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Hope
At this point in time, it’s easy to be feeling anxious, unsettled or like we have no control over anything. Watching the news can be a depressing affair and hang over us like a grey cloud.
We don’t have a lot of personal freedom. It’s not a nice feeling to know that you don’t have the freedom or control over your life like you’d want. We can’t control or change the health and wellbeing of our loved ones or friends, things seem all topsy turvy and out of whack. We can’t predict what will happen, when an outbreak of this virus will happen or when our lives will begin to return a bit more to what we’re used to.
It can be frustrating and at times, we can even begin to feel a little hopeless. Often our hope is that tomorrow will be better than today – or at least not as bad. And possibly that might happen. But equally as possible is that it doesn’t.
In times like this, we need to have a hope that is unshakeable – not a hope that is built on things that may fail.
When we talk about the word hope from a biblical perspective, we’re not talking about something that we wish might happen, or we hope there’s a possibility that it might happen such as “I hope we have no rain tomorrow, or I hope that my team wins the footy on the weekend, or I hope that I’ll be able to do this…”.
We’re talking about a real hope is not wishful thinking, but a confidence that something will come to pass, a certainty that something will happen. In Christian terms, this is when God has promised that something will happen and we can have complete confidence that it will. In the bible, this is described “as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:19), or a spiritual lifeline that takes us right into the presence of God.
The hope that we can build our lives on and put our confidence in is knowing that there is a God who created heaven and earth and has each one of us in His hands. It is knowing that there is somebody there who is for us, who wants the best for us and can be depended upon, even in these uncertain times. With this hope, we can know for certain that at the end of our days, if we have placed our hope and trust in Jesus, that we will be with Him at that time. We can know for certain that whatever is happening at the moment is just momentary as we’ll get to spend eternity with Him.
It’s perfectly natural to wish for a better tomorrow and it’s right to work toward that happening and be grateful that we can. But if we’re going to talk about real hope, then we have to have something deep and steadfast, a spiritual lifeline that helps and comforts in this time – something that genuinely knowing Jesus can bring.