Romans 15:13

Sisters and brothers in Christ,

This evening’s Bible passage is Romans 15:13: “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.”

I wrote yesterday about worry. Today I’m writing about hope.

Nowhere in Scripture is there the slightest suggestion that the world is ruled by a God of worry. The true God, as Paul here reminds us, is “the God of hope.” Despite the stubborn resistance of fallen humanity, God never worries that his steadfast and self-sacrificial love will prove too weak for his purposes of redemption and transformation. Our God is the God of hope not because he sorta hopes that maybe things might just turn out okay, but because he is the author of history, he knows the end from the beginning, and his love is the most powerful force in the universe he created in love.

If only we could tap into this hope. Well, we can, sort of. Not in our own strength, nor by the power of positive thinking or some such self-help method. But the God of hope can share his hope with us. Paul’s blessing here is not “May the really smart ones among you fill yourselves with all joy and peace in believing,” but “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.” It’s God’s gracious work, not our stand-out spiritual strength, that replaces worry (regardless of our circumstances) with joy and peace.

This kind of joy and peace arises not from worldly success or security, consoling as savings and an ongoing income may genuinely be during this pandemic, but from “believing.” It is our faith in the God of hope, the God who has redeemed us in Christ, the God who has known from before the beginning that we will be eternally “holy and blameless before him in love” (Eph. 1:4), the God who proclaimed millennia ago that “of the increase of [Christ’s] government and peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7), the God who is fully confident that even human sin cannot finally prevent the coming of the new heavens and the new earth. It’s our faith in this God that fills us with “all joy and peace.” This faith isn’t the triumph of our own reason or a courageous leap of blind faith. It, too, is “the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8).

So Paul prays, too, that “by the power of the Holy Spirit [we] may abound in hope.” The God of hope doesn’t just hope in an idle sort of way that God’s children might possibly “abound in hope.” God uses all “the power of the Holy Spirit” to make this hope bud, blossom, and eventually abound in us, even in the midst of trouble and uncertainty.

Hope, by definition, isn’t something that gives us what we hope for right away. The God of hope is immeasurably patient as he continues to work for the hoped-for joyous culmination of human history. The Holy Spirit is no less patient with each one of us as he cultivates the fruit of the Spirit in us and so prepares us for our glorification in heaven. The fulfillment of our hopes (and his) are not scheduled for delivery tomorrow. God is not amazon.com! But the good he finally delivers will make anything we can buy today, pleasing as it might be, seem so paltry by comparison.

Julian of Norwich famously wrote in her Revelations of Divine Love, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Julian lived at a time when the bubonic plague pandemic was claiming lives all over Europe, including the city of Norwich in which she lived. Julian’s hope in the future wasn’t grounded in her immediate circumstances, but in the God of love who had filled her with “joy and peace in believing” and whose Holy Spirit had allowed her to “abound in hope.”

May the God of hope fill you, too, with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you, too, may abound in hope.

Your brother in Christ,

Max