The God of Hope
Jeremy Walker serves as a pastor of Maidenbower Baptist Church in Crawley, England, and is married to Alissa, with whom he enjoys the blessing of three children. He has authored several books, and is grateful to preach, teach, and write as opportunity provides.
This post is adapted from Jeremy’s upcoming 50-day devotional, A Word in Season: 50 Days of Hope for Hard Times. Click here to learn more: A Word in Season
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 15:13
God’s revelation of himself is neither accidental nor irrelevant. The Lord has made himself known so that we can approach him according to that revelation. When we read the various names and titles God gives to himself in the Scriptures, it ought to increase our understanding and embolden our faith. So it is in Romans 15:13, where the apostle prays, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Our God is the God of hope. The apostle Paul describes how the Lord Jesus Christ was sent as the Servant of God, the Root of Jesse, the Son of David, who will rise to reign not only over the people of Israel but also over the Gentiles. This Jesus will gather a kingdom of his own out of every kingdom of the world. In him, the Gentiles shall hope—they will put their faith in him with confident expectation. And now says the apostle to this church in Rome—which is composed of both Jews and Greeks, men and women who have been brought from every background and walk of life—“now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Paul is one of those preachers to whom you might say, “Yes, we get the point!” This is the God of hope, “filling you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope, just as you have hoped in him.” He is the God of hope, the God from whom hope comes, and the God in whom we hope. He is the author of hope. There would be no confident expectation were it not for the fact that we have such a God and that our hope is in him. It is because God is God, and because God is all that he is, that we have any of this expectation of future blessing.
The hope of which the apostle speaks here is confident trust with confident expectation. It is not the vague possibility of some future good but the assurance that God has made certain promises to us and the absolute persuasion that he will bring to pass all that he has said. So, it is from the God of hope that believers can be filled with all joy and peace in believing, by laying hold of Christ, the Son of God. It is by entering into this relationship with God, by Christ Jesus, that we come to be filled with all joy and peace.
Notice how the apostle fills up the language there—filled with all joy and peace, all joy and all peace abounding so that there is no space for anything else. There is joy in knowing the God of hope. There is peace in knowing the God of hope. And that joy and that peace come through our faith in Jesus Christ, by whom we are brought into a relationship of peace with God. His smile is known and felt in our midst, and with that, we may then abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Here again there is abundance, filled with all joy and peace, and now abounding or overflowing in hope.
How can you and I do that? How can we experience that? It is because we have a God of hope, but also because the power of the Holy Spirit is at work in God’s children. There are many things that would dent our hope in this world and distress us in our walk through it. There are many things that would dim our eyes. There are trials and temptations that might seem to shake our relationship with Christ. There are difficulties through which we pass that might make the promises dim in our eyes. There are circumstances we encounter where, like many believers before us and those who will come after us, we will cry out to God in the midst of gloom and darkness, asking him to lift up our souls. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, hope will conquer. This confident expectation will rise to the surface.
Our hope, then, does not rise and fall with our circumstances. Our hope should not be yoked to the peaks and troughs of experience, shaken by what happens in the world around us. Our hope needs to be settled in the God of hope, grounded in our faith in Jesus Christ, and abounding because of the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us. Then, our hope is both settled and sure.