Our third pre-assembly devotion is written by Dave Raecke. Dave is a member at Our Saviour, Warrenton and serves on synod council as a representative of the Germana Conference.

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Romans 5:1-5

Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory.  But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

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When asked if I would write a devotion for Synod Assembly members I said, “Sure!” (After some thought.) Pastor Colleen sent me a list of passages to pick from and I went right to the Romans passage. It’s a book I have studied a lot in leading adult classes so I figured: “a piece of cake”. Well-yes and no. 

I went to my “concise” concordance which covers 7,200 key words in the NRSV text, with 70,000 references. For the word hope, there are 70-80 references, which seemed small. So, I wondered about hope’s good friends, faith and love (or charity, if you’re a King James fan). Turns out faith has about 250 references and love has about 500! 

The other main word in the topic, “sustains”, only has 6 references. I wondered if I had the right subject. As I thought about what was going on, I noticed that the order of the F-H-L words in the Romans text is the same as in the more well-known 1 Corinthians 13:13 text- “And now faith, hope and love abide, these three: and the greatest of these is love.” That phrase, “the greatest of these is love”, made me wonder if I had the right subject at all. 

But as I thought more about it, I came to see that all 3 words are important in their own right, and even more so as a connected package. And that hope is the connector. Our relationship with God has to start somewhere and that is faith—when someone or something brings us to realize that there is a God “out there” and He really does want to bring us back to Him. Hope springs up as we go through life and things may not be as smooth as we would like, and faith may be a bit hard to hang onto. And hope leads us to see God’s love—everlasting, overwhelming, sustaining us, and calling us to go out and look for folks to whom we can offer these gifts, as God’s helpers.

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This week’s prayer requests:

  • For God to guide all those who are preparing for worship: preachers, altar guild, musicians, and readers.
  • Thanksgiving for the work of Lutheran Disaster Response, who will receive the assembly’s offering