“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27 ESV)

What was your favorite toy to play with as a kid? Mine was Legos, and I still love to build things with them. All of the shapes and sizes and colors… it’s amazing how they all can come together to form a beautiful masterpiece. 

But masterpieces didn’t always happen. I often missed a step in the instructions somewhere at the beginning and with taller designs, that caused them to fall over. A lot of people also play with just a simple pile of Legos and no instructions. Sure, that can work out well, but frequently these designs fall over or don’t look the way we had hoped, because we had nothing to base them on; we may have had the wrong foundation or none at all. 

This passage is one that you may have heard before: “Build your life on the firm foundation of Christ and you will prosper.” We like to believe this interpretation because it sounds like it has the best outcome for our life. In reality, we also need to remember that we will have problems in life, regardless of how we build our foundation. 

However, what if we already have an instruction manual on how to assemble our foundations? It’s wisdom! When we have wisdom, we will be able to make better decisions, and therefore will likely be able to better structure our lives around Christ. We will mess up some of those pieces of wisdom, causing our lives to become easy to topple over. But when we use wisdom to help plan our lives, we have a better chance of ending up with some sort of Lego-structure-of-life, instead of a Lego-pile-of-life.

How can you use wisdom this week as the instruction manual of your life? Could you use it to put in place the Legos of kindness, love, or generosity?