When have you been afraid? Last week? Yesterday? Today? And were you afraid of something real? Of something imagined?

The Israelites lived in fear under Pharaoh. What was he thinking? What might happen next? And what might never happen? Rescue. So Israel groaned under the weight of slavery and cried out for help.

When you’re afraid, what do you do? Sometimes we try to distract ourselves from our fears. Sometimes we try to ignore them. Sometimes we run away and hide. But what happens? Our fears don’t get distracted from us; they don’t ignore us; they don’t run away and hide from us. They are, it seems, ever present. So sooner or later we look to something or someone else and we, too, cry out for help.

Israel called out to God. Who do you call out to? Where do you put your trust, your fear? To trust is to entrust, to transfer something belonging to you, even your very self, into another.

In your fear you can only deal with what you know, not with what you don’t or can’t know. Here are two things you can know in your fear to help direct your trust:

1) God knows your thoughts. God saw and heard Israel in their groaning. He saw their affliction, that they feared. And he saw their oppression, what they feared. God isn’t just aware of your fear. He’s also aware of the cause of your fear.

2) You can know God’s thoughts. For children especially, not knowing what an adult is thinking can be scary. But you need not fear what God is thinking about you. Paul says no man can know another’s man’s thoughts except the spirit of that man and unless that man chooses to reveal those thoughts. In the same way, no one can know the innermost thoughts of God except the Spirit of God and unless God chooses to reveal his thoughts (1 Corinthians 2:10-12).

The glorious truth, Paul proclaims, is that God has given us his Spirit to reveal to us, to make known to us, the inner most precious thoughts of God. These thoughts are about something though. “Set your minds on the things that are above” where Christ is (Colossians 3:1-2). The thoughts God makes known to us are centered on, revolve around, are grounded in, not a place “above,” but a person—“Christ” who is above.

Now where Christ is there is no fear, because he has conquered every fear. He is our living hope! Our thoughts, when set on him, are neither disconnected from something real nor connected to something imaginary. It is one thing to have an imaginary fear, quite another to have an imaginary hope. Your hope is only as real, unshakable and unassailable, as the object of your hope.

Wherever you are put your fear, your hope and trust, your very life, into Jesus Christ. In him God has not only seen and heard you, but has himself come down to rescue you on the cross. There Jesus faced his greatest fear—he didn’t distract himself, ignore, or run away and hide—he walked into our greatest fear: being completely forsaken and separated from God. And he was, in our place, so that now “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)