saw the kings of the earth, to greet the last comer who had fought
against God and failed, with 'Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou
become like unto us?' The stone will stand, whosoever tries to blow it
up with his dynamite, or to pound it with his hammers.

But there is the other kind of testing. One proves the foundation by
building upon it. If the stone be soft, if it be slender, if it be
imperfectly bedded, it will crumble, it will shift, it will sink. But
this stone has borne all the weight that the world has laid upon it, and
borne it up. Did any man ever come to Jesus Christ with a sorrow that He
could not comfort, with a sin that He could not forgive, with a soul
that He could not save? And we may trust Him to the end. He is a 'tried
stone.' 'This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out
of all his troubles,' has been the experience of nineteen centuries.

So, being tried, it is precious,--precious to God who laid it there at a
great and real cost to Himself--having given up 'His only begotten Son';
precious, inasmuch as building upon it is the one safety from the raging
tempest and flood that would else engulf and destroy us.

III. Note, next, the process of building.

The metaphor seems to be abandoned in the last words of our text, but it
is only apparently so. 'He that believeth shall not make haste.' So,
then, we build by believing. The act of building is simple faith in
Jesus Christ. We _come_ to Him, as the Apostle Peter has it in his
quotation of this text--come to Him as unto a living stone, and the
coming and the building are both of them metaphors for the one simple
thing, trust in the Lord. The bond that unites men on earth with Christ
in Heaven, is the exercise of simple faith in Him. By it they come into