Faith & Identity

The difference between knowing God is your foundation and actually building on it

By Annessa Leigh, RN

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Maybe you’ve heard people describe God as a rock, a refuge, or a foundation. It shows up in worship songs, on coffee mugs, in the verse a friend texts you on a hard day. I’ve always believed those words. But for a long stretch of my life, I was still running around trying to keep everything from falling apart, as if the ground under me depended on how well I handled the schedule, the house, the money, and everyone’s moods.

If that sounds familiar, I don’t think it means your faith is weak. I think a lot of us were told what’s true and never shown what to do with it on an ordinary day.

The story of the two houses

Matthew was a tax collector, which in his day made him about as popular as the guy who tows your car. Tax collectors worked for the Roman government and were known for skimming extra off the top, so most people wanted nothing to do with him. Jesus walked right up to his booth and asked Matthew to follow Him anyway, and Matthew became one of His twelve closest friends. Years later, he wrote down what he’d seen, and that account is the book of Matthew in the Bible.

In it, Matthew describes a day when Jesus taught a big crowd on a hillside. People call it the Sermon on the Mount. He talks about worry, money, prayer, forgiveness, and how to treat people. Then He ends with a short story about two men who each build a house.

One man builds on solid rock. The other builds on sand. On a sunny day, you probably couldn’t tell the houses apart. Then a storm rolls in:

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”

— Matthew 7:24–27, NLT

Notice that both men heard Jesus. The man who built on sand wasn’t someone who skipped the sermon. He listened to the same words as everyone else. He just went home and kept building the way he always had.

That’s the part that got me, because hearing and agreeing were never my problem. Using it was.

What building actually looks like

When I first tried to “build on God,” I did what a lot of us do. I signed up for a 5 a.m. prayer routine, a Bible reading plan, and a gratitude journal, all in the same week. It lasted about as long as my promise to stop buying throw pillows.

What actually helped was much smaller. As a nurse, I learned that when five things are going wrong at once, you don’t panic and try to fix all five. You figure out what matters most and start there. So I started asking myself a few honest questions:

• What am I leaning on right now? When I got anxious, I usually reached for control instead of God. I’d clean, plan, or fix, because it felt better than sitting still and trusting.
• Is this actually mine to carry? A lot of what I was holding had never been handed to me. I’d just picked it up because nobody else did, then quietly resented it for years.
• What does this truth mean in this exact situation? “God is my foundation” is lovely in general. It started to matter when I asked what it meant for the argument with my husband, the bank balance I was avoiding, or the empty bedrooms now that our kids are grown.

None of that required me to become a different woman by Monday. It just meant bringing what I believed into the actual moment I was in. If you like to write in the margins, an NLT Bible with wide pages makes it easier to jot down what you notice as you go.

Why it’s so easy to skip

James was Jesus’ younger brother, and for a while he didn’t buy any of it. The Bible says that while Jesus was teaching and healing people, His own brothers didn’t believe in Him. (If you’ve ever had a sibling roll their eyes at your big plans, James is your guy.) Something changed after Jesus rose from the dead, and James went on to lead the very first church in Jerusalem. He later wrote a letter to believers, and he didn’t sugarcoat much:

“But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.”

— James 1:22, NLT

I used to read that as a scolding. Now it sounds more like a friend telling you the truth because she cares about you. Trying harder can hold a life together for a while. You can white-knuckle your way into a cleaner house or a tighter budget. But when everything depends on you, it all comes apart the moment life knocks you sideways, and then you feel like a failure and start over with a new planner.

Part of it is simply that God is unseen. You can see the bills on the counter and hear the kids arguing in the next room, but you can’t see Him working, so it feels more natural to trust the things you can grab with your own two hands. That doesn’t mean He isn’t real or isn’t there. It just means trust has to reach a little further than your eyes can.

For women who’ve been the strong one for years, there’s another reason, too. Leaning on God means admitting we aren’t holding it all together by ourselves, and that can feel like giving up the one thing we’re good at.

You don’t have to pour the foundation

This is the part I most want you to hear, and it comes from Paul, whose story is wild. Before he followed Jesus, Paul made it his job to track down Christians and have them arrested. Then Jesus stopped him in his tracks on a road trip, and he did a complete turnaround. He spent the rest of his life traveling, starting churches, and making tents to pay his bills. One of those churches was in Corinth, a busy, flashy port city, and that church had plenty of drama. Paul wrote them letters to help sort it out, and in one of them he said this:

“For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have—Jesus Christ.”

— 1 Corinthians 3:11, NLT

The foundation is already there. You don’t have to earn it by finally getting your life under control. What you’re learning is how to build your ordinary days on top of something that was laid long before you showed up, and that’s a much lighter job than the one most of us have been trying to do.

A small place to start

If you’re wondering where to begin, start by noticing where you actually stand right now: what’s weighing on you, what you’ve been gripping, and where you feel the most unsteady. You don’t need a plan yet.

If you’d like the bigger picture behind all of this, you can read how Grace Architecture works.

Annessa