A ROCKY FOUNDATION

  In his book “The sickening mind”, Paul Martin wrote, "during the Gulf War of 1991, Iraq launched a series of Scud missile attacks against Israel. Many Israeli citizens died as a result of these attacks. After the war was over, Israeli scientists analyzed the official mortality statistics and found something remarkable. Although the death rate had jumped among Israeli citizens on the first day of the Iraqi attacks, the vast majority of them did not die from any direct physical effects of the missiles. They died from heart failure brought on by fear, worry and stress associated with the bombardment. Psychological studies conducted on Israelis at the time showed that the most stressful time was the first few days leading up to the outbreak of war on January 17, and peaking on the first day of the Scud missile attacks. There was enormous and well-founded concern about possible Iraqi use of chemical and biological weapons. The government had issued to the entire Israeli populat...

  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...