Romans 15:13 - Find joy and peach through God

Romans 15:13 - 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. Where does joy in life come from? Is it from true love, a job well done, good grades in school, or something like that? Those might make you happy for a short time but its not an everlasting joy. Our passage shows that God can give you all the joy and peace that you can ever need if you are willing to trust in him. Look at the disciples; by all accounts they should have been miserable. They were tortured, ridiculed, and persecuted just about everywhere they went. Yet, Acts 13:52 says “And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.”. How can this be? Through all the pain and all the suffering they still were filled with joy. I would love to know that level of joy in my life. I have a hard time sometimes dealing with things in my day to day life. Stress at work, bills, a busy schedule, house work, all these things I allow to frustrate me and I can tell you I do not always feel the joy in my life. That’s just the world getting in the way I know, it is Satan trying to pull me back to him. Once I clear my head and reconnect with God though I know the joy that He intended me to have. That joy never leaves us. We choose not to connect to that joy at times but that does not mean that it ceases to exist or is no longer available to us. Once things start to get out of hand or go bad we have a tendency to shake our fists at God and ask why He forsake us in our time of need. Why did He allow this thing to happen to us? We forget that He is with us the whole time. We overlook the fact that He has a plan and that it is not for us to understand. We are just too wrapped up in our own lives, our grief, our feelings to see that He is still there. That if we just give it to God, He can handle it even if we can’t. The disciples knew this and as a result were never separated from the joy they found in God. If we trust in Him and allow the power of the Holy Spirit to work in us, we too can be filled with joy for all time. Happiness is temporary, joy, the kind that we find in God, is eternal. I will take joy any day of the week, how about you?