Hey, welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

The reading for today titled Building What Lasts, was written by Matt Lucas.

When I was a young boy in Ohio, we lived near several construction sites.

Inspired by them, my friends and I gathered leftover scraps to build a fort.

Borrowing tools from our parents, we hauled wood and spent days trying to make our materials serve our purposes.

It was fun, but our attempts were poor reflections of the

well-constructed buildings around us. They didn't last long. In Genesis 11, we encounter a major

building construction project. Let us build ourselves a city, said the people, with a tower

that reaches to the heavens. A big problem with this effort was that the people did it to make a name

for ourselves. This has been a recurring issue for humans. We build monuments to ourselves and our achievements. Later,

in the biblical narrative, this story is contrasted in 1st Kings chapter 5 with Solomon's

motivation for building God's temple. I intend, therefore, to build a temple for the name of the Lord my God.

Solomon understood that what he built needed to point to God and not himself. This was such an

important lesson that he even wrote a Psalm about it. Psalm 127 opens with, unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.

Like my childhood fort building, what we build will not last, but God's name and what we do for him

has lasting significance.

Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Genesis chapter 11, verses

1 through 8.

Now, the whole world had one language and a common speech.

As people moved eastward, they found a plane in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar.

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