Hope Like An Overflowing Water Glass

Posted by: Megan Sweitzer | Monday, August 5th, 2024 (12:00am)

“I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” ROMANS 15:13 NLT

When I first read this passage, the word that immediately stuck out to me was overflow and quickly a memory came to my mind. When I was a kid, I remember standing on a stool in my kitchen with my mom beside me while I learned how to pour water into a glass and, of course, not knowing how to control a pitcher, the glass overflowed.

Isn’t that a beautiful picture of the hope that Christ gives us? An overflowing hope. Hm. Let’s think about that more!

This verse is a closing prayer Paul makes as he is bringing the letter for the Romans to an end. Paul has spent so much of Romans talking about division and unity between Jew, Gentile, and Roman. He has this opportunity near the end of his letter to talk about the Christian life and how to live together. This is where we pick up with our verse of the day.

There are 2 mentions of hope in this passage. The first is about God being our source of hope, that God in his character is hope. We have the ability to turn to the Lord, look to Him and his word, and we can expect to know a God who is hopeful and provides hope for His people. His hope is abundant and overflows even in the darkest of situations. If you open up the book of Isaiah every once and while, you will find pages filled with destruction, judgment and hardship, yet those things are always followed by God’s hope and redemption. Paul, here in Romans, is praying that this God, the same God of Isaiah, who is the source of all hope in life and death, will fill the people completely with joy and peace because they trust in Him. He is praying and encouraging Jew and Gentile alike, to know this God. Can you say that you trust in Him and in his hope? Do you have this confident and joyful expectation that God is good, overflowing with hope, and can fill you with peace and joy? Do you know this God?

The second mention of hope in this passage is the hopeful result. Because we know God as our source of hope and can trust that He will fill us with joy and peace, THEN we will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are now equipped because of the Spirit and what Christ has done for us, to overflow hope into our community, our family, and our spouse. Because of who the Lord is, we have a hope that can seep into every area of our lives. We can let it transform and change us to be more Christlike. This week, consider what it would be like to have an overflowing confident hope in the Lord wherever you are. Could we be a community that is pouring hope over each other just like the water overflowing from the glass?