No Other Foundation

The other day when John received an incredible revelation about Nicodemus, I saw the word “foundation.”  Jesus assaulted Nicodemus’ foundation, the life and religion that he had built his life on.  Jesus was calling Nicodemus to leave his “faith” No other foundation. Unless our foundation is Jesus Christ, it will not stand.

I relate to Nicodemus personally because I was religious.  I was heavily involved in a prison ministry, leading worship, going to church every week, Bible Studies, youth group counselor, Sunday school teacher, working hard to look good, even at my husband’s and children’s expense.  It was all about me – my ambition, my performance and trying to buy my salvation.  Like Nicodemus, Jesus confronted me.  He sent one of His own, who saw through my lies and challenged and assaulted my “faith.”  In His mercy, He exposed and began to tear down and destroy the foundation of deception I had built.  Every structure apart from Christ in my life, He has and continues to assault and bring to collapse, so that He can secure and establish His foundation.  It brings to mind Jeremiah 31:28 where the Lord is speaking to Jeremiah just before He tells him about the New Covenant that He will make: “And it shall come to pass, that as I have watched over them to pluck up, to break down, to throw down, to destroy, and to afflict, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.” Every foundation that is not Christ must be destroyed.

With new light I see that to be “born again” is the birthing of a new Foundation, “Christ in me” (Col. 1:27). It brings the crisis of choice to leave and count as loss my “faith,” what I have sold my soul to and built my life upon as “right”: my goodness, my persona, my performance, my abilities, my success, my self-made religion, my pontificating delusions. There was a deliberate leaving, abandonment, consensual death to my “faith,” the foundation built on sand, doomed to utter destruction.

Nicodemus was shocked by the impossibility of such a thing.  It was a total life change… a total life exchange, abrand new Foundation.  This was an epiphany to me, new light, a new seeing of HIM and His testimony in me.