Unshakeable hope. You know, that's one thing we need right now as Christians, wherever we are in the world.

We need an unshakable hope. And the beautiful thing is, the Word of God promises that to us

and how we can come to and have and hold an unshakable hope in our hearts and in our lives. And that's what I want to share with you. So if you have your Bibles, I want you to open up to the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is towards the end of the New Testament. After all of St. Paul's letters, you have the epistle to the Hebrews. And we're going to start in chapter 6, verse 11. And I'm going to start

with this section, just to give you a quick Reader's Digest version of the Epistles to the Hebrews. This comes at the end of Paul's epistles, but it's not signed by Paul. It doesn't say Paul at the beginning, like it does all the other letters. And there's a lot of question, even in the church fathers and even among scholars today, who is the author of the epistle to the

Hebrews?

Because it was anonymous.

Now, my personal opinion is that it was St. Paul.

And in fact, it mentions Timothy at the end as his companion.

And of course, we know that Timothy traveled Paul.

My personal perspective, and I know this is debated, is that Paul writes the letter to the Hebrews, after he's arrested in Jerusalem, taken up by the Romans up to Caesar and Meritima to be secure there.

And there's a riot, of course, when Paul brings this collection to Jerusalem, he's eager to get there.

He goes to the temple and a riot breaks out and he gets arrested by the Romans

who have to save him from being killed by this mob,

and then he gets taken up to Caesar and Meritima,

where he's held prisoner there for a year and then he appeals to Caesar.

You know that story.

But after Paul, who is so eager to get to Jerusalem and to support the church there,

he gets arrested immediately and taken out, and so he writes this letter

because he had so much he wanted and intended and prepared to teach

the Jewish community in Jerusalem, because we know from Romans 9 that he loved his Jewish kinsmen

and he loved the small Christian community there and that's why he spent over a year collecting

money in Greece and in Europe to bring back to support the church there that was suffering persecution.

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