Author: Sarah Fowler Wolfe

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Hope From The Darkest Time in History

Dear sister,

Many dear friends of mine have been suffering from depression lately. Not just a time of feeling blue, but deep soul-rending pain that leaves them questioning their very existence. Weeping with them and praying for them is in sharp contrast to the new life of spring surrounding us—flowers blooming, leaves returning, sunshine beckoning.

Palm Sunday has just passed, the remembrance of the joyful day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (fulfilling the prophecy from Zechariah 9:9) and people lined up to greet Him with shouts of “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matthew 21:9) Jesus said if they hadn’t, “the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 19:40) And Easter is next, the most hopeful event in all of history. He is risen. But between those Sundays of celebration, we have a very dark week.

On Maundy Thursday we remember the Last Supper Jesus had with His Apostles, where He washed their feet and instituted the Lord’s Supper. We know His heart must have been heavy as He warned them how Judas would betray Him and Peter would deny Him. And then He went to the garden of Gethsemane, where He asked His friends to watch with Him because “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38). He went a little farther on and fell on His face (Matthew 26:39) praying if it were possible to be delivered from what His Father had asked Him to do. He returned to His friends, who hadn’t even stayed awake while He was dealing with such torment, and then left them and prayed the same thing again… and then came back and found them sleeping again, and left and prayed the same thing again. The Son of God, who had chosen to come from the full glorious presence of His Father in heaven to live a sinless life for 33 years on sinful earth was about to face the full wrath of the Lord for all the sins of each of His people. What sorrow, what dread! He was under such emotional strain that He began to sweat blood (Luke 22:44). Traditionally at the end of the Maundy Thursday service church leaders strip the vestments from the front of the church and the congregation files out in silence, commemorating Judas’ betrayal and how the soldiers stripped Jesus once they’d captured Him.

As we pass into Good Friday we remember the torture He endured, His death by crucifixion, and His burial. While He hung on the cross, the whole land was dark for three hours in the middle of the day (Mark 15:33). Traditionally churches hold a Tenebrae service to commemorate this darkness, gradually lowering the lights until the sanctuary is dark, as it would have been outdoors while our Savior was dying. When Jesus died, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.” (Matthew 27:51) The Messiah had just been crucified. He was dead, and His followers had to bury Him.

It must have been hard to cling to what Jesus had told them, that He would be raised on the third day (Matthew 16:21). He was dead. They’d seen Him breathe His last, touched His body, prepared Him for burial, and laid Him to rest. They went away to mourn together as the Sabbath approached.

But we know the rest of the story! On the third day the tomb was empty. He has risen, He is alive! Death no longer has dominion over Him (Romans 6:9). Later “He parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51) and “After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3). Not only is Jesus alive, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-6). This is unfathomable mercy, grace upon grace.

Theologian Dr. R.C. Sproul and composer Jeff Lippencott collaborated to write a number of hymns in a project now known as Glory to the Holy One. One of the songs is No More the Grave, about Christ’s victory over death. Listen to it sung at Saint Andrew’s Chapel during the debut concert and rejoice with the refrain:

No more the grave can yield its sting,
No more is death our foe.
Our souls can now with gladness sing,
Now gone all curse and woe!

I pray as you travel through this week that you “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:18-19)

Serving the risen Lord Jesus Christ with you,

Sarah

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Hope While Moving

Dear sister,

I am exhausted. My roommate and I are moving soon. Of course we’ve done that before, but not for three years. There are so many logistics to work through. And this time, for the first time, it involves not only purging and cleaning and packing and scheduling and changing addresses and setting up utilities but searching home listings and finding a realtor and a mortgage broker and getting an inspection and an appraisal and signing a never-ending stream of paperwork.

But I said just yesterday that even all this is a reminder of grace. We knew we had a tight time limit for finding a house. In our price range everything was moving quickly—like within a few days of coming on the market kind of quickly. And our lease on our current apartment ends on a certain day. So we researched for months, watching things come on the market and get sold, but there was a one-week window to both find and get in contract on a house.

So what happened? That.

I wasn’t even worried about any of that part of it, to be honest. Every time I move God just sets it up. I never know exactly where I’m going until the moment I need to know, and then the best option is presented right before I have to make a decision. Every. Time. I kept reminding my roommate God would work it out, and He did.

So why am I worried all these tasks won’t get done? They will. They always do. This is my 18th move. I know what I’m doing, and I know how to get it done even amidst running my business and volunteering at a national conference for several days and painting the entire interior of the new place before we move in. Everything that needs to get done will be done (Philippians 4:19, Matthew 6:26).

We hear all the time—on commercials, even from our financial advisors—that “past performance is no guarantee of future performance”. Except with God, it is. He reminds us over and over in Scripture that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that He brought His people out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. He promised a Savior, and He sent His own Son to live a perfect life, be tortured, and die on a cross for our sins. He gave us all of His Word to remind us of everything He’s done. He will not abandon us now.

1 Peter 1:3-7: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

My prayer for you this week is that “the tested genuineness of your faith” will “result in praise and glory and honor” (1 Peter 1:7) to the Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Hebrews 13:8). He who holds the stars in the sky holds your circumstances in His hands. Cling to hope, sister; cling to Him.

Praising Him with you,

Sarah

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Eagerly Waiting with Perseverance

Dear sister,

At first ‘hope in troubled times’ sounded like a no-brainer to me. After all, that oh-so-familiar Jeremiah 29:11 says “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” We have hope because we have Christ, right? …Right? I have to be honest: I can quote verses about hope all day, but I have a hard time knowing what that’s supposed to feel like.

Read Romans 8:16-25. We are children and heirs of God if we suffer with Christ in order to be glorified with Him. Paul says our suffering now is “not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (v18). God subjected creation to unwilling futility (pointlessness or uselessness) “in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption” (v21). He says creation and even we who are children of God “groan together in the pains of childbirth” (v22-23) “as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (v23). “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (v24-25). The NKJV translates verse 24 not just as waiting with patience but says we “eagerly wait for it with perseverance”. That is what hope is.

Okay, eager perseverance, sure. But it’s a lot easier to identify with Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” If we’re hoping toward “the glory that is revealed to us” it may be a long time before we get to see the inheritance we have been promised.

In Romans 12:12 Paul tells the church to “rejoice in hope”. Proverbs 10:28 says “The hope of the righteous brings joy” (NKJV “The hope of the righteous will be gladness”). This reminds me of Romans 5:2-5 “[W]e rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” And that parallels James 1, the ”Consider it all joy…” passage. James tells us “the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

Hope—even when it seems like it’s all we can do to hold on by our fingernails, never mind that “eagerly” thing—produces patience, steadfastness, perseverance. And that is the process we are going through, the refiner’s fire, that will make us ready to take the place Jesus bought us as sons and heirs with Himself. And what is that like?

“’Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’” (Revelation 21:3-4)

My prayer for you this month is with Paul: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” (Romans 15:13)

 

Rejoicing in hope,
Sarah