COVID 19 ENCOURAGEMENT EPISODE 08

Hi, this is Chris Benjamin, the director for the Salvation Army Soundcast. We wanted to take this opportunity to share some additional messages of encouragement with you from some of our hosts from shows like Wonderful Wars of Life and Heartbeat. We just pray that these are an extra blessing to you.

If they are, please share them with a friend. God bless. Hi, this is Major Amy Reardon with the Salvation Army Soundcast and I'm happy to be able to share a few thoughts with you today. As you know, it's Holy Week and we've just recently had Palm Sunday and we're coming up on Good Friday. I was thinking about the crowd in Jerusalem, you know, the crowd that welcomed Jesus and yet then not too many days later cried out, crucify him, and the contrast that happened there. A lot of times I've heard people say what a surprise it is that they move from a welcoming crowd, a celebratory crowd, to a condemning crowd that sought out his death in just a matter of days.

But I was really giving some thought and I'm not sure it was all that surprising. What I mean is when Jesus came to Jerusalem, the people thought that he was coming as a conquering political hero. That's what it meant by spreading their cloaks on the ground. That was a Jewish symbol of a coming king and palm branches were waved to show victory. So they were demonstrating that they really believed that Jesus was making his entry and now the time had finally come when he was going to conquer the Romans and set them free from that oppression.

That's what they've been hoping for. So by the time Good Friday came, none of that had happened. Jesus hadn't conquered the Romans. He hadn't even called together an army. He hadn't done any of the things that they expected. What did he do? Well, he did a lot of teaching in that time.

In fact, one of the things he taught was that the people should pay their taxes to Rome. So obviously this was quite different from what they had in mind. And maybe they were just angry enough that it changed their hearts, that they felt betrayed, that they really just thought of Jesus as a traitor to what they expected because they expected the wrong things. So as we're here in this COVID-19 period, we also aren't really sure what to expect. We're in this holding period, just like the Jews were sort of during Holy Week. We don't know what's coming next. Some people say that this is the end of history as we know it, that we're walking into the times that were talked about by Daniel or spelled out in Revelation. Other people say that, no, this isn't the end of history.

In fact, this is the beginning of a great new era and the church is going to shine and we're going to become better people than we ever were. We don't really know what's going to happen. We don't know what God is going to do. We don't know what his purposes are.

We're in a waiting period. But I think we need to make up our minds to be nothing like the people in Jerusalem. We need to have hope and faith when God doesn't do what we're expecting him to do or when he makes us wait for what he's going to do.

We need to be people of hope and confidence. What is to our advantage is that we live on this side of the resurrection. We know who Jesus Christ is. We know what victory is, because even though Jesus Christ hasn't returned for the second time yet, we do know that he is the conquering king of the universe. We do know that he has conquered sin. We do know that he resurrected and that we will live forever with him. So we know so many things as those people long ago didn't know. So this Holy Week, even as we wait and we wonder what is going to happen next to us, to our loved ones, to our land, let us remember that we serve the risen king. We know the end of the story, and it's a hopeful one.