Anchored

One of the biggest challenges for the Church today, and the individual Christians of which it is comprised, is to stay reliant on Scripture, standing strong on the truth. Psalm 57 says:
7 My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and give praise.
8 Awake, my glory! Awake, lute and harp! I will awaken the dawn.
9 I will praise You, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing to You among the nations.
10 For Your mercy reaches unto the heavens, And Your truth unto the clouds.
11 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; Let Your glory be above all the earth.

As I shared last week, we are not to be tossed "to and fro" by the philosophies of this world.  Our view of the world, or worldview, has to be derived from the Bible itself, not from the "Bible plus," or attempting to attach the Bible to our own personal whims. We can stay fixed and focus on His great mercy and the unshakable truth of the Scriptures. In all things, we can be determined to exalt Christ and to have a high and confident view of what He has said.

+++++

Stability in our lives results from our dependence on God and our regard for the sufficiency of Scripture. In Hebrews 6, we find a passage that can teach us that our hope in the Lord is an anchor for us:
17 Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath,
18 that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us.
19 This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil...

We are certainly seeing a shift in American Christianity - the upheaval in the United Methodist Church over the teachings of Scripture generally and sexuality specifically has led to hundreds of churches seeking to leave the denomination.  The Southern Baptist Convention is debating whether or not the denomination is in a state of "drift."  That is actually a consideration that every church, each denomination, and ideally every individual Christian should be prioritizing - am I, are we, moving closer to Christ or are there areas of compromise that I need to do something about?

Writing at The Stream, retired pastor and missionary Ron Hale relates analysis from Stream colleague Tom Gilson - he writes:

Tom Gilson, author, speaker, and Stream senior editor, has written a very helpful piece identifying two groups within the polarizing tug-of-war within contemporary American evangelicalism. He tags them the Anchored and the Accommodationist. These terms help explain what is going on in the Southern Baptist Convention today.

The Anchored, Gilson says, are Christians who anchor their truths in the Word of God. It’s not their single source of truth, but they are convinced that where the Bible speaks, “it speaks truly and with authority.” Their goal is to understand the Bible “properly and follow it faithfully. They know they fall short, but the goal remains for them regardless.”

The Accommodationist will offer honor to the Word of God “but they want their message to fit in better with the world somehow” … “they don’t mind altering their message to make it more accommodating to the world.” This group comes in several flavors, but Progressive Christianity is the most obvious. Progressives become jittery when God’s Word makes people or certain groups uncomfortable. “They can come up with creative new interpretations,” according to Gilson.

Hale notes that:

Dr. Lee Brand, the former first vice president of the SBC, in an open letter to Southern Baptists makes a relevant point:

There is a great storm brewing within the SBC, and we cannot afford to get this weather report wrong. Our battle is not between our various shades of brown, but between those who will say the Bible is sufficient in their proclamation and show its sufficiency in their practice, and those who will try to merge some measure of biblical principle with a palatable amount of worldly philosophy.

Hale goes on to say:

The Anchored know the power of shining the searchlight of Scripture on society, thereby rescuing a culture from suffocating in its own sin. When evil shows up as insanity — like a Drag Queen preaching to 1st graders, only then do “normal” people start smelling the stench of our sick society. The Anchored wake up each morning with certain core convictional beliefs based on Scripture and they shall not be moved. Accommodationists awaken to all the clamoring voices in our pluralistic society, and are easily swayed by social media top-talkers.

In the original article, Gilson states:

Progressive Christians say they’re following Jesus’ example. That’s not remotely true. Even where they model some of their work after some of Jesus’ example, it’s actions without anchoring, which is completely unlike Jesus. So accommodationist “Christianity” is really more like Accommodationist nothing-ianity. It erases the real Jesus and replaces Him with an empty nothing.

The real Jesus lived grace and truth together and equally. The two virtues can coexist, and He proved it. Those who are Anchored know this and strive to emulate Him in it. We’ll get it wrong sometimes, and annoy people in the process. That’s what you get for trying sometimes, but you still have to try. We can annoy people getting it right, too. Thankfully the Bible guides us in that, as it does in all other matters that really matter.

So, are you anchored in the word of God?  That is a pertinent question.  God's Word provides us with stability in a world that is turbulent, a world that offers insufficient answers to the deeper questions of life. We can look to the teachings of Scripture to provide us with security.

So when you consider what it means to be anchored, we then can evaluate how that is reflected in how we think and how we live.  Compromise leads to confusion, which results in chaos.  But, confidence in the Lord leads to a centered life that results in Godly character.  We must reject the philosophies of this world and make sure that our thought processes are governed by what we find in the Word of God.

In Ron Hale's Stream article, he discussed identity politics, which characterizes people based on outward characteristics, divides them into groups, and assigns behavior to them based on that group dynamic.  He quotes from Atlanta-area pastor Josh Buice, who said: "You cannot attach identity politics to the sufficient Scriptures and still claim to be champions of sufficiency. God’s Word must stand alone. Like a confident lion walking in the afternoon sun on the African plains — it doesn’t need assistance to diagnose and address the social ills of a depraved society."  We have to make sure that we are rejecting identity politics and seeking identity in Christ.