Sometimes I get anxious about the future. Yesterday I was reading about our economy and a 1400 page stimulus bill that, given its enormous size and hasty passage, had to be voted on by elected officials who had never read most of it. Yet the bill takes drastic measures never before dreamed of to solve looming problems of epic proportions. One analysis I read carefully described how the stimulus bill was just part of the problem that was going to destroy our economy for years. Others said it was a necessary step to meet immediate and looming dangers.

And I’m just one more person who hasn’t read the bill and wouldn’t understand it if I did. Yet I am by nature a problem solver, and my mind starts spinning on what I should do to protect my family, protect my church, protect my future. And I start getting consumed and anxious.

I need something solid to anchor my life to. A lot of the things generally considered to be sure are now revealed to be actually quite vulnerable. Whenever the sure things become unsure I think all of us become anxious until we find again something solid to keep us steady in the storm.

Years ago I asked myself what I believed – what I was sure of and what the anchor for my life really was. Distilled down to fit on a bookmark, I thought through Ten Things I Know, the ten things that are bigger for me that everything else in life. There are many things I don’t know about the future, but none of that uncertainty changes these 10 things. And nothing in the future will be more important.

What are your “10 things”? Unless they start and end with something beyond this creation then when the storms come you only drag your anchor through the stormy water. The anchor finds something solid when it reaches truth from God. These Truths put the world in its proper place and let us know our course regardless of what storms may come.

Here are the 10 places my anchor catches fast. Maybe they can be a line in the storm for you as well, or a starting point for the Twelve Things or Eight Things that you go back to again and again.

10 Things I Know

1.

There is a God
who has made the world, and made me.

2.

Every individual
has been intentionally created and is deeply loved by God.

I am one of those individuals.


3.

Through the mystery of what is called the Trinity,
my Maker-God walked this earth in human form 2000 years ago.

He came as the prophesied Christ and was named Jesus.

4.

He did that to make possible a personal, experiential and eternal relationship
between Himself and every human being that chooses it.


5.

There is no real life apart from the spiritual life that comes from Jesus.

Not in the creation and not in myself do I find life. Life is the Spirit of Jesus living in me.

6.

God is discipling me personally.

The goal of His involvement is not to make the things of this life work for me,
but to teach me to walk with Him in all things.

All my natural inclinations go against this goal.

7.

Through the Fall of Genesis 3 every human life is born spiritually dead and alienated from God.

As a result, every person begins by seeking life in the creation and in themselves. Making themselves the measure of all things, they reject their Creator, His authority, and His purposes.

The world and the culture I live in
are shaped by and committed to this alienation and rebellion more than any other factor.

8.

God is at work in the world today revealing Himself and calling people back to Himself.

Through the Holy Spirit, I (and every believer) am God’s means for accomplishing that.

My fellowship with God comes as I yield my life to the costs of that work.

9.

The purpose of my life is two-fold.

1) let the Spirit of Jesus express Himself through me to the people He has chosen to put around me, and,

2) bring people, one person at a time, into their own life-experiencing relationship with Jesus.

The primary means for doing these is choosing to love others with that self-costing love
which Jesus has expressed toward me.

10.

One day my whole earthly life will be summed up
by what God has produced as I have followed Jesus in the above two-fold purpose.