A Word About Translations
There are a number of good translations available including the KJV, NKJV, ESV, NIV, NASB, HCSB and others. Anchor Points meditations are not intended to supplant any of these respected translations. Any serious study of the Word of God must be based on one or more of these readily available translations. But what about the people who aren’t quite ready to dig that deeply into Biblical study?
Many believers are intimidated by the seemingly daunting task of understanding the Bible. “Where do I start?” “How do I find things?” “I don’t understand the King James English.” “What does sanctification mean?” These are just a few of the reservations I hear when encouraging people to dig into the Bible. However, I have found that if the word is put into people’s hands in a form they can understand, they can connect with it. If they connect with it in a meaningful way they begin to get excited about it and want more.
That’s where Anchor Points got its start. As a therapist, I wanted to be able to give my anxious clients a scripture or two addressing their anxiety. I wanted to give my depressed clients, my angry clients and my grieving clients powerful truths from the Word of God that would minister to their needs. Many of them lacked a complete knowledge of the Bible. They needed these truths in a form that was readily understood and portable, something they could take with them. And most importantly they needed it to ‘speak their language.’
Often in my practice, I would go over some spiritual truth during our visit and I would see God working as we applied His word to their issue. I would write down the scripture reference so that they could look it up again, but sometimes it seemed like they needed more. They needed something that would stay with them after they left. If I could find something with the power to take hold and endure that would be strong medicine indeed. Without this ‘strong medicine,’ the light bulb moments we shared would all too quickly dim amidst the harsh glare of competing internal and external messages once they were back in the ‘real world.’
Time after time I hear my clients say something like “I understand the things we talk about in here, but after a day or two I start drifting back to my old habits.” What they were voicing is basically the issue we all face, how to deal with the old man. The old man is our old nature and he is not eager to be removed from his perch behind the control panel of our unredeemed parts. We all need stronger medicine to correct that problem. I knew the Word of God was that medicine, but how could we find a way to make it more portable and powerful in a way that connects and speaks their language? We needed something that would not only get the truth into their heads, but even more importantly, into their hearts.
And that’s when I went to work and Anchor Points is the result. These Anchor Points meditations are intended to be powerful, concise and portable nuggets of truth, that speak to people in a language they can connect with. They will never replace the power of the living word taken in its entirety. We see these meditations as supplemental on one hand and yet on the other hand they are as muscular and effective as the Word of God in all its forms and variations can be. The word is living and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12a). Anchor Points wants to put that sword in your hand.
The Bible talks about the sword and the Word in another place as well. In the sixth chapter of Ephesians, we find the passage that describes the whole armor of God. Here we are instructed to put on this armor so that we might withstand the attacks and schemes of the devil. The only offensive weapon included in this description is the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God. Though unstated, the implication is that we need to be proficient at wielding this sword. While the sword may have been the weapon of choice in the day when that was written, today it would look more like an AR15. But even such a sophisticated weapon as this would be no more than an unwieldy club on the battlefield without ammunition. Think of each Anchor Point meditation as another round of ammo. Or if you prefer the original imagery, each meditation fully assimilated represents another pass of the blade over the whetstone to keep our two-edged sword sharp.