A Room With A View

It fascinates me that property in California’s coastal mountains is some of the most expensive anywhere.  Is it the weather?  Is it the view?  Is it the prestige?  Is it a combination of factors?
Whatever it is, we desert-dwellers 150 miles to the east often think of those mountainside homes, but it’s not their location nor their beauty that brings them into focus…it’s the fires.

 If not the fires, its the mudslides.

If you read this from some California coastal mountain, please give me a little grace as I write about a life lesson from Jesus.  In Matthew 7, verses 24-27, Jesus wrapped up His “Sermon on the Mount.”  His conclusion was a warning about where we build the “house” of our life.  The structure, He said, would be anchored in either rock or sand.

No matter where the structure is built, He predicted that storms would come.  Like the warm Santa Ana winds that stoke wildfires and the occasionally torrential rains that cause flooding, the storms of life are coming to each of us.  Simple truth: you WILL have storms!

The variable, according to Jesus, is where the house is built.  Even more to the point, he was warning about the type of foundation upon which the house is constructed.  The old Sunday School song said, “The wise man built his house upon the rock…and the house on the rock stood firm.”  It was different for the foolish man; his house went SPLAT!

All of this brings me back to my title, “A Room with a View.”  Like most of you, I have occasionally been privileged to spend time in a place with breathtaking views.  The temptation in those places is to spend all of life there enjoying the atmosphere.  Those lofty locations make us want to pack up and leave the less stellar places where the hardships and hassles of life are abundant.  A life with a view and few problems seems so…so desirable!  It’s almost as if Jesus reminds us of the storms to make sure we know we can’t really escape this world by planting ourselves on top of a mountain.

It’s the depth and substance of foundation that make life work, not the elevation of the the rooftop.  I look forward to talk more about it this weekend at Stone Ridge Church. I hope you can join us, but, if you’re stuck in a storm, catch the podcast!