I started reading the Diary of Anne Frank last month for the first time. I felt this connection with her as she is quarantined inside her house with her family. Thankfully it’s not the Nazis outside my door, but I do feel like we are fighting a different type of war right now. Reading it during this COVID season has given me a new perspective on life right now. As I go for my daily walk outside in the sunshine, I am so thankful that I am able to be outside. Or when I go to the grocery store, I feel blessed that I am not eating beans and potatoes for every meal. But the hard part about reading her diary is knowing the ending. I know what happens at the end of the story and spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well for Anne. I feel this knot in my stomach every time she writes about what she wants to do when the war is over, or the family discussions they have about the Allies advancing and the hope that they will be free soon. I want to yell into the book and tell her not to put her hope in these things, because they aren’t going to come true. I find tears in my eyes as she dreams and plans for the future.
As we move into the yellow phase and maybe green phase of quarantine, this idea of unsure hope has been on my mind. I have felt like Anne, dreaming about what I will be able to do once this is all over. But I’ve found that it’s actually been really hard for me to hope right now. How excited should I get about a possible vacation this summer, or should I make plans for the fall? What if we go into the yellow phase and then there’s another outbreak and we have to go back into the red phase? What if it’s worse than it is now? It’s actually harder for me to get excited about things that might happen and then have them be taken away than to not get excited about them at all. It’s left me in this strange place of not knowing what to feel about the future.
God reminded me this week where and in whom my true hope should be found. I looked up the word “hope” in my study Bible and the definition I found was, “to desire something with confident expectation of its fulfillment.” It reminded me of a conversation I had with an unbeliever once. We were debating the topic of hope, and he said that Christians use the idea of God to give them a good feeling of hope in the midst of hard times, but it’s all made up in their head. I responded by saying that hope must be based off of something else. Hope is not just a feeling, but an action of trust. We place our hope IN something, and the FEELING of hope is the result of the action. For example, I have hope that a chair will hold me up when I sit in it. But I’m placing my hope in the chair when I trust in it and actually sit down and it holds me up. For hope to be real, there must be something real for us to place our hope in. So my response to the unbeliever was that if the object of our faith isn’t real, than our hope isn’t real.
And this is what I have been struggling with as we enter the yellow phase. It feels like everything I want to put my hope in might not be real and may not happen. In so many conversations I have heard the phrase, “I don’t know what the next year will look like.” It feels like doing a trust fall where the person promises they will catch you, but you keep looking over your shoulder to make sure that they are still there. Afraid that at any moment they will disappear and you will fall flat on the floor.
But here’s the good news for Christians. Hebrews 6:18-20 says, “God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.”
The writer is speaking to a group of Hebrew Christians who are considering going back to the old ways of Judaism. They are questioning if Jesus was really worth the persecutions and hardships they were facing. And here’s what the writer is saying to them and to us today. Don’t put your hope and trust in the things of this world. They aren’t promised and they might be taken away. Your vacation could be cancelled, you could go back to the red phase, and you could even lose your life. If you put your hope in these earthly things you will always be looking over your shoulder in the trust fall and you are sure to fall flat.
But there is Good News my friend. He says put your hope in something else, put your hope in someone else, put your hope in Jesus. We can trust God because of two unchangeable things; his character and his promise. We are trusting God because of who He is and what He has said. He is the God who would leave heaven and come to earth as a servant to live a perfect life and die on the cross for us. We put our trust in Jesus because we can look to the cross and know that our future in secure in his finished work. We have hope in the person of Jesus who has become the high priest forever because he has conquered sin and death. And trusting in who He is, allows us to trust in what he says, and we can trust that his promises will be fulfilled. When we fall into the arms of Jesus and trust Him with our entire life, we can trust that what He says in his word is true. And the Holy Spirit gives us the enjoyment of that hope now. (Romans 5:5, 15:13).
So in a time when it is so tempting to place our trust in things the world is promising and the hope of a yellow or green phase, we can look somewhere else for our hope. We place our hope in Jesus, knowing that he is trustworthy and he has promised to catch us when we fall into his arms. And we can trust his Word and the promises of the Bible.
Here's where we can actually place our trust right now:
- He promises that our salvation is secure, no matter what ( John 10:28-29)
- He promises never to leave us nor forsake us (Heb 13:5)
- He promises to give us wisdom if we ask (James 1:5)
- He promises to provide a way out of temptation (1 Cor. 10:13)
- He promises to finish the good work he has begun in us (Phil 1:6)
- He promises to come back (Luke 12:40)
“These promises are sure and steadfast. They have much more to say about who God is or how is sanctifying us than about a specific circumstance or outcome. We are not promised certainty in our circumstances, but we are promised certainty in the God of our circumstances. And that, brothers and sisters, is an anchor for the soul.” -Jen Wilkin
Lindsey Reichert
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