Finding Your AXIS Point

Finding Your AXIS Point: Why the Bible Must Be the Foundation of Your Life

What if the reason so many Christians are falling apart when life gets hard isn't a lack of faith — but a misaligned foundation? Years ago, as I started working on my master's degree, I began to study discipleship. I began to study what it means to be a Christian. We love that label. "I am a Christian. I'm a born-again Christian." We label ourselves without really understanding what we're saying. And the deeper I dove, the more I kept asking: how were the early believers — Peter, Paul, James, John, Philip, Stephen, Priscilla — able to walk through the chaos, the destruction, and the persecution that hit them so quickly? What was their secret?

I think I found it. And it might just change everything.

The Access Point That Keeps You From Crashing

As an Air Force veteran, I love to go to planes as an illustration. A plane has three axis points — longitudinal, vertical, and horizontal. As long as all of those points line up into that central axis point, the plane will fly. But the minute any of those points go off, it becomes out of balance. And an unbalanced plane crashes.

I spent five years as an aerial porter, calculating how to load cargo into planes to ensure they didn't crash. Everything had to be balanced around that central axis point. And I think our problem so often in the church today is we don't know our axis point. We don't know the point that we've got to make sure everything else is balanced to — or else we're going to crash.

Think about someone you know who was a Christian, had a good life, had a good relationship with God — and then crashed and burned. How did it happen? They got one of their axis points off. One of their lines of alignment drifted from their very foundation.

Our axis point is the Bible.

A 2,500-Year-Old Object Lesson

In Jeremiah 35, the prophet Jeremiah — a man who had prophesied for 40 years — receives an unusual assignment from God. The Babylonians have invaded Israel and are exiling the nation. God tells Jeremiah to gather a specific group of people called the Rechabites and offer them wine. This group had been instructed by their great-grandfather, roughly 250 years earlier, not to drink wine, not to plant vineyards, not to live in houses — to remain a set-apart people.

So Jeremiah pulls them into the temple — into church — and places wine in front of them. Their response? "No. Our great-grandfather told us not to drink. We haven't broken that. Not even now, in the middle of an invasion."

Then God says to Jeremiah, essentially: Look at these people. They're listening to their grandfather. But Israel won't listen to their God.

God speaks through Jeremiah: "Will you not receive instruction and listen to my words? I have spoken to you persistently... but you have not listened to me" (Jeremiah 35:13-14).

Persistently. God has not shut up. He's continued to say, "This is how you live. This is how you live. This is how you live." And yet Israel kept following other things, other idols, other voices.

Church, when God speaks, we need to learn to listen.

The Gospel Doesn't Change — Even If We Want It To

In Galatians 1:8, the Apostle Paul writes to the early church with a stark warning: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed."

Paul is saying — even if I come back and preach something different, don't listen. That's how serious this is.

If you're paying attention to what's happening in churches today, so many are manipulating the Word. It's not the same gospel. You listen to these YouTube preachers, TikTok stuff, Instagram reels — a little bit of truth, but pure garbage at the end of it. Because anything that's a departure from the Word of God is garbage. And yet we feed into that. We get excited about it over and over again.

The gospel is this: you and I are sinners. We were born sinners and were unable to save ourselves — no matter how many good things we did. But God, in his incredible wisdom, decided to fix this for us. He sent his own Son into this earth to live a sinless life, die on a cross, and rise again three days later. That is the gospel. And it doesn't change because our culture changes.

The Word of God is not changed by our culture. Our culture should be changed by the Word of God.

The Numbers Don't Lie — And They're Alarming

Let me share something that should shake every one of us. The Barna Research Group — which has been doing studies on faith in America for decades — released a report in 2020 asking self-identified born-again Christians a series of questions. Then they asked the same questions again in 2023. Here's what they found:

In three years, because of the shaking of COVID-19, the axis points of millions of Christians went off. They weren't going to their Bible — they were going to their government, to their fears, to other voices. And the crash happened.

We say one thing and we act another. Our alignment is off.

The People of the Book

Here's what's encouraging: this isn't new. Throughout history, every time the church drifted from the Word, men and women rose up and said, "We've got to get back to the Bible." The Pentecostal movement — the movement many of us come from — do you know what they were called in the early days? Not the Holy Rollers. Not the people running around. They were called the People of the Book.

The charisma, the gifts, the signs and wonders — those things happened because they were in the Book. When they were in the Book and God was revealing his depth of love, his grace and mercy, they began to align their ways. And the Holy Spirit descended upon them.

Every reformation in church history — Luther, Wesley, Baxter, the Pentecostal outpouring — happened when someone pointed back and said, "What does the Word say?" And I believe with everything in me that we need a reformation in our day. I don't want to live off of yesterday's reformation. We've got to get back to the Bible.

Your Experience Doesn't Change the Word

This last one might hurt a little. Your experience doesn't change the Word of God.

What you've been through, how you've lived your life — none of that rewrites Scripture. The enemy is very, very good at manipulating experiences. He's good at using our pain, our disappointment, our confusion to make us say, "Well, in my experience, this is how it works." But nothing trumps God.

And here's something important for those of us who are Spirit-filled: the Holy Spirit does not contradict the Bible. So if you feel like you've received a word, go to the Bible first and ask — does this line up with the Word? Because if it doesn't, it's another spirit. The Word of God is not changed by anything.

Finding Equilibrium

When your life is aligned to the Word of God, you find what I call equilibrium. It's that tug-of-war moment — where the things that try to pull you out of balance are counterbalanced by the very presence of God. Because you know what you believe. You know in whom you believe. You know what the Word of God says about every situation.

And when the winds come, when the chaos comes, when the pain and conflict come — they don't shake you any longer. You still have joy. Why? Because you fixed your axis point.

Acts 2:42 describes the early church this way: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer." And the result? Awe came upon the community, and day by day they added to their Numbers those being saved. That's what a church aligned to the Word looks like.

Putting It Into Practice

So what does this look like for you, starting today?

1. Make the Bible your axis point — not culture, not experience, not popular preachers. Ask yourself: What does the Word of God say about how I'm living? Then align your life to that answer, even when it's hard.

2. Read your Bible — daily. You cannot align to something you don't know. The Word is persistently in front of us. The axis is already there.

3. Test everything you hear against Scripture. Whether it's a sermon, a podcast, a reel, or a feeling — go to the Word. If it departs from the Bible, it's not God.

4. Open yourself up to correction. Ask God: "Show me my life in Your Word. Show me my ways. Remove my bias, my preconceived ideas, and let me open Your Word as a fresh child and say — speak to me."

5. Don't wait for someone else to fix your axis. I can give you tools to help. Our Church family can give you community to strenghten you. But until you line yourself up with the Word, nothing will change.

When I'm aligned with God, nothing can shake me. The winds of change, the chaos, the confrontation — I can stand through all of those and not be shaken. That's not magic. That's what happens when you fix your axis point.