An anchor has one purpose: to keep you in one place. When I was a commercial fisherman in Neah Bay, Washington, we had a big anchor. It weighed about three-hundred pounds and had a big old book chain. Due to its size and weight, we did not pull up that anchor every time we went out. Instead, we left it anchored and tied our boat to it. That anchor was solid and we had confidence in it.

Jesus Christ is like that anchor. He is solid and we can have confidence in Him. In Hebrews 6:19 we read, “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast . . . ” Jesus is an anchor that holds! He will hold us steady if we are securely tied to Him—even in times of storm.

The Anchor of Assurance

Without the Lord, you might have an anchor but it is not going to hold. In Neah Bay, we had to anchor out a few times. I remember one stormy night in particular. My dad woke me up in the middle of the night and said, “We'd better get the boat away from the dock so that it doesn't get broken up.” I would rather have stayed at home in bed, because we faced 80 mile-an-hour winds and things looked pretty bad, but we went out into the bay and dropped the anchor down. It took several tries to get it to grab.

Once we were anchored, we fell asleep in the boat—even in the thick of the storm. Then about two or three in the morning, Dad woke me up saying, “Wayne, we are on the rocks!” I could feel the back of the boat hitting the rocks as we went scrambling out of the cabin. Our anchor had not held as it should; we had drifted from one side of the bay to the other and were bouncing on the breakwater. I remember thinking, If our anchor would have held, we wouldn't be in this situation.

We were finally able to re-anchor and lay back down. However, trying to go back to sleep was difficult—there was just no assurance, no comfort. I kept thinking, It is going to happen again. We are just going to drift again.

Life without Jesus is like that. You may have some type of anchor in your life, but when storms come, that anchor does not hold. It just leaves you with the feeling I had in the bay that night—with thoughts like, I am going to be lost; I am going to have trouble. Without the Lord there is no assurance and no comfort.

When we are securely tied to the Lord, however, we are not uneasy. We know that our Anchor will not drift; it will not move. It has been steady since time began and will be steady throughout eternity. Just like our big three-hundred-pound anchor, our connection to the Anchor is the only variable.

Check Your Chain!

If you leave an anchor chain underwater for a while, it can rust, and then when the storm comes, the anchor could break loose. So, every couple of years, we would pull that big anchor up and take a look at it to make sure all the chain links were fine, that the pins were not going to fall out, and generally make sure that everything was okay.

We need to check our spiritual lives like that to make sure that our connection to our Anchor is holding and that nothing is going to go wrong when the storms come. We can do that by praying—keeping in contact with God. When we know that our Anchor is holding and that our connection to it is strong, we will be confident that we will not drift.

In times like these we need that sure Anchor. There is economic upheaval, increasing violence, corruption, the threat of terrorism of all kinds, war, social and moral decay, and on and on it goes. Many people are afraid. However, we do not have to fear the circumstances or the storms that surround us in this life. We have an Anchor that will hold.

Tried and True

A while back, I went with a team to Romania. In one of the youth services we held, a young man testified to the strength of that Anchor. He told how young men are required to go into the Romanian military when they are twenty years old, and he knew that he was going to face persecution there. He did not hide the fact that he was a Christian, and his fellow soldiers found out right away. They told him it would not be long and he would be drinking with them, talking like them, and going places right along with them. He made it clear that he had no intention of doing so and, as time went on, the Lord kept him.

One night, a commanding officer who had been drinking came to him at about four o'clock in the morning and said, “Come into my office.” The officer had a glass of liquor on the table and he said, “Soldier, drink that.” This young Christian looked at the officer and said, “Sir, I know that I can get in deep trouble by refusing you, but Sir, I cannot.” The officer looked at him again and said, “I am going to ask you again, drink that cup.” He answered, “Sir, I will not.” The third time the officer said, “I am going to ask you just one more time and you had better drink it or you are in trouble.” The young man answered again, “Sir, I will not drink that.”

The officer then ordered, “Hand me that pistol.” After the soldier did so, the officer said, “Soldier, load this gun.” Once again the soldier obeyed, and then handed the officer the gun. There, in a military office at four o'clock in the morning that drunken officer, hand shaking, put the gun right to this Christian's forehead and said, “Drink!” The soldier looked at the officer and said once again, “Sir, I will not.”

The officer then put his gun down and ordered someone else to go get him some juice to drink. The Lord spared that young man's life that day. He had an Anchor that would hold and he knew it. He knew that even if the officer took his life, the Anchor would hold through eternity.

Wayne Butler is the pastor of the Apostolic Faith Church in Woodlake, California.