An Open Letter to Caregivers
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another. — Romans 15:13-14 NIV
When we began thinking through what we wanted to talk about with you today, the Holy Spirit placed these two verses on Donna’s heart.
Verse 13 serves as an encouragement for all care-giving followers of Jesus, who share in the sufferings of Christ.
Verse 14 finds Paul pointing the reader to his ministry to the Gentiles, which you and I are to imitate as we serve the community alongside other Christians in the local church setting.
Donna chose the NIV version because of the word “overflow” which she found to be a better description of what we want to communicate to you today.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another. — Romans 15:13-14 NIV
Donna: I do love the word “overflow!” Overflow means to cover with or inundate, to overrun, submerge, engulf, soak, saturate, drench, flood, immerse! That is what I want for me and for the people Jim and I care for.
Donna loves this quote by Lisa Hughes in her book Unmet Expectations; Reshaping Your Thinking in Disappointments, Trials, and Delays: “The essence of our heart’s theology is how we think about God when circumstances are different than we expected.” I would add “are different than we had hoped.”
As we live in this fallen world as fallen people we suffer. When that suffering is up close and personal, I can be challenged as to where I am resting my heart. My joy and my peace will be found by where I rest my heart. I am daily challenged to practice viewing my circumstances and those of the people we meet with from an eternal or biblical lens instead of a lens that only sees the temporal, the here and now. It is important that we care well for the people we meet with, grieving with them, rejoicing with them, equipping, and encouraging them with the truth of God’s Word, His promises, and His character.
Our prayer for the people we meet with, and counsel is that by the power of the Holy Spirit, they would come to trust God as their greatest source of hope, their source of joy and their source of peace amid the difficulties and the sufferings they are experiencing. It is our prayer that others would abound in hope, filled to such a measure that it would overflow into the lives of others as they, too, instruct one another with the hope they have in Christ. As this takes place, we are also rehearsing the gospel to our own hearts…as we, too, are in great need.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. —ESV
I appreciate the ESV translation of these verses because…
Verse 13 points to God and where our hope originates. It is a powerful reminder that it is God who promises to fill us with hope, joy, and peace as we follow Jesus. The verse concludes with a call to “abound in hope” through the power of the Holy Spirit. It reminds us that we are to receive this hope, not striving for it under our own power, or feel SHAME if our expectation of hope differs from another’s. It is through the Holy Spirit that we “may abound in hope.”
In Verse 14 Paul affirms “I am satisfied about you.” We want the caregivers to know, “you are doing well. Your work is a worthy endeavor and a high calling. What you do is inherently good, holy, and set apart.”
Verse 14 also acknowledges “that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge, and able to instruct one another.” Today, we affirm that in each of you.
Donna and I, want to come alongside you, as husband and wife, as fellow laborers, as coheirs in Christ, to support you with goodness, knowledge, and instruction (encouragement). We want to be in the trenches with you as you pursue the Lord together and labor to minister to the local body of Christ that God has given you to shepherd. We may not be experts, nor do we have answers for everything. But together, with the revealed Word of God, the reconciling work of Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit, we can bring our small basket of bread and fish. And Lord willing, Jesus will multiply them to the Father’s glory.
We would love to answer any questions that time will allow.
