One of my “heroes of faith” is Corrie Ten Boom. As a teenager, I was inspired by The Hiding Place,which records the experience of Corrie and her sister, Betsie, remanded in the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp, near Berlin. Betsie died there on December 16, 1944. Recently, I returned to reading more of Corrie’s writings and came across this remarkable quotation: “When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”
Through troubled times, Psalm 46 has also been a help and refuge to me, with its advice to “Be still and know that I am God”. I linked Corrie’s analogy with this verse. If the train driver or aeroplane pilot gets to the destination, then so too will all the passengers in the train or plane. We are “in Christ”, and faith in knowing that He is the “captain of our salvation” should give us confidence, peace and hope.
Faith and hope seem to be inextricably linked. Often, in scripture, they are joined by love. It would seem that our hope is proportionate to our faith. “The nature of hope is to expect that which faith believes” (Richard Sibbes). Because the early Hebrew Christians seemed to be losing hope, the writer often encourages them to look again at the secure basis of their hope. “This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 6:19,20). Christ our forerunner is already at our ultimate destination! Again, the writer tells his readers to “hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
“Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness … on Christ the solid rock I stand”. So, if you are feeling hopeless and discouraged at the time of reading this, preach the gospel again to your soul!
When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.
