Your Family Anchor

Every ship has an anchor. That anchor is at the end of a very long series of individual steel links. Each link is joined to another link. And if you trace those links one by one you’ll eventually get to the anchor. It’s the anchor that keeps a ship from drifting. It’s the anchor that keeps the ship exactly where it needs to be. 

That’s the way families are. Every family is one link in a very long chain thatstretches out for hundreds and even thousands of years. This chain is so long that it is hard to grasp the enormity of it. For most of us, we are doing pretty well if we are familiar with the two or three links in the chain that come immediately before our link.

God knows the importance of family chains because He invented the family chain. And that’s why God puts such importance on each father successfully anchoring his link in the family chain. I’m responsible to take care of my link, and you are responsible to take care of yours. That’s what He wants us to do. And He wants us to do it well. There’s no doubt that’s what He wanted the men of Israel to do. And God used Moses to tell it to the men of Israel straight.

In Deuteronomy 6, the people of Israel are getting ready to go into the promised land after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. They have before them an absolutely unbelievable opportunity. And that opportunity is to go into the promised land, obey the laws of God, and establish a new civilization and a new culture for their children and all of the generations to come.

Not too many people have the opportunity to start a new civilization. But that’s exactly what God was giving to Israel after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. God gave them a shot at starting over and doing it right. What a monumental opportunity! What an incredible calling!

And the responsibility for this new opportunity for the nation of Israel is laid squarely on the shoulders of the men. To be more specific, it is laid on the shoulders of the fathers.

Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God, to keep all His statues and His commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged (Deut. 6:1–2, emphasis added).

Genealogies are in the Bible for a reason. And when you dig into them, they are anything but boring. The reason that genealogies are so fascinating is that genealogies contain the secret of having a significant and meaningful life.

Generally speaking, if a father anchors his family in Christ, then the odds go up dramatically that his sons will anchor their families. But when he decides he knows better than God and starts living to please only himself, that’s when a family begins to drift. America has millions of families that are drifting. Why are they drifting? They are drifting because they have no anchor.

When God changes a nation and brings revival, one of the primary things He does is to get a hold of some fathers and turn them into anchors. And in our day of crisis, in our day of a fatherless America, that’s precisely what God is up to. God knows who His men are. He knows where they are and He knows who they are.

And He knows how to strongly support them.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.