A ROCKY FOUNDATION

  A woman who was more than 80 years old related a personal experience that had profoundly influenced her life. She said, “I recall that when I was a child, I used to watch a precious old saint in church as with closed eyes he sang with head thrown back and with tears trickling down over a perfectly radiant face, ‘Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing!’ Sometimes he sang in tune and sometimes way off, but nobody cared because he sang with his whole heart. I don’t remember a single word he ever said, but I was profoundly impressed by his face. I wanted to be a Christian like that. Since then I have often prayed, ‘O Father, help me to be a radiant Christian.'” Psalm 34 breathes with the spirit of exuberant confidence and faith in God. David wrote “I sought the Lord and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.   Those who look to him are radiant;   their faces are never covered with shame.   This poor man called, and the Lord heard him;   he save...

  Louis Albert Banks tells of an elderly Christian man, a fine singer, who learned that he had cancer of the tongue and that surgery was required. In the hospital after everything was ready for the operation, the man said to the doctor, "Are you sure I will never sing again?" The surgeon found it difficult to answer his question. He simply shook his head no. The patient then asked if he could sit up for a moment. "I've had many good times singing the praises of God," he said. "And now you tell me I can never sing again. I have one song that will be my last. It will be of gratitude and praise to God." There in the doctor's presence the man sang softly the words of Isaac Watts' hymn, "I'll praise my maker while I've breath (Our Daily Bread). Philippians is the most joyful book in the Bible. And yet the apostle Paul wrote it from a dingy Roman prison, a place we would typically associate with misery, the opposites of joy. He wa...

  A gardener had been especially careful in tending one particular rose, which was very fair to look at. But when he went one morning to his favorite rosebush, he found that the flower, of which he had taken such care, was gone. He was very upset, for he thought that some bad boy had stolen into the garden and taken away his best flower. He was complaining very bitterly of his loss when someone said, “The master has been down in the garden this morning, and he has been admiring this rosebush, and he has taken away that fine bud of which you were so proud.” Then the gardener was delighted that he had been able to grow a flower that had attracted his master’s notice. Instead of mourning any longer, he began to rejoice. He said “Why should I complain because you have taken from me what is really your own?” Psalm 34 is titled “ A Psalm of David when he pretended madness before Abimelech, who drove him away and he departed” . The superscription is intended to turn our attention ...