Verse of the day · October 12
Why does Romans 12:12 put rejoicing, patience and prayer in one sentence?
Between the hope and the prayer, the verse puts the trouble.
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Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer;
Romans 12:12
The line asks three things: rejoicing in hope, patience in tribulation, prayer that keeps going. What comes immediately after them is two more instructions — share what you have with Christians in need, food, clothing, whatever is wanted, and keep a door open for strangers. Hospitality was a heavier duty then than it sounds now: houses that took travellers in were scarce, and among Christians the man on the road was often somebody driven out of his own home by persecution. Persecuted and oppressed, they could expect their business to suffer, and perhaps to be put out of their occupations by the people who opposed them, with little compassion to expect from anybody outside the church. It was a time of persecution. Those were the conditions of the people told to rejoice in hope, to be patient in tribulation, and to keep on praying.
In the original language the words come in a different order: in hope, rejoicing; in tribulation, enduring; in prayer, persevering. Each clause names the thing a man is in the middle of, and then what he is to be doing there. And continuing instant, in the third clause, is a single Greek word: it carries both fervency and perseverance — not cold in the duty, and not soon tired of it.
The hope is not left vague. What is hoped for is the glory of God, to be revealed shortly to every faithful follower of Christ. It is a hope of eternal life and glory, and the gospel is what produces it. It is being for ever with the Lord, in a world with no more death in it and nobody left crying. Hope and trust in God are themselves a way of honouring him. And to rejoice in a hope, rather than merely hold one, says two things about the man doing it: that he is sure the thing is real, and that he thinks highly of how good it is.
The second clause takes the hardest case and does not soften it. Tribulation is what God's people must expect while they are in this world, and the road to heaven runs through it. Bearing it with an even mind is to the honour of Christ, and of their own Christian profession. The patience asked for implies steadfastness — the enduring of all that may be appointed. It has two edges: no murmuring against God on the one hand, and no reviling of men on the other. And the people being asked for that patience are addressed later in the chapter as dearly beloved: a word of affection from the man writing, and one that may also be suggesting they are greatly beloved of God, and high in his favour. The appeal the chapter opens with is the mercy of God: the mercy that is in him and the mercy that comes from him, and the greatest of it is that Christ gave himself for us, and gives himself to us.
Just before these three, the letter says: not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord. To be religious is to serve God, and those three commands together with these three are the answer to how. Here is the side of that answer nobody expects. What is in view is the suffering that comes to a Christian for Christ's sake — and God is served in that too, not only by working for him when he calls us to work, but by sitting still quietly when he calls us to suffer. Patience for God's sake, with an eye to his will and his glory, is true piety. And the man who can do nothing except bear it has not dropped out of the service. He is in the half of it that does not look like anything.
And the patience is not asked for on its own. Those who rejoice in hope are likely to be patient in tribulation, because what holds a man up under outward pressure is a believing view of the joy set before him. The position of the first clause says the same thing: it comes straight after serving the Lord and straight before patient in tribulation, and nothing tends more to animate God's people to a cheerful serving of him, or to make them more patient under affliction, than a hope of being for ever with the Lord. It is placed between the two things it feeds.
Then the third clause says where the hope is fed from. Its fervency is aimed at something specific: getting the light and the power of the Holy Spirit, by the most fervent and intense asking at the throne of grace. Without that light and power, the rest of what this run of commands asks becomes impossible — hating what is evil, doing good, loving his brothers, holding a hope that comforts him, bearing up patiently under the tribulations and ills of life.
Each of these three helps the others. Where a hope of glory is assured enough to be a rejoicing hope, the spirit of endurance in tribulation comes naturally. But the hope draws on something too: prayer strengthens the faith that gives rise to hope and lifts it into an assured and joyful expectation. Patience in tribulation is fed by the same expectation, so everything depends on perseverance in prayer. Prayer is a friend to hope and patience. What it takes to keep a joyful hope, and to be held up in the middle of afflictions, is a spirit of prayer cherished and a man living near to God.
Prayer is needful at all times, but especially in a time of tribulation and distress — and the distress may be inward as well as outward. The instruction is to keep at it: never to give up, and never to let discouragement settle. In affliction, in perplexity, in moments of despondency, in danger and want and disappointment, in the loss of friends, a man feels how fitting it is to draw near to God and pour out his heart to him. And the advice is placed here to teach us to go back continually for fresh supplies of grace and strength — enough to keep up the graces, and do the duties, that the verses on either side of this one call for. The ones after it run on to the end of the chapter: giving to saints in need, taking strangers in, blessing the people who persecute you, weeping with those who weep, living peaceably with everybody as far as it lies with you. Saints is the word that verse uses for God's people, and they are saints because God set them apart, because Christ's blood took away their sins, and because the Spirit of God made them holy.
The middle clause is the one addressed to a man with the least left in him. He is inside the trouble, and he is the one asked to hold steady in it. He is not told to find the patience in himself. It is fed to him by the hope, and the hope is kept alight by asking — for the light and the power of the Spirit, for fresh supplies of grace and strength, asked for again and again. Which is why everything here depends on the third clause. But that clause supplies nothing by itself; it is a request. So what the other two are finally resting on is God himself.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, the Geneva Bible notes and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made