During my college career, my campus pastor emphasized three anchors that are designed to anchor me in my faith. Through the years, I’ve been taught these three things: know God, live life together, and take responsibility. Some of these anchors were tough to build, but I can say that all of the time and effort that it took was well worth it.
KNOW GOD
This seems like a hard thing to do. How can you know someone that you can’t physically see? Well, it is a lot easier than you would imagine. Understanding God’s character and having a personal relationship with him is both an easy thing to do and an essential part of your faith life. To know God, you must dive into the word. Spending daily time reading and studying the Bible is such an important thing that most Christians often neglect. You cannot have Sunday mornings in church be the first time that you open up your Bibles.
In addition to spending time reading the word, to know God, you must spend intimate time with him. You cannot truly know someone if you do not spend time with them. To Christians, prayer is our way of communicating our needs, concerns, and thankfulness to God. It is supposed to help us realize our dependence on God and put our faith in knowing that God has the ultimate wisdom to know how to handle every situation. As a result, your faith and relationship with God will grow deeper and stronger.
LIVE LIFE TOGETHER
This anchor is oftentimes one we overlook or do wrong. We say “hi” to people before and after church; we have all these contacts on our phones, so we must be living life together right? It is a sad realization, but to a lot of us, these are the relationships that we have. The perfect example comes directly out of the Bible. Acts 2:42-47 shows exactly how a group of believers truly live together. They devoted themselves daily to prayer; they sold personal possessions to help out one another when in need, and they spent intentional time together. In all of these things, they made it top priority to keep God at the center of it all. In doing this, they were able to push each other to grow spiritually in relationship to God as well as each other.
By living life together in a biblical community, no one was left alone during hard times. When you are going through difficult times in your life, you are going to need the help and encouragement of fellow believers to lift you up, because no matter how much you think you can, you can’t do it alone.
TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
This is the most important anchor. You can know God and live life together, but if you do not actively live out your faith then there will be no growth. If you read Acts 2:42-47 and you do not actively live that out in your own community, you are not showing that you know God, you are not living together, nor are you taking responsibility. But, when you apply all three of these anchors to life, that is when true change happens. That is when you will find yourself truly anchored to God.
