An Anchor in a World Adrift

Hebrews 6:19

As we network the globe with the wonders of the World Wide Web and probe the secrets of distant planets, the molested bodies of small children are exhumed in Belgium and victims of genocide are uncovered in mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. Teenage militia roam the streets with automatic weapons ablaze. Little children are exploited as cannon fodder, marched in waves across mine fields ahead of their older comrades.

Sadly, the lives of children are cheap. Millions of unwanted children are ripped from their mothers’ wombs in the most prosperous nations. The horrors of sexual abuse of small children is but the tip of the iceberg of moral degeneration. Land mines lodged in the landscape of warring nations are the tragic legacy of conflicts that have already exacted a horrific toll. Eight hundred persons a day have been killed by them and thousands more maimed—often children.

Society is paying the consequences of the pollution of our moral ecosystems with pornography and permissiveness and more subtle but powerful messages that incite to morally outrageous behaviors. When we have forgotten the worth God sees in us and abandoned the purpose God has for us, then the glory of human persons is abdicated. When the Shekinah of His glory fades, life becomes cheap.

Meantime, the fragile ecosystems of our planet home are increasingly threatened by indifference and greed, and the irreplaceable resources of the human family are recklessly squandered.

We enter a millennium that will be remarkable for its mind-boggling technological achievements, but without moral direction. We must speak to a generation searching for a place to stand, someone to trust, searching for a place to lodge faith’s anchor, to find meaning, a place to invest one’s life for a purpose grander than achieving financial security and self-gratification.

We have just such an anchor! Against the drift of the tide of meaninglessness and despair, “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure”

(Hebrews 6:19). The question is whether we have taken hold of the hope offered us in Jesus Christ. And whether we are prepared to offer it to others, and to say,

“Master, for just this, we are here, in this time, in this place, in our kind of world—a world adrift, a world in moral danger of self-destructing. Master, for You, for that world, we are here.”

Kay F. Rader, The War Cry