I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

–Parallel verses:
Romans‬ ‭5:3-5‬
Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Looking back at my life, I have placed hope in a lot of people or things. I placed hope in my career, hope in my strength, hope in my relationships. I placed hope in people I thought were good people, who turned out to deceive me. I have placed hope in my Mom who was a good person, to be there for me in life, but she died of cancer when I was 14. I have placed hope in my wife, and as wonderful as she is, she has, at times, let me down. And if I am honest, other people have placed hope in me and I have let them down on many occasions too. So there are a few possible responses to “hopes unfulfilled”: 1) We dream and hope less in others or ourselves. We lower our expectations. 2) We try to take control of our lives more. 3) We find a better, more pure and true source of hope.

Reduced hope leads to a life of mediocrity. Taking control leads to a life fulfillment that is capped out by our abilities. But finding the pure source of hope has some serious promise. Both of these passages deal with where we place out hope, and this then drives where we place our alliance and energy in life. Am I a slave to sin and this world or a slave to God and his righteousness? I added Romans 5:3-5 as a cross reference here because Paul gives us a formula for Hope: “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

Now let’s apply this to the above passage in Romans 6. We can see it as our suffering produces perseverance, our perseverance, character, and our character, hope. The perseverance part is also what we are a slave to, what we persist in doing and following. We can also apply it this way: Jesus suffered in life and on the cross. This produced perseverance in his followers. They all eventually died as martyrs of the faith. And many still do today. This perseverance produced a character in his followers that was like his — a character that loved as God loved and, and they were slavishly devoted to righteousness. And this character in his followers produced (and continues to produce) a GREAT HOPE in their hearts. This hope is in Jesus Christ. He is the one person we can hope in who ALWAYS DELIVERS on his promises and never lets us down. And this hope in Jesus will lead us on to eternal life. Hope in this world, its things and its people, however much we like them or appreciate them, just leads to death in the end, because we are sinners. But our hope in Jesus Christ brings eternal optimism in the hope of heaven, because he saved us from our sins. Circling back, both my Mom and my wife placed their hope in God and modeled that for me. They realized/realize that I can not deliver 100% of the time on their hopes, and vice versa. It was not my Mom’s fault she died, but how she died mattered. And she died modeling a Hope placed squarely on Jesus Christ. May it be said of me.

Lord thank you for a hope in you that is always faithful. You are personal, you care, and you show up in life to help us. You don’t take orders from me or always do things the way I think you should. Your plans are better than mine in the end. Thank you for your faithfulness and I put my hope in you!