Finding Hope: Because You Trust

I want to talk to you about prayer. We all pray. We all pray many different things, but I find that the prayers recorded in Scripture to be great guides for how we can pray. I sometimes find that the prayers of Paul and the prayers of Peter and others look very different than my prayer.

My prayer typically centers in on me and what I want in my life. There’s nothing wrong with making our requests known to God. There’s nothing wrong with expressing our desires. But there is something rich about the prayers that God has preserved down through the ages that are found in the Bible. One of those prayers is at the end of the book of Romans – Paul’s masterful laying out of the gospel and the good news of the gospel as to the church there in Rome.

He says this in the 15th chapter. “I pray that God, the source of hope will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust Him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” What a prayer. One verse and such a powerful prayer.

We use the word hope in all kinds of ways, don’t we? You get up and maybe you have an outdoor activity planned. Maybe you have a wedding planned. You check the weather and you say, “I hope that it’ll be a good day.” We use it in that way many times. But the way the Scripture uses hope here is this confident assurance that what God has promised He will do. I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust Him. There it is. I trust Him, and because of that, He can fill my life with joy and peace.

Why? He’s the source of hope and that I would overflow with a confident hope because of the Holy Spirit that He’s placed in me. We live in a world that I think is desperately longing for hope. It’s hopeless. Suicide rates are up. People find themselves discouraged and find themselves despondent. And what I want us to remember is this. That the source of hope that we have, that the world desperately needs, that I need in my life, and that you need in your life, is the God of all hope.

God has made everything possible through His Son Jesus. When I place my trust in Him, then regardless of the circumstances of this world, I can find true hope that produces within me a joy and a peace. Paul wrote that to a church in the first century – a church that was under the control of a wicked and evil emperor. It they could find hope because of what God had done for them, then can you and I not find that same hope today? This is a hope that is firmly placed in the God of all hope because we trust in Him and because of the Spirit of God lives within us. God will provide for you and me a joy and a peace that will fill our lives.

…

Click here to watch other videos in the Strengthen Your Walk series and to sign up to receive other daily video teaching from Inspiration Ministries!