Joy, Hope, and the Holy Spirit

Scripture — Romans 14:17; 15:13 (NRSV)

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Devotion

In Romans 14, the Apostle Paul deals with conflict in the Roman church over various religious practices. Some of the Christians in Rome believed they should abstain from meat (which was often associated with idol worship). Others believed they were free to Christ to eat anything. Furthermore, some of the Romans were convinced they should set aside one particular day each week for worship and other church activities. Others believed they had the freedom to determine which day they devoted in a special way to God (see 14:1-6).

In response to the conflict in Rome, Paul urged the Christians there to “no longer pass judgment on one another” (14:13). No matter what they eat or what day they set aside for worship, they must not judge or injure their brothers and sisters with whom they disagree (14:15).

Then Paul seeks to reorient the priorities of the Roman believers. He writes, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (14:17). Rather than focusing so much attention on what they eat or don’t eat, the recipients of Paul’s letter should pay more attention to the essentials of God’s kingdom, namely righteousness, peace, and joy. These are experienced in and through the Holy Spirit, who dwells within each believer (8:9).

In the New Testament, the kingdom of God has both present and future dimensions. In the present day, God reigns over all things, including the church and every single believer. So, in a sense, we live in the kingdom of God right now. Yet things on earth are not yet what God ultimately intends for them. The earth is under the dominion of “the ruler of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2), whom we sometimes call Satan. Sin continues to drag us down, distract us, and disable us in our effort to live fully for God’s glory. Thus, we experience God’s kingdom now, but incompletely.

In our spiritually divided world, we yearn for the future, the full coming of God’s kingdom. We look forward to the day when “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever” (Rev 11:15). (Yes, this is sung in Handel’s Messiah, and you’re welcome to sing it right now!) In this life, we get to taste a bit of that future kingdom through the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit. As Paul writes in Romans 15:13, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” God, through the Spirit, fills us with joy and peace, which enables us to have abundant hope for the future kingdom.

Taken together, Romans 14:17 and 15:13 make a strong connection between joy, hope, and the Holy Spirit. We can have joy in this age, even with its struggles and sufferings, because of our hope in the coming of God’s future kingdom. We can experience the “fullness of joy” (Ps 16:11) even now because God is present to us through the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the Spirit enables us to abound in hope, which in turn fills us with “all joy.”

If joy is connected to our hopeful yearning for God’s future kingdom, then joy isn’t only a response to good things in our present-day experience. Indeed, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in Surprised by Joy, joy includes an “unsatisfied desire,” a yearning that isn’t fully satisfied in this life (p. 19). Thus, since Christian joy is bound to our hope, we can have joy in difficult times and also understand that our joy won’t be complete and permanent in this age.

These two passages from Romans associate joy with the work of the Holy Spirit. In Romans 14:17, we have joy “in the Holy Spirit.” In Romans 15:13, God, through the Spirit, fills us with joy as we “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Paul has more to say about how the Spirit enables us to experience joy. I’ll investigate this more in tomorrow’s Life for Leaders devotion.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Welcoming—Living Peacefully With Different Values and Opinions (Romans 14–15).