I pray that the God of hope will fill you with abundant joy and peace through your belief in him, and that you will also overflow with this strong hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I am confident that you dear friends are also full of goodness and knowledge and therefore able to effectively counsel and teach one another.
Comments:
As Paul continues his many-phased benediction of Romans, he refers here to a fabulous title for our heavenly Father..."the God of hope". He is the One who definitively holds the future of all things in his heart and in his hands...and it is a marvelous future for the entire creation that Jesus Christ came to inaugurate and secure. It is a perfect future...one filled with love, justice, beauty and ongoing adventure. God is with us now through Jesus and offers himself to be the source of the renewed hope that we so desperately need as we endure and grow through the adversities of life in this world. The apostle prays for us, his readers, to be filled with abundant joy and peace (those characteristics of being that spring up, by the Spirit's power, from God's hope over us and in us) as we hold fast to our trust in Christ Jesus. It requires the power of the Holy Spirit, a power with a source beyond this realm, to live in hope within this realm. Followers of Jesus are a "prophetic sign" on display to the entire creation of God's ultimate victory over all that is evil and broken.
As we are filled with these heavenly graces, we are equipped and empowered to offer this overflowing strength to one another in the community of faith and to those who are on their way into it. We not only need what God supplies directly to our hearts and minds, but we also will need brothers and sisters in Christ all along the journey...vessels of God's goodness and truth...who will be used by the same Spirit to convey God's loving messages and support into our lives as they are needed. The church is meant to be a network of Christ-centered friends who band together to track with each other through all the various seasons of life and help inspire one another to keep moving forward to our personal finish lines.
May you be filled afresh this day with abundant joy and peace. May you abound in hope through a power beyond your own as God allows you to see what he sees and shares his very thoughts with you. May he bless you with true and wise friends now and all throughout your life, until that great day comes when the old creation is seen to be swallowed up by, fully digested by and entirely assimilated into the new. Amen.
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