Your mother told you many things as you grew, while you were still smart enough to realize you didn’t know much.

She probably delivered a constant stream of instruction, correction, guidance and insight, knowing you wouldn’t grasp instant recall of her valuable wisdom, but hoping something would sink in and surface when you needed it.

Biblical instruction is like that. You read, listen and meditate and Holy Spirit prodding surfaces insight when you need it. Current events make two large concepts especially vivid and meaningful to me in these uncertain times: the admonition from Jesus to love each other, and the parable of building our houses on a firm foundation.

At first blush it is simple unto silliness to think that the “new command” Jesus gives His disciples in John 13:34 is to “love one another” because that’s how “all men will know that you are my disciples.” Goodness, that’s easy. Love other Christians? Give me a curve ball, Lord, not that slow lob over the plate that anyone can whack out of the park.

Tell me to move mountains or shovel mud out of flooded houses far from home without pay, or to let loose of everything I possess, or love my enemies and do good to those who would harm me. Give me a challenge here.

We want people to know we love you, so wouldn’t it be a little more market savvy to stand on street corners and pray? Or preach from an overturned box in the marketplace? Or adorn our bodies with Jesus jewelry and our cars with Savior stickers?

Why not honk our horns as we pull out of sleeping neighborhoods on Sunday mornings for church? Surely if we avoid the block party because someone might get rowdy, our neighbors will have a clearer understanding that we love you than if we just love one another?

Don’t people expect us to love one another? Isn’t that simple?

I’ve come to understand the incredible wisdom of that “new command” of Jesus. He obviously knew the difficulty that His followers would have in emulating the simple, broad, encompassing, selfless, sacrificing love for each other He lived to demonstrate.

I’m saddened unto tears to realize Baptists are best known for our internal bickering and not for how we love one another. Why is it easier to love and cooperate with groups whose theology is significantly different from ours, than it is to love, accept and work with fellow Baptists whose perspective varies so slightly a non-Baptist couldn’t tell us apart?

When we pour by the thousands to lend a helping hand in disaster, the world notices and sees how we love those who hurt. According to Jesus, it is when we “love one another” that “all men will know” we are His disciples.

Second, the frightening extremes of the world economy the past month, revealed like an X-ray the worn and rusted rails on which our economic engine was running. It is a system that depends on our insatiable desire for more of everything; where instant gratification is too slow; where we feel compelled to borrow to have it all now; where we want to pay the full cost of nothing and where it is always someone else’s fault.

John McCain offered a joke I’m sure he didn’t intend by saying he would “eliminate greed from Wall Street” if elected president. Greed pulls the whole train, with a few people at the top earning more in a year than everyone in my hometown will earn in their lifetimes. It’s a system that rewards success and failure too, if the culprit sits in the CEO chair, strapped to a golden parachute.

C.E. Andrews who has been president of Sallie Mae, the nation’s biggest educational lender for a whopping 16 months, will receive a $500,000 bonus for “year to date achievement of individual performance goals” and a mere $2.5 million longevity bonus when he leaves office at the end of September, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The system is built on sand, not on a rock. Jesus warned us against building our houses on sand in Matthew 7:24-27. “… The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd said Sept. l9 the government acted to bail out the financial system because it might be just days away from a “complete meltdown.”

Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post said, “What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen. Paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. It’s a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game — and once the confidence goes, there’s no telling when the selling will stop.”

You can see the importance of confidence because when the U.S. government initiated a rescue plan Sept. 18 world stock markets rose overnight.

You act in one way if you have confidence, and act in a completely different way if you have no confidence. Picture the post-game posture on Friday night of the boy who scored the winning touchdown versus the one who didn’t play.

You gain the most confidence when you build upon a rock. Real money and long term dreams have evaporated in the gyrations and manipulations of markets. Realities behind the relentless bad news mean tens of thousands are suffering for real.

If you are among them my encouragement may seem shallow. But take heart, for truth arcing through history assures us that houses built upon the Rock will withstand the storms.