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Romans 15:13 vs. “Abound In Hope (Romans 15:13 ESV)”

Seeds Kids Worship (Seeds Family Worship) · checked 2026-09-05

▸ Official upload. It met the standard, so play it.

What we checked

PassageRomans 15:13 chapter ↗
Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)
Presents itself asquotation
Categoryword-for-word ✓
AlbumHope · 2021
Words addressed tonot addressed to God (sung about Him)
Teaching or experiencescripture set to music

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria this song presents words as scripture, so these apply

✓Text-faithful
✓Translation named
✓Context kept

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

  • The whole verse, in order, in the ESV. Every repeat in the verse, chorus and tag repeats a phrase the passage had already supplied.
  • The ESV is named three ways over. In the track title, on the album page under “Scripture Version,” and in the chart's credit line, which also names the 2007 text edition.
  • The word order carries its own proof. The ESV arranges the second half unlike the WEB, KJV and BSB, and the song follows the ESV.
  • The chord chart is posted free with the words on it, so anyone can check the song against a Bible without buying anything first.

⚠ Cautions

  • The reference is never sung, only printed in three places. A child can learn the words here and still not learn where they live. Say the address out loud.
  • “Hope” is the word held longest and repeated most, and the verse does not define it. Verses 9 to 12 do. Read them with the song.

Verse Proof

Romans 15:13

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Paul is closing his letter to the church at Rome. Chapters 14 and 15 deal with a congregation arguing over food and holy days, and 15:7 tells them to accept one another as Christ accepted them. Paul then stacks four quotations from Israel's scriptures, and all four bring the Gentiles in. He names the last one as Isaiah's, and it ends with the Gentiles hoping in the root of Jesse. Verse 13 is the prayer Paul puts right after that. It opens by naming God from the word the quotation had just landed on. He does the same thing earlier in the chapter. Verse 4 says the scriptures were written so we would have hope, and verse 5 then names God from two words verse 4 had just used. The “you” in verse 13 is a whole room of people who had been disagreeing, not one reader alone.

WHAT THE SONG SINGS — Romans 15:13, complete, in the ESV, named in the track title and in the chart's credit line

One verse, sung whole, in the ESV's wording, at a length and pace built for children. The publisher posts the chord chart free, and the chart shows the shape.

Two bars of chords open it. The verse section carries the first half of Romans 15:13 across four lines, in order, and the fourth line repeats the third word for word. The whole verse section is then sung again. The chorus is the second half of the verse. The clause about the Holy Spirit's power comes first, the clause about abounding in hope second, then a three-word tag of that second clause, then both clauses again. The tag section sings that same three-word phrase three times, stretching the last vowel of “hope” out over several beats, with a wordless vowel sound between the repeats. Verse, chorus and tag then all come around a second time, and an instrumental outro closes it.

Nothing is sung that Romans 15:13 did not supply. Counting every distinct word on the chart's sung lines, twenty-one of them are words the ESV of Romans 15:13 uses. The other two are not words at all. One is “hope” with its vowel spelled out long, and one is a wordless vowel sound. There is no added line and no explanatory phrase. The reference is never sung. It is printed instead, in the track title, on the album page, and at the top of the chart. The check is against the publisher's own posted chord chart, the only transcription we found.

Nothing shifted inside the sung words. The verse arrives complete and in order, and every repeated line repeats a phrase the verse had already supplied. The label is easy to find, and the wording backs it up. English Bibles do not arrange this verse the same way. The WEB, the KJV and the BSB all open it with “Now,” and all three put the abounding before the Spirit. The ESV opens with “May,” and puts the clause about the Holy Spirit's power before the abounding. The chart follows the ESV on both counts. It never uses the word “Now,” and its chorus sings the Spirit clause first. Smaller markers point the same way, at least away from the KJV and the BSB. The chart says “Spirit,” where the KJV says “Ghost.” It says “believing,” where the BSB has a longer phrase about believing in Him, and it says “abound,” where the BSB says “overflow.” The credit line prints the same answer. It names Ben Houser and Jason Houser, 2019, Seeds Family Worship Music (ASCAP), and then names the ESV, Crossway, and the 2007 text edition.

✓ Word-for-Word Verified: The whole verse is sung, in order, in the ESV's wording. The ESV is named in the track title, on the album page, and in the chord chart's credit line. The chart's word order matches the ESV and matches none of the WEB, KJV or BSB.
When Bibles disagree about word order, the order a song sings tells you which ones it did not use.

Why it matters

Two things are at stake here, and a parent can settle both.

The first is whether a word-for-word label can actually be tested. Here it can, because Bibles arrange this verse differently. Where a song puts the clause about the Holy Spirit rules other translations out. Seeds names the ESV in the track title, and the song then sings the ESV's arrangement. The label and the words agree, and nobody had to take anyone's word for it.

The second is what the word “hope” carries. A child will supply a meaning for it, and the nearest one to hand is that things will turn out fine. Paul has just spent four verses quoting Israel's scriptures about the Gentiles, and the last of them ends with the Gentiles hoping in a promised king from the line of Jesse. That is the hope verse 13 asks God to fill a divided church with. The song sings the verse accurately. The four verses above it say what the verse is about.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song moves between God and the singer.

What repetition plants here is a blessing asked for somebody else. The verse never says “me.” It says “you,” and the song keeps it that way, so a child singing it is asking for another person exactly what Paul asked for a church.

The centre of attention reads as mixed on an honest count. God is the subject of the verse section, where He is the one who fills. The hearer is the subject of the chorus and the tag, where they are the one who abounds. God acts, the hearer receives, and the part that repeats most names the hearer's state.

The word planted hardest is “hope,” drawn out on one long vowel until it is the sound a child remembers. That makes it worth telling them what it points at. Romans 15:12 ends with the Gentiles hoping in a promised king. Romans 15:4 says the scriptures were written so we would have hope. Colossians 3:16 asks that the word dwell in us richly as we sing.

Helpful comparison

Seeds' setting of Psalm 139:14, already on this site, is track 1 of this same album and names its version the same way, in the track title. That habit holds across the album page, where all ten tracks print a reference and the letters ESV.

One difference between Seeds releases is worth recording, because it is easy to mistake for a fault. Our proof of their 2014 setting of Romans 12:9-10 records no wordless vamp syllable anywhere in that song. Our proof of their 2019 setting of Joshua 1:9 records one. This one has one too, in the tag. All three are still word-for-word settings of their passages. What separates them is arrangement, not text.

Three dates sit in the record. The chart's credit line reads 2019. The album page gives 9 September 2021 as the release date and 3:24 as the track's length. The official video went up on the Seeds Kids Worship channel on 7 December 2021.

Sources

Corrections

No corrections to this proof yet.

Think we got something wrong? Tell us what and where, and we will check it against the text. Real errors get fixed here, dated, in public. Every correction on the site →

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✓ Every word the chord chart prints as lyric is a word of Colossians 2:6-7, in the passage's order, and no word of the passage is left out.

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