I have always been intrigued by Jesus’ illustration at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. As He brings the sermon to a close He tells the crowd that anyone who listens and obeys the things that He has taught will be like a man that built his house on a rock foundation, when the storms of life come his house will stand because it was built on a firm foundation. Jesus does not leave it there though, He then says that anyone that does not listen and obey His teaching will be like a man that built a house on a foundation of sand, and when the storms of life come his house will fall because it was built on an unsure or weak foundation. There are many points to be made from Jesus’ closing illustration, but the one constant in His story is the storm. Many of us would like to believe that if we build our lives on a strong foundation then we will never experience storms, but this simply is not true. Near the end of His life on earth Jesus told His apostles, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world.” We have never been given the ability or opportunity to live our lives in a way that will avoid storms; we have been called to and given the great opportunity to live our lives in a way that will endure them.
Hebrews 12 says “’Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.’ Now this, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken . . . that the things which cannot be shaken may remain.” We have all experienced shaking in our lives; events that we never saw coming or expected to experience appear and we are instantly faced with a reality different from what we had hoped. The key to life is not being unshaken but rather, being unshakable. Life shakes, we can’t get around that. As I write this I can think of the shaking of many people’s lives that I love and care for: unemployment shakes, illness shakes, loss of relationship shakes, rejection shakes, waiting shakes, disappointment shakes, death shakes, change shakes. Life shakes and honestly, I believe it is supposed to. We are such creatures of habit and have such an inability to hold on, to wait and to believe that many of us simply live today as if this is the way our entire lives will be and even should be lived. There are seasons in which God must shake our lives and allow shaking, not to harm us but to show us that we have gripped tightly to things that were never meant to hold us. Some of us are living in instability simply because we have refused to let go of the shakable things in our lives.
I once heard Ron Luce say that he often will ask a group of people to write down three things that they cannot live without. He then asks them to look closely at the list and determine how many of those things could actually be taken from them at any moment. He goes on to make the point that the things in our lives that we put all of our weight upon cannot be things that are finite because that will lead us to trade the infinite for things that we ultimately have no control over. If I have decided that I cannot live without my job, what happens if I lose it? If I have made my identity about my dreams, what happens if they were not God’s purpose for me? If I have determined my value by how others feel about me, what happens if they change their opinion of me?
If your life is shaking today, it is so that everything that is not given by God, everything that is not eternal, everything that is not worthy of your love can fall off and you can be left with what is secure, what you can depend upon and be sure of. Instability comes from clinging to, holding or standing on shakable things. The shaking creates faith and stability. It hurts to find out that what you hoped for is actually what is causing you to be unstable, but the goodness of God is that He shakes us not to make us fall but to make us stand firm. Let go of the things that are shaking in your life today, whatever they are, and hold tight and fast to the Word that Jesus has spoken to, in and over you. What is most important is not that the shaking stops, it is that the shakable things fall off, leaving you and I with “a kingdom that cannot be shaken.”