Romans 15:13: a blessing, not a command
13So may the God of hope fill you with every joy and with peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope and in the virtue of the Holy Spirit.
The verb is in the mood of a wish, which changes the nature of the sentence: not something to do but something to receive. This edition speaks of the Holy Spirit’s virtue where others say power, and the title given to God — the God of hope — is the key to the whole paragraph.
Short answer
Romans 15:13 is a blessing rather than an instruction: Paul wishes that the God of hope would fill his readers with joy and peace so that they abound in hope. It closes a section about Jewish and Gentile believers accepting one another, and hope appears as a result rather than an effort.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 2 min read
It is one of the most used verses for ending a service, and that use fits. What the quotation tends to lose is what came before it in the letter.
Where this verse appears
Romans 15 closes the practical part of the letter, and the subject is life together between groups with real reasons not to accept one another: believers of Jewish background and believers from outside.
Paul has just quoted a run of Old Testament texts about peoples praising together. This verse is the prayer that closes that argument.
What it says
The form is a blessing. Paul does not command hope or demand joy: he asks that they be given. That matters for anyone reading the verse on a day when they feel neither.
The internal sequence is chained. Joy and peace come in believing; hope comes in abundance as a result. It is not a list of independent items but a process with an order.
Hope is the term that organises the verse. It opens it, in the title given to God, and closes it, in the aim. And in Paul’s vocabulary hope is not optimism about what will happen: it is expectation resting on a promise.
What to do with it today
In a bad week, the form of the verse is what serves best. It can be prayed exactly as it stands, asking for what is missing, instead of being read as a demand for what ought to be felt.
And it is worth noticing the setting of life together. The blessing is not individual in the original: it is addressed to a group that was struggling to put up with itself. Abounding in hope, there, has to do with staying at the same table.
What the passages say
4For whatever was written, was written to teach us, so that, through patience and the consolation of the Scriptures, we might have hope.
Nine verses earlier, Paul explains where hope comes from: from patience and from the consolation that the Scriptures give. It is the mechanism behind the blessing.
5but hope is not unfounded, because the love of God is poured forth in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
An earlier claim in the same letter that hope is not unfounded, tied to love poured out. The two passages together show the theme had been building.
A prayer to carry with you
God of hope, fill me with what I cannot produce. Joy, peace, and enough hope to get through this week. Amen.