When my parents moved into the Baptist
Home we had an auction to sell all the stuff they had accumulated over a
lifetime. Our family was allowed to go through and pick out a few personal
items. I picked up a mirror that had hung in my bedroom as I grew up.
My oldest brother walked through the
tables and joked about all the junk. Suddenly he reached down and picked up an
old folding ruler. It was the kind carpenters used before tape measures. A
smile spread across my brother’s face. “This is the ruler Dad used to build the
house. This means something.”
I understood. My brother was a
teen-ager when Dad built the house and he and my other brothers helped with the
construction. This ruler was the standard every piece of wood in the house was
measured against. The house stood strong against the elements as a shelter for
a growing family because of that ruler and the man who knew how to use it.
The family bible was the standard
against which everything that went on inside the house was measured. When my
parents were married, at sixteen, they accepted Jesus and were baptized
together. They made a commitment to Christ to keep their family in Church and
raise them by the principles of God’s word.
The prophet Amos saw a vision of The
Lord holding a plumb line in His hand, (Amos 7). A plumb line is simply a
weighted string that gives a true vertical line for building a wall. If a wall
is not built according to plumb it is destined to fall. God told Amos that He
had put a plumb line in the middle of His people and he would “…never again
pass by them.” (Amos 7:8-9) As a result, everything was about to be “made
desolate” and “laid waste.”
It was not the plumb line that was
about to destroy Israel. It was their failure to build their lives according to
God’s plumb line that would result in their own destruction. They chose their
own standard over God’s and were about to pay the price. The word of the prophet,
God’s Word, is the perfect standard by which we stand or fall. It does not
matter how we measure up to each other. What really matters is how God sees us.
Bro. Robin
