Lewis Smedes Standing on the Promises First air date October 4, 1998 – Program #4201

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Dr. LEWIS SMEDES is ordained in the Christian Reformed Church of America and taught theology for over twenty-five years at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He’s a prolific author whose books include Forgive and Forget, Caring and Commitment, and The Art of Forgiving. He’s now retired from teaching, but continues to travel as a visiting preacher and to write from his home in Sierra Madre, California.

I have just one thing to say to you: never give up hope. Never give up hope. Never give up hope for your children. Never give up hope for yourself. Never give up hope for this broken, bruised, and bungling world. Never, ever give up hope. Because if you let hope die, you will die with it. They may not bury you for a while, but without hope you are a dead person walking. As long as you keep hope alive, hope will keep you alive.

The first thing I want to say about hope is this: We were made, we were created for hope. Hope is bred in our bones.

I. Our spirits were made for hoping

Our spirits cannot live without hope anymore than our lungs can breathe without air. Hope is the work of the human heart the way thinking is the work of the human brain. Let me explain why this is so. God created us with the magical power to imagine what is going to happen to us in the future. But He created us with absolutely no power to control what will happen in the future. Let me say that again: God created us with the power to imagine the future, but he gave us no power to control the future.

We have the power to imagine all sorts of good things that may happen to us and to people we love. Good things we want. Good things we need. But there is no way for us to guarantee that we are going to get those good things. It is possible that we may get them, but it is never certain. We can only hope. We also have the power to imagine all sorts of bad things that may happen to us or to our loved ones. But we cannot be sure that they will happen. They could happen. It is possible. But it is never sure.

What we have ahead of us is a field of possibilities. The tomorrow we can imagine today is chock full of wonderful possibilities. But it is also full of possibilities of bad things, even terrible things. So the future that we imagine is a future with possibilities of blessings and possibilities of tragedy.

When we focus our imagination on the terrible things that could happen, we fear that they will. When we imagine and focus on the good things that could happen, we hope that they will happen. And that is the human condition: we can live by fear and we can live by hope.

Hope energizes us. Fear paralyzes us. Hope empowers us. Fear weakens us. Hope lifts us up. Fear drags us down. As human beings who cannot control the future that we imagine, we are fearful that bad things we imagine will happen, but we hope that the good things we imagine will happen. The question of everybody’s life is: will we live by hope or will we live by fear? Will hope empower our spirits or will fear shackle our spirits?

This brings me to the second thing I want to say to you about hope.

II. Hope is power

Hope is personal power to strive for the good things we hope for. As long as our hope keeps the upper hand over our fears, we have the spiritual energy to strive for and achieve the good that we hope for.

I am talking to you about hope here today because once upon a time a young Dutch blacksmith, only twenty-one years old, and a young, plump Dutch farm girl, only twenty years old, were energized by hope to leave their families, their friends, their little village, their native land, and book a place in steerage to steam off to a future in the United States. What had gotten into them? I can tell you. It was hope that got into them.

Every good thing that any man or woman has ever been accomplished was begun by the power of hope. No painter has ever put a brush to canvas without hope of leaving something beautiful to look at on the canvas. No writer ever put words to paper without the hope of writing something worth reading. No builder has ever put brick to mortar without hope of building a wall. No business person has ever launched an enterprise without hope of making it work. No addict has ever been cured without hope of getting better. No evil in the world has ever been overcome without hope that good could triumph. I am going to repeat myself: every-not most, every-good thing that anyone has ever accomplished in our world was begun only because someone had hope that it could be done.

Hope is the fuel that powers the human engine. But there is a warning label on every package of hope. Caution: Hope can break your heart. This is the third thing I want to say about hope.

III. Hope can break your heart

If we live long enough, we will all have our own stories of high hopes that crashed on the painful rocks of reality. This is one that I remember; you must remember your own. Doris, my wife, and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary last month. I can tell you we would never have had those fifty good years if we hadn’t begun with hope and if we hadn’t lived with hope that the present troubles will pass and better things will come. We know about the power of hope and we have known the heart break of lost hope. For the first ten years of our marriage we kept hoping for a child, we kept praying for a child. Sometimes we feared that our hopes would never come true but we kept on hoping-for ten years. Then finally, bless God, our hopes came true. Doris became pregnant and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. You see, we said to each other, let us never give up hope. But less than two days after he was born, the child of our hopes died. Yes, hope can break your heart.

One of the loveliest women ever to grace my life was Tammy Kramer, our pastor’s wife. Tammy was the director of the outpatient AIDS clinic at Los Angeles County Hospital. One day she told me about a young man who came in for his weekly treatment, but this time he faced a new doctor who, without so much as looking up at him, said casually, “You know, don’t you, that you won’t live out the year?”

The young man stopped at Tammy’s desk on the way out and wept: “That SOB took away my hope!”

“I guess he did,” she answered. But then she asked: “Do you have another one? Do you have a hope to fall back on?”

Is there another one? Is there a hope that can live even when our fondest hope dies? Is there a hope that survives the heart break of lost hope?

This question is my cue for the fourth thing I want to tell you about hope.

IV. There is hope that stays alive when our fondest hope dies

Ordinary human hope that we can’t live without is born of a faith that good things are possible. When God gets into our hoping, hope goes beyond a faith that good things are possible. Now, please listen to me carefully. When God gets into hope, hope becomes a faith that good things are not only possible, but that good things are promised. The Maker of the Universe has promised good things for us to hope for. This is the essence of a faith that is rooted in God. Hope moves beyond a belief that good things are possible. Hope becomes a trust that good things are promised.

A promise is a lot better than a sheer possibility. When a person makes a promise, he says, “You can count on it. I will be there with you and I will make it happen.” So when your hope is based on promises made by the Maker of the Universe, you have hold of the hand of the One who has the whole world in His hands and He has the will and the power to make good on His promise.

I remember an old gospel hymn we used to sing at our church when I was a boy: “Standing on the promises of God; Standing, standing, standing on the promises of God.” My friends, you and I have both been through times when that was all we could do-just keep standing on the promises of God. That is what you do when God gets into your hoping. You stand firm on the rock of His promises.

So the fifth thing I want to say to you about hope is this:

V. Hope is trust that God will keep his promises

What did He promise? He promised that He would be under us, that he would be over us, that He would be ahead of us and behind us, that He would be a circle of love around us and a spiritual power of hope inside of us.

He promised that when we are losing control and are falling off the edge, He will be there to hold us up. He promised that when we are walking into a spiritual darkness and can’t find our way, when we fear that we will fall and break our necks, when we fear that someone out there in the dark will assault us, He will be there with us and lead us through the darkness.

“I will be there with you.” This is the promise of God. This the hope that lives when other hopes die. But He promises much more.

For me, the biggest promise of all is that He will one day make all things good again, all things new again. The Bible puts it this way: “What we look forward to is a new heaven and a new Earth where everything is right.” So the last thing I want to say about hope is this:

VI. Hope is faith that God will make the whole world work right one day

When God gets into hope, we have hope for a world where little children can play on city streets at night without being afraid; hope for a world where no mother ever watches her baby starve; hope for a world where nobody ever points a gun at anybody else; hope for a world where no adult ever abuses a child or child abuses an adult; hope for a world where all God’s children of all races and all tribes and nations join hands and praise the Lord, the Maker and the Redeemer of the world.

VII. When you are on God’s side, you are on the winning side

God is going to win. The resurrection of Jesus tells us that God can win. When you are with God and with your hopes, you are on the winning side. Love is going to win. Peace is going to win. Justice is going to win. Life is going to win. God is going to win.

So this is why I say to you: never give up hope. Never, ever give up hope. Keep hope alive. As long as you keep hope alive, hope will keep you alive.

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Interview with Lewis Smedes Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Lew, a profound message on hope, people of faith and people of hope. The alternative: despair…

Lewis Smedes: When people despair, they lose all energy, they lose all positiveness, they lose all outlook. Hopelessness is hell.

Talbot: We began the program with lines from Emily Dickinson’s poem that conveys hope through the metaphor of a bird and that appears in your book on hope. How did you come to choose her words?

Smedes: I have always loved that poem. It is such a fancy-free, life lifting metaphor.

Talbot: “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches on the soul and sings a tune without the words and never stops at all.” A kind of unconditional gift that keeps going.

Smedes: As long as we let it go. I think the biggest task in the whole world today is to bring people hope. I’m told that twenty percent of the world’s population today that live without any hope at all.

Talbot: When hope broke your heart-when you and Doris lost your baby of two days-there was a back-up hope.

Smedes: I call it a “fall back” hope.

Talbot: A hope which resulted in three more beautiful children.

Smedes: Three adopted children who are wonderful, wonderful kids.

Talbot: And now two grandchildren that will give you joy. We thank you so much, Dr. Lewis Smedes.

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