BELIEVING HOPE: Obtaining the Benefits of Joy and Peace

Romans 15:13 (NKJV) 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.

Here we see that both joy and peace are gifts to us from God as well as precursors to hope, but notice how we get them: “through believing”. Joy and peace do not come automatically, but are received through the cultivation of faith in Christ. We can never disconnect the promises of God from faith. While faith is not earning or working for something, it is the mechanism that lays hold of what is promised (Eph 2:8). Our faith is sometimes strong and ready with the smallest directive to push us into compliance with truth; however, there are other times when it is so weak that we feel like we are trying really hard to convince ourselves of something that isn't so. And this is where Satan has his power. He capitalizes on our doubts by telling us we are believing a fairy tale, pointing out natural examples around us to make his point. Satan’s real power is in his ability to sell lies in order to lead us astray from sincere and pure devotion, and he is very good at it, I might add; after all, he has had thousands of years of practice (2 Cor 11:3; Jn 8:44). When people get deceived and led astray from their faith they drift into fear and despair, resulting in a debilitating sense of hopelessness. Therefore, our choice is simple: we can either believe God or not.

Let’s get practical. For us to have joy and peace in believing we must discipline our minds to choose to think about truth (Phil 4:8), and truth comes from the Word of the God. Though we doubt, and at times our mental focus on the truth seems contrived, we keep saying it to ourselves, not because we are trying to convince ourselves of something that isn’t so, but because ultimately we have more confidence in the Word of God than our own thoughts, experiences, and observations. We force our minds to capitulate, surrendering to a truth that is above our circumstances (Col 3:2). We STAND (Eph 6:13), we renew our minds (Eph 4:23), and we prepare our minds for action (1 Pet 1:13a). It’s a mental game, though not really a game at all. It is believing hope, and our emotional well-being depends on it.