Prayer for Hope week 3

#30 Days of Prayer for Hope
##Week 3

“The difference between hope and despair often lies in the heart. Your heart influences your thinking and attitude. Grief and pain tear a person up from the inside out, but a cheerful heart is open to healing.” When we feel our hope turning to despair it is time to seek the Holy Spirit, time to call on Christ, time to call out “Abba.” For we are co-hairs with Christ and our Daddy in heaven hears our cries. Even when we don’t know how to cry out, the Holy Spirit within us intervenes on our behalf and “intercedes for us through wordless groans.”
The point here is that the more we live by the Spirit, the more we will be prone to lean on the Spirit when we need Him. So let’s learn from Romans chapter 8. First, we are heirs, Children of God, with the rights to call on our Father for help. Second, our current pain will not last forever. Third, it is the unseen our hope is in, our adoption, rebirth, and the redemption. Therefore, we likewise lean on the Spirit in our weakness allowing Him to lead, guide, and intercede for us. It is these things that we know deep in our hearts; knowing that God will use these afflictions for good because we love Him and He loves us.
Therefore, if we know these things deep in our hearts, why do we let the worries of the world tare us apart from the inside out. Is it because we do not believe God is big enough, or capable enough, or loving enough to deal with our problems? No, He is all of these things and more; therefore, we can confidently say that “if God is for us who can stand against us.” We can boldly approach the throne, as more than conquerors over the worries of this world. Hebrews 4:16 reads, “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
Let us pray this week as we as we read portions of Romans chapter 8 that the hope in us that allows us to boldly approach the throne of Abba flows out from us and through us to a world that is desperately seeking hope.
Blessings, Pastor Perry

##Romans 8:14-39 (NIV)
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.