Where do you find hope that will anchor your soul in the midst of pain and suffering? When your world falls apart, nothing makes sense, every step you take implodes, you can’t find solid ground, the darkness weighs in – what gives you the strength to carry on? Christ and Christ alone is the only HOPE that will light up that kind of darkness.
Christ is the hope that anchors our very soul. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28 NIV). “Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity…For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints. And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you will not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises…In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 6:1-20 NASB). Praise be to God!!
Christ is the hope of the gospel. “We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you…because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel…He [Christ] has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you…He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight—if indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard…To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:3-27 NKJV). All praise to Christ and Christ alone, for He, is our hope and our righteousness!!!!
Christ is the hope that brings us into God’s glory. “We have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus the Messiah. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace by which we have been established, and we boast because of our hope in God’s glory…Now this hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. For at just the right time, while we were still powerless, the Messiah died for the ungodly” (Rom 5:1-6 ISV).
Christ Jesus is our hope. He is the “Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,’ says the Lord, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’” (Rev 1:8 MEV). One day He will make “all things new” and we “will see His face, and His name shall be on their [our] foreheads… [and we] shall reign forever and ever” (Rev 21:5; 22:4-5 MEV). That is our hope and anchor of our soul. To God be the glory!! Amen! Amen!!
