“My heart is fixed” (Psalm 57:7)

“Stand fast in the Lord” (Philippians 4:1)

Leslie F. Church in his biography of John Wesley, Knight of the Burning Heart, records the passing of John’s father, Samuel, in these words: “The death of the old rector changed many things. With all his failings he had been fixed ground for his family.”

Yes, old Samuel Wesley had many failings. He was always hopelessly in debt. He had served the tiny village parish at Epworth most of his life, and he was never called to a larger congregation. His parishioners were not too devoted to him. They resented his biblical preaching about their sins. He rebuked them for their violence and ill temper. Often in the middle of the night, the Wesley family would be awakened by a crowd of the rowdier element in Epworth beating on the side of the house with sticks, trying to drive their unpopular pastor out of town. Many were old Samuel’s failings, but Leslie Church says of him: “The death of the old rector changed many things. With all his failings he had been fixed ground for his family.”

Here’s a tonic thought for tired, discouraged middle-aged folks suffering from the slump of the sixties, the failures of the fifties, or the fatigue of the forties — yes, and even for us of the three-score-years-and-ten-plus crowd: With all our failings, remember, we are fixed ground for someone. You can’t quit or throw in the towel. You can’t even stop for long enough to enjoy a brief respite of self-pity. There’s someone depending on you, in the generation just ahead or the one just behind or one of your contemporaries who has suffered from life some crippling wound and is looking in your direction for steadying support.

What if you have failed here and there in this venture or that relationship? Who hasn’t? Someone once said to me, “As I look back over my life I can see it has been just one failure after another.” All of us have felt like that at times.

Even John Quincy Adams at forty-five wrote in his diary, “Two-thirds of a long life are past, and I have done nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my country or to mankind.” And later, nearing seventy, having distinguished himself as secretary of state, president of the United States, and an eloquent member of Congress, Adams recorded: “My whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success in anything that I ever undertook.”

Though scores of failures stare us in the face, though the black clouds of disappointment and sorrowful losses are all about, remember there’s not a single one of us who’s not fixed ground for someone.

Often folks in the middle years come suddenly to the discovery that their personal ambitions have not been realized and that these ambitions are more than likely impossible to achieve. But even this is no occasion for despair. Though our dreams of personal glory and prestige may never come true, life has not lost its meaning. It may be that we are on the verge of life’s greatest discovery — namely that we are here for someone else’s sake, that we are fixed ground for another to stand upon, and through fulfilling that role, we’ll get, not only life’s greatest satisfaction, but our one chance at fame.

Jesus once said something that indicated he thought a personal discovery of this sort was the one and only entrance into the Kingdom of God. Remember? “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself (disown himself, think no longer of his own success) and take up his cross, and follow me.”

Old Samuel Wesley never was much of a personal or professional success, but he and his wife, Susanna, nurtured and trained and sent forth into the world a remarkable family. One of his sons attended Charterhouse School and achieved such a life of distinguished service that to this day the little British boys who go to that school proudly proclaim his name as they sing their school song:

Wesley, John Wesley, was one of our company,

Prophet untiring and fearless of tongue;

Down the long years he went,

Spending, yet never spent,

Serving his God with a heart ever young.

 

And another of old Samuel and Susanna’s boys, Charles Wesley, wrote dozens of hymns that are still sung, not only by Methodists, but by millions of Christians of all denominations all over the world.

And then, too, let’s remember that it’s not just financial support that’s furnishing fixed ground for someone, important as that always is. It is moral, spiritual, psychological fixed ground that others are seeking in you. Your confidence that builds up their self-confidence, your faith in their future that hangs up a goal for them to shoot at, your expressed assurance that you are counting on them not to let you down — this is the fixed ground that is more important than financial support. A lack of financial support can be compensated for, while a failure of confidence is disastrous.

Samuel Wesley was pretty much of a failure in backing up his boys with cash when they went away to school, but no one ever outdid him in expressing high hopes, expectations, and confidence in their ability to take advantage of their education for the service of God and man.

Rufus Jones, the Quaker philosopher, once overheard his small son, Lowell, talking with a group of playmates. The boys were telling what each one wanted to be when he was grown. Finally, Lowell’s turn came, and he said, “I want to grow up and be a man like my daddy.” Jones said that few things in his life ever touched him more or gave him a stronger push to dedication. “What kind of a man was I going to be,” he said, “if I was to be the pattern for my boy!”

A young businessman in talking of a more mature associate said: “He could have made much more money out of his business than he has, but money is not his first consideration. He has a passion never to do anything that would reflect on the reputation his father had and bequeathed to him in his name and his business.”

Morally and spiritually you are fixed ground for someone. Never forget it.

And, of course, this business of furnishing fixed ground for other lives is not entirely the vocation of parents to fulfill for their children and of older brothers and sisters for the younger. Some of the strongest lines of influence have cut across all family connections. Here is where the Church, if it has any reality as a communion of saints, can perform its powerful ministry for fashioning personality.

How many young men and women in business and professional life are building their careers, their moral and ethical judgments, their standards of success, on the fixed ground of older men and women they admire and observe in church and community.

A promising young man, on a bold, brave venture away from home and the restraints and supports of society where he is known, gives his word that he is held firm on fixed ground and spiritual foundations by the faithful correspondence of a former teacher who contrives through every possible expression of her confidence and affection to lay stone upon stone for his sure foundation.

Don’t despair, don’t lose hope, hold on in the struggle. Remember, in spite of all your failings, you are fixed ground for someone.

But this would be empty counsel, sheer autosuggestion, unless there were some solid, unshakable ground upon which each one of us could take our stand. One of the surest things we know about ourselves in our more sane moments is how unstable we are. How quickly anger flares up hotly! How long resentment smolders! How suddenly unexpected opposition topples us over! So our stout resolves turn to water; our brave, firm stands become forsaken posts. Unless there is available to us, from some quarter outside ourselves, beyond our fickle emotions and wavering wills, some solid ground on which we can stand, we cannot furnish fixed support for others.

Historian Allan Nevins once said that great and admirable as moral courage is in itself, “it must be recognized that it never appears except as a part of that greater entity called character. Courage then is not an independent trait but springs from the nurture of moral breadth and poise.”

How is this personality-making miracle accomplished? How is the chaos of conflicting desires in the soul of a person brought into order? How is the instability of our vagrant emotions solidified into fixed ground? How is the wall of character constructed?

Saint Paul says that it comes best and most naturally to a person who is “in Christ.” God has created us each one in his image with the possibility of becoming godlike. God has provided us with a savior who alone can atone for, and deliver us from, our past sins and continuing sinful inclinations. If we will receive him for what God has appointed him, the Lord and Savior of our lives, then by his grace, as we live in him, character, Christian character, can be constructed within us, and dependable, fixed ground will appear.

This was what Jesus was talking about when he said that the people who heard his message of salvation, heeded it, and lived by his word every day could be compared to a man who built a house on a solid rock foundation. Then when the storms of life came and the winds blew and the rains beat down and the floods swirled about its foundation, it stood firm, built upon the rock of ages.

But the folks who hearing the gospel of Redemption refused it, obeying not the words and commandments of the Lord of Life, were like a man who built his house on sand without firm foundation. Then when the storms of life descended upon him, all was swept away.

The man or woman in Christ Jesus comes in time to possess what Phillips Brooks, the well-known Episcopal clergyman, called in his Lenten medita­tions, “the solidity of righteousness.” Day by day the person dominated by the mind of Christ is, with each act of principle done, with each unselfish, merciful service rendered, laying stone upon stone the foundation of his personality set on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. It’s not that he becomes indifferent to what people say or is unaffected by favorable or unfavorable events of the world about him. It’s just that these have not the power to make or break him. Brooks said that it’s just the difference that a storm makes to the fellow who’s standing on the shore and one in a small boat at sea. The storm may vex the fellow on the beach in a hundred ways — blow sand in his eyes, whip off his hat, send a shiver down his spine, and make him button up his coat — but it sinks the poor fellow out at sea.

If Jesus Christ is the Lord of your life, if he really rules in the counsels of your personality, if his love and his word are accepted as the last court of appeals for the final decision in your personal, social, political, and business affairs, then you are on fixed ground. Though the scaffolding of time crashes about you, and the rugged masonry of ancient civilizations crumbles, and the steel girders of human custom and prejudice come crashing down around you, yet you shall not be moved. Your heart is fixed. Stand fast, therefore, in Christ.