It’s officially 2016 in Malawi, friends. I’m welcoming the new year with gratitude and a giant side of relief. It’s been an incredible year, which I’m also totally okay with being over. It was filled with God’s provision and goodness. But also with awkwardness, uncertainty and grief. (Please don’t hear complaints, I am immensely grateful for this year!)
As I’ve been thinking about the year to come, this week, I also finished my last book of the year, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers. In the book, Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove discuss three different prayers and how we can live them out in our lives. This book had such perfect timing, and I particularly connected with their insight on Paul’s prayer for the church of Ephesus in Ephesians 1.
Ephesians 1:15-23 says, “For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints. I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of this great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. Far above all the rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of who fills all in all.”
What a beautiful prayer.
God doesn’t just want us to know what he has called us to do in this world, but to know the HOPE he has called us to.
I love love love this paragraph from the authors:
“Ephesians beckons us to grow in spiritual wisdom so we can begin to share divine hope. And God’s hope is what we need to stick with Jesus for the long haul. God’s hope is Abraham, all alone out under the stars. He is old and without a child. But God says, ‘All peoples on earth will be blessed through you’ (Gen. 12:3). God’s hope is Ruth, a ‘Moabitess’ outsider to the chosen people, her husband buried in the ground, saying to her mother-in-law, ‘Your people will be my people and your God our God’ (Ruth 1:16). God’s hope is Israel standing out in the desert with the Red Sea in front of them and Pharaoh’s army at their back. God’s hope says, ‘The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still’ (Ex. 14:14).
So this is my prayer, as we (as believers) greet a brand new year: that our hearts would be enlightened, that we would grow in spiritual wisdom and learn to share the hope of Christ with the people we interact with. May we KNOW and find rest in God’s hope.