I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources He will empower you with inner strength through His Spirit. Then Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in Him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. – Ephesians 3:16-19 NLT
As followers of Christ, we want to root our identities in Him, live in obedience to His commandments, and worship Him in Spirit and truth.
All of that sounds great in theory, but it’s a lot harder in practice! This world is full of voices that try to tell us who we are, what we need, and where to find truth. And those voices are so pervasive—flooding our screens, coming at us from political and entertainment platforms—that it can be incredibly challenging to ignore them. Or, at the very least, sift the good messages from the harmful ones.
We need something solid to hold on to—and indeed, someone solid to hold onto us—when everything else feels chaotic and uncertain. We need Biblical truths stored up in our hearts and minds so we can fall back on them when we start to doubt who we are.
Boats Need Anchors—and So Do We
When boat captains are out on open water and they want their boat to stay within a particular radius, what do they do? They drop an anchor. The anchor hooks into the ocean floor or river bed, grounding the boat to that spot so the captain can cut the engine or let down the sails and not worry about drifting too far.
As Christians, we need God and His Word to be our anchor in this storm-tossed world.
The culture you’re a part of, your friends, your family, or even your own fickle heart may try to tell you that your identity is in your job, socioeconomic status, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, or any number of other things. And it’s so easy to start believing that’s true.
After all, your job is where you spend the majority of your time and energy, so your success or failure at it has to be a reliable metric of who you are as a person, right?
You come from a wealthy family, so your competency to build a fortune of your own must be an indicator of your ability to carry on the family legacy, right?
All your friends are getting married and having children, so you must have to do that too, or there’s something wrong with you, right?
Wrong.
All of these things are pieces of our identity. Our jobs, families, hobbies, and finances are very important to our flourishing and should be handled with care, intention, and prayer. But none of them is our identity on its own. Our identity comes from God alone—His love for us that goes “wide, long, high, and deep,” His good plans for our lives, and His desire to live with us in loving communion forever.
Drifting Back Home
Maybe the image of something “anchoring” you brings you peace and reassurance. Or maybe it brings up unpleasant feelings of being restricted and controlled.
But an anchor is not meant to be restrictive; it’s a safety measure. This is true of literal boat anchors, and it’s even truer of God’s guiding instruction for our lives. In fact, you don’t even feel an anchor’s effect at all unless you start to drift—unless you wander just a little too far beyond the boundary of protection and safety.
When we’re living within the good boundary lines that God has set for His children, we have the freedom to live, work, play, and enjoy life as we please. The anchor is there, to be sure, and we can rest in the knowledge that its presence is meant to protect us, but we don’t feel its tugging.
In this life, however, drifting is inevitable. Our hearts are drawn away from the things of God, sometimes more readily than we’d like to admit. We’re enchanted by what the world has to offer because it feels so much more tangible and enticing than the promises of God we may have yet to see.
Praise God that He is never surprised when we’re swept up in the wiles of the world. He knows the depths of our hearts, what we long for, what we’re afraid of. He knows that we’ll be tempted away from Him. But when we’ve set Him as our anchor, filling our minds with the truth of His Word and resting our hearts in His goodness, we can be assured that He will always tug us back on course when we start to drift—lovingly, patiently, and with all compassion.
