitory aims, varying
judgments of men, the fashions of the day in morality, the changing
judgments of our own consciences--these are the things on which men
build, if they are not building upon Jesus Christ. Like a vessel that
has a raw hand at the helm, you sometimes head one way, and then the
puff of wind that fills your sails dies down, or the sails that were
flat as a board belly out a little, or you are caught in some current,
and round goes the bowsprit on another tack altogether. How many of us
are pursuing the objects which we pu