I thought four letter words were bad and should not be taken seriously until I met HOPE. In my deepest and darkest of moments I can say hope is something that seems non-existence and truly hard to grasp. It is hard to explain, but there are times when some emotions are almost impossible to remember or experience. I can remember being in misery for so long that I forgot what joy was or what it felt like, or how to conjure it up with thoughts. I would even take time to sit and meditate on joy and find there were no feelings to be found to follow through. Has this ever happened to you? I would tell my doctors that something is just missing and they would look at me with blank faces. Until one day I came across this verse and it made sense to me.
“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” Romans 15:13
So, I am going to break this verse down for you as the Holy Spirit has shown it to me.
- Now God of hope – God is the beginning and ending of hope, the expert on hope, and the man upstairs who gives out hope.
- Fill you with joy and peace – HE has the power to fill you with joy and peace. This tells us that joy and peace or linked to what we have hope in. If we lack hope then we don’t have joy and peace. There may be times as I have said before that I couldn’t muster up my joy and peace. In those times, I remember floundering because I had no answers or no Faith in what I was doing or putting my hope in. True hope can fill you with joy and peace.
- In believing – The importance of our beliefs. This tells us the first place to look when our hope, joy and peace are disturbed is to look at what we believe in. For me, this one, is the key. I have often found myself believing in something that has no merit, no hope of a good end, and that is not what God wants for us. Other times there are beliefs that other say are true that are contradictor to your peace in God. When this happens, it is of great importance to look it up in your scripture and study the entirety of the answer. Look at the scripture in its setting and what is going on in the story as well as multiple scripture throughout the Bible talking about the same subject, then draw a conclusion. You will be amazed at what you find and peace in having a true answer and believing in it.
- That ye may abound in hope – God’s desire is for us to abound and live with hope. Hope is what gets us through each day. You can have hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is God’s light shining for us a pathway to him, or you can believe its Satan standing with a flashlight leading you astray. Each belief has power, but which one has a path out of the dark pit, and which one leads you further down?
- Through the power of the Holy Ghost – God has promised those who believe in him the gift of a comforter to abide with them. That comforter is the Holy Ghost. Some people recognized it as their conscience. Others as an entity to guide them right and wrong. I believe the Holy Ghost is many things, and you will find that as you study multiple scriptures on the subject, but in this verse, it defines the Holy Ghost as one who has power. Not just any power, but power to instill and give hope. The power to guide us to a place of hope again. I don’t think the Holy Ghost is necessarily like a fairy godmother that waves its magic wand and poof! You have hope again. I think the Holy Ghost is deliberate, careful, and slow to teach us how to have hope again. You know that saying, “give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”? If the Holy Ghost just gave it to us, it would burn out when we used it all up, but if the Holy Ghost took the time to guide us on how to obtain and have hope, then we can acquire it at anytime in the future.
So many times, I would often get mad at God for not granting me hope that I had earnestly prayed for. Why would he want me to suffer so? This verse shows me that God does not want me to suffer, but that in doing things His way, He wants to grow me. Grow me to trust in Him and in His promises, grow me in my mental and emotional development, and grow me to understand the power I can have with his help to conquer the deepest and darkest of hopeless places. All it takes is a mustard seed of faith and we will see our mountains become small, our deeply planted roots of anguish uprooted and planted in the depths of the sea, and our lives flourish into a tree where others find hope and security. (Matthew 13:31, Mark 4:31, Luke 13:19, Luke 17:6)
And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Matthew 17:20
by keri payne 