“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound (overflow) in hope, through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
I don’t know how many hundreds of times I have read this verse throughout my years of Bible reading and Bible study, but today it really caught my attention. It is loaded with gospel truth. Paul had just dealt with the inclusion of the Gentiles as the people of God, which had been prophesied in the Old Testament. This verse serves as a kind of doxology on that truth. The hope of God is for Jews and gentiles alike. Through Jesus Christ the world is literally overflowing with hope. Paul, then, gives the substance of this overflowing hope. I’m going to begin at the bottom of the verse to point out the reason that we have this hope. Paul wrote that it was “through the power of the Holy Spirit.” In John’s gospel, the promise of the Holy Spirit was given, and at the end of the gospels and at the first of Acts we see the fulfillment of that promise. We have this great hope in the Lord because of the Holy Spirit that God has given to believers. The Holy Spirit who convicted us, confirmed us and entered into our lives brought this great overflowing hope into our lives. (Remember that hope as used in the New Testament does not mean “maybe so” as we use it today, it means that through the Holy Spirit we have certain hope.) The hope that we are given overflows with joy: “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy…” In John 15:11, Jesus said, “My joy I give you that your joy might be full.” Jesus gives us His joy through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that we will always be happy, but it does mean that we will have the Joy of Christ no matter what is occuring our lives. It is up to us to claim this joy when we are going through difficult times. The Bible nowhere promises God’s people that their lives will be trouble free. All you have to do is read about all of the Bible’s prominent characters and see the troubles that they went through – all the way from Moses to Paul. But all believers have an overflowing hope that brings Christ’s joy into their lives. The hope that we are given overflows with peace: “Now the God of hope fill you with…peace in believing.” Just as Jesus promised us His joy, He also promised us His peace in John 16:33: “These things have I spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have tribulation (trouble): but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world…” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of books have been written advising people how they can find peace. Jesus promised us overflowing peace. The Holy Spirit brings peace into our lives. Like it is with joy, this promise of peace does not mean that we will not have anything negative happen in our lives to unsettle our peace. After all, Jesus said, “in this world you will have trouble.” He offers us overflowing peace in spite of the troubles that we meet with in life. I personally know this, for I have had to claim this peace many times. The hope of overflowing hope with joy and peace comes about by believing: “Now the God hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing…” “Believing” is an important word in the New Testament. The promise given throughout the New Testament is that we can have salvation through believing in Jesus Christ. This means more than believing about, or just believing Jesus. To believe in Jesus means to give your life to Him. Believe in Jesus and claim the overflowing hope, joy and peace that we can have only in Christ. If you have it today, claim it!!! Bro. Joe
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“Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to His power that works in us. 21. Unto Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end, amen.”
We need to understand that when we serve the Lord, whatever that service is, we are not in it by ourselves. In our flesh we are limited as to what we can do. In His infinite wisdom, God has shown me what I can do in my flesh, and that is mainly to make a mess. Whatever your task is as a Christian, you cannot do it by yourself. You need the power of God. I think that this is the crux of the problem in a lot of church work today. We go about church business as though it is simply our business, not realizing that it is not simply “our” business. Before Jesus was crucified and ascended, He promised His disciples that He would send the Holy Spirit to work within them. That promise was not just for the disciples, it is also for us. If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit living within you, and He is not in you just to give you some holy thrills. He is in you to enable you to do whatever it is that God wants you to do. He is in you to help you live the Christian life. We depend every day on that “power that works in us.” If we are not depending on Him, then we are not getting done for the Lord what He wants done. You might say, “Wait a minute, do you mean that when I keep the nursery at church that I need the power of the Holy Spirit to help me do it?” I will assure you that if my job at church was keeping the nursery, I would need every bit of the Holy Spirit to help me do it. Don’t you think that tending babies is a gift from God? Not everyone who tends babies is serving God, but if you are doing it in His kingdom work, it is a gift from God. That’s why we don’t need to take any task that we do in the church or the community lightly. God does not take anything that we do for Him lightly. Read this very carefully: What the church needs today is for all of her people, whatever their tasks, to depend on the Holy Spirit, who can give them the power to serve. Of course, that doesn’t just apply to the things that we do at church. It also applies to the things that we do seven days a week. We need to depend on the Holy Spirit when we are at work. Don’t you think that God wants to use you on a daily basis? The problem is that you might feel surrounded and intimidated by those who work with you. We need to always be reminded about what is recorded in 1 John 4:4: “You are of God. Little children, and have overcome them: because greater is He that is in you than he who is in the world.” There is no need to feel intimidated, because we are not in it by ourselves. Remember that you belong to God and that He has empowered you with His Spirit. If God has something that He wants us to do, no matter how menial it may seem to us, it is important because God wants us to do it. Do not belittle your service to Him. Sometimes our service might be to just be quiet Christians, quietly living out our faith before the world. Just remember as you face life’s daily challenges, that God is working in you “according to His power that works in us.” God’s power is never menial, and it is never unimportant. Let’s just go out into the world, into the church, or wherever, with the understanding that God’s power is at work in us. Bro. Joe “But you shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit has come upon you….”
Every Christian has been given the power of the Holy Spirit. As in our text, it is the power to witness, but it goes beyond that. It is the power to live victoriously. Several years ago the city of New York spent several days in darkness because of a power outage. If electricity cannot get to homes, there is no power to turn on lights, or anything else. We have a power outage when we fail to depend on the Holy Spirit as we should, because He is the source of our power. When do we have “power outages” in our lives? We have “power outages” when we do not seek God in the plans for our lives. I think that we would call this “prayer power.” We always need to seek God’s wisdom and direction when we want to serve Him. If we don’t seek His wisdom and direction, we might go on our own, and we have no innate power. This is illustrated in the ninth chapter of Joshua. The Gibeonites were afraid of the Israelites and were afraid that they would be overrun by them. They pretended to live far away from the Israelites, though they did not. God told Joshua to take all of the land of the Canaanites, and the Gibeonites lived in Canaan. Why did Joshua and his leaders make that mistake? Verse 9:14 tells us: “And the men took their victuals, and asked not the counsel of the Lord.” They found out later that they were neighbors, but it was too late to do anything about it, because they had “made a league with them.” (Read Joshua 9 if you would like to get the whole picture.) It was a simple matter of seeking the Lord. We have “power outages” when we do not stay close to God. James gives us a promise in James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” When we ignore the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we lose our closeness to God. We need to consciously stay close to the Lord by daily reading of the Bible and by spending time in prayer. One thing is for certain, if you are not close to God at the present moment, it is because you have moved. Jesus promised just before He ascended back to the Father, that He would “be with (us) always.” Jesus has not moved and He will not move. The Holy Spirit also has not moved away from us, we have just ignored His leadership in our lives. When we do this, we pay a price in one way or the other. This is one reason that the Bible tells us that God disciplines those He loves. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” We have “power outages” when we have human relationship problems. Jesus gave us His love, and He intends for us to share His love with other people. When we allow relationships with fellow Christians to go sour, we cannot serve with the power that we can when we are right with them. But we are not supposed to love just fellow Christians; we are expected to love all people. I know that this is not easy, but if we want to stay clear of “power outages,” we should have good relationships with our fellow human beings. This is difficult in the workplace and it is also difficult in the church. But if we want God’s power in our lives we need to stay right with people. We have “power outages” when we do not forgive other people. There are many Christians who are not serving as powerfully as they should because they have not forgiven someone for some affront. If Jesus could forgive us, we should certainly be able to forgive others. If there is anyone that you have not forgiven, ask God to give you a forgiving heart. This is not an exhaustive list of “power outages” in our lives, but I think they are among the major ones. Bro. Joe “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.” NIV
In our text Paul was defending his ministry to the Corinthian church. There were many in the Corinthian church that were critical of Paul. They did not like his preaching style. They did not think that he was a genuine apostle, because he had not been with the original twelve. They thought that he was “bold” in his letters, but “timid” when he was with them. Paul hinted in this passage that when he came to visit them, they would find out how “timid” he was. He warned them that the weapons that he would use would not be weapons of the world. His weapons had “divine power to demolish strongholds.” Paul did not name those weapons, so what you will get in this article is what I think those weapons were. I want you to realize that this is my opinion, but I think that you will agree that these virtues are weapons that we can use in spiritual warfare. (Paul gives a description of the Christian’s armor in Ephesians 5, but most of them are defensive, except for the “sword.” I think that these weapons that I will list would be involved in our armor.) The first weapon that we have as Christians is Holy Spirit power. In Ephesians 5:17, Paul mentioned “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” The Holy Spirit serves as our weapon against strongholds in at least two ways. One is that when we are saved, we are given the Holy Spirit to work inside of us to lead, guide and teach us. We have His presence every day to help us combat evil. Another way is that the Holy Spirit inspired the word of God, which we have to prepare us for the battles that we will face in the world. Have you ever wondered why godless people want to ban the Bible? It is because they know that God’s word has the power of the Holy Spirit and they want to keep it out of our hands, heads and hearts. Miss Doris Knight was a missionary to China during the Japanese takeover and was there when the communists took over. She was retired and a member of the first church I pastored. When Miss Doris knew that the Bible would be banned, she began to memorize massive amounts of scripture. Her sister told me that she had seen her pretend to read from her Bible, but she was really quoting it. She did this because she knew that the word of God is the sword of the Spirit, and she would need it in case her Bible was taken away from her. We could not face the evils of the world without the Holy Spirit. The second weapon that we have as Christians is our faith in Jesus Christ. We should never underestimate the power of faith to defeat the evils of the world. Jesus said that if we have faith as small as a mustard seed, we can remove mountains. We grow in faith in measure, that is, we grow in faith as we live in it daily. But the faith that we have is the same weapon that Paul, Peter and the other great Christians in the New Testament and in Christian history had. We activate that faith when we digest the word of God and when we pray. Prayer could actually be classified as another weapon, but faith and prayer work together in our lives. I have found that when I have gone through difficult times in my life that my faith was strengthened by taking everything to God in prayer. Faith and prayer bring the power of God to bear in our lives. Paul pointed this out in one of my favorite passages, Philippians 4:6-7: “Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving make your requests known unto God. 7. And the peace which passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” That is a great example of faith and prayer working together. If you are a believer, you have these weapons. Use them!!! Bro. Joe “Likewise the Spirit helps our infirmities for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groaning which cannot be uttered.”
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