For more than 10 years, I have been trying to renovate my house, but cracks in the walls keep appearing, and no matter how many times I fix the doors, they will not shut! The problem was that ¾ of the house had a sand foundation and ¼ was on clay. The pylons were only put in the ground about 6 inches, and there is a spring besides the house! For 10 years, I have tried to fix it from the top down. I failed, and it has cost me tens of thousands of dollars. I realised that there was no way around it; I had to dig out the foundations and do it from the ground up. I am now done and have also re-landscaped the backyard to fix all of the mess we made. It cost me about $4000, including the new landscape. Wow, why did I not do that from the beginning? It is the same for our lives and faith.  The things we must do to get the most benefit are the very things we resist the most! Often, it is much easier than we thought it would be.  We must always build up using good foundations; retro-fixing from the top down never works. What are the foundations? Love God, love people, and go make disciples... It never changes, and we resist it the most. We are robbing our lives of their full potential and blessings! 

On another interesting note, I was told how to sow my new lawn by a professional landscaper, and it is also relevant to our foundations. He told me to sow my grass seed thick and wide because, in his 30-year experience, at best only 25 percent will grow. Wow, where have we heard this before?? (Matthew 13:1-23; Mark 4:1-20; Luke 8:1-15) So don’t get discouraged when we do try to make disciples. We give up too quickly. Even Christ said that he had a 25% success rate; why should we expect any better? The trick to success is to sow more seeds and not give up. Nurture what does grow up! If we tell no one about Christ, we will certainly fail. If we get the courage to tell only one person, we have more than a 75 percent chance of failure. The more we do, the more comfortable we get sharing our faith, and the more seeds that will grow. A whole lawn only needs 25% to grow and multiply to fill it up completely. The world only needs 25% to grow and multiply to fill the whole world!