St. Paul the apostle understood the importance of hope. He tells us in the book of Romans, the eighth chapter, that we are saved in hope. Another translation has it: We are saved, but all we have to show for it at present is hope. Still another translation says: We hope we are being saved.

No matter which translation you like best, it comes down to this: living as a Christian is a life of hope. There are four things I want to say to you about hope. They are summed up in four words. Here they are: Passion, Power, Pain, Promise.

Hope is passion for good things we do not have yet, but which we believe are possible. I am talking serious hoping. I am not talking about hoping that the Chicago Cubs will win a ball game. But about hoping for the things we need to make our lives full and complete and joyful.

For serious hoping, for passionate hoping, you need three things. First, you need a dream: nobody ever hoped for anything who did not first dream of what she hoped for. Second, you are to believe that what you dream about is possible. If you don't believe it is possible, you stop hoping.

But you need one more thing. You need a personal stake in what you hope for. Think of your hopes for your children. You hope they will live healthy, happy, productive, and good lives. And you can bet that you have a personal stake in their success.

Dream plus faith plus investment equals passion. Hope is passion for the possible.

Now my second word -- power.

Hope is the most powerful energy source in the world. Hope gives people power to achieve what they hope for. Some people think that poor people, hungry people, oppressed people change things because they are poor and hungry and oppressed. It is not true. People change things when they have hope that they do not need to be hungry or poor or oppressed any more.

A well-known Jewish philosopher asked this question about his people: How can we account for the survival of the Jewish people through all the exile and persecution? And this was his answer: The Jewish people have survived by the power of hope.

I am standing here talking to you because two young people just twenty years old were driven by hope to pull up their lives by the roots, say goodbye to their families, to their towns, and to everything familiar, take passage in steerage, and sail to the United States in search of a better life. Driven by hope. This nation was built by the power of hope.

No painter ever set brush to canvass, no writer ever set pen to paper, no builder ever set brick on brick, no enterpriser ever built an enterprise without having hope that they could do what they dreamed of doing.

We have not begun to fathom the power of hope in creating better lives for ourselves. But there are limits. Hope can let you down. High hopes can crash on the rocks of reality and break your heart. And the higher the hope, the deeper the pain.

Here, then, is the third wword -- pain.

For the first decade of our marriage, my wife Doris and I hoped passionately for a child. We hoped and prayed for ten years. Then, finally, after ten years, Doris became pregnant. We thanked God and drank a toast to hope.

One night, about six months into the pregnancy, something went wrong. I called the doctor. He said: "Doris is going into labor. Get her into the car and bring her to the emergency room right away; I'll meet you there. Oh, yes," he said, "I have to tell you one thing. I should have told you before. Your baby is going to be seriously malformed."

"How serious?"

"Very serious. It's up to you to tell Doris on the way."

I told her. We decided that we were not going to give up hope. So we kept on hoping. All through the night. At 6:00 a.m., the doctor came to me with a silly grin from ear to ear: "You have a perfect baby boy. Come and see."

I went with him; there he was, yelling his head off, looking just like me. Praise God, we thought. We must never give up hope. Never give up hope. Two days later our baby was dead. Hope can break your heart.

If we could all get together tonight, we could share the times when our high hopes brought up deep pain. So what do we do when hope lets us down. A great writer named Albert Camus, after writing hopefully about the human struggle for many years, ended his career with this advice to the human family: stop hoping, think clearly, but stop hoping.

I am telling you to keep on hoping.

Sometimes when hope crashes down and crushes our spirits, we need to find a deeper hope, a hope that outlasts broken hopes, a hope beyond all human hoping.

And this brings me to my final word -- promise.

Once the Lord gets inside our hoping, the odds change. Now we are not talking only about passion for what is possible. We are talking about passion for what is promised. The whole Bible story has one theme: The Maker of the Universe has come and made us a promise. And with his promise, He brings in a new dimension of hope.

There are two main hopes in the Bible. One of them is a hope for the future: we hope for a happy ending. We all want a happy ending. This is why we love fairy tales so much. But this tale is true: in Christ there is a happy ending. Christ is going to win and make our whole world work right again. Life is going to win. Peace is going to win. Love is going to win, because God is going to win. his is what believers hope for the future.

But what we need is a hope for today. Not a childish hope that God will give us whatever we want. But a mature hope, hope that God will be with us and hold us up when we are walloped with a pain of fallen hope.

This is the hope he offers: I will be there with you when human hope fails.

Sometimes we feel that this last hope has let us down. Often it feels for all the world as if God is not here at all. He has left us. Abandoned us. Gone on leave of absence and left us to shift for ourselves. I have felt that way more often than I care to tell you. It is a terrible feeling because if God has abandoned us, our last hope is gone.

I want you now to think for a moment about Jesus and the Cross. Here was the best and brightest of all the ages. He was the one beyond all others in whom God lived. But now, he was in a situation that was as God-forsaken as any human situation ever was. He himself felt that God had abandoned him, gone back on his own name; he wasn't the one who was with Jesus. He was the one who let him down. And Jesus protested: Why? Why? Why? And God was silent.

A couple of days later, before the fingers of the light had filtered through the mist of the early morning, while the citizens of the city were catching their second snooze, God went to work. A resurrection. The impossible became reality. Christ arose.

God had never left him. Where was God when Jesus was hanged on the cross? He was there hanging and suffering with him. God is not only the God of the suffering; he is the suffering God. But then he came through with resurrection and life.

There is hope when life is hopeless. He promised.

So keep on hoping. If you wonder whether your marriage can make it, keep on hoping. If you are worried about what your kids are up to, keep on hoping. If you are lonely and need a friend, keep on hoping. If you are afraid you are going to die and it scares you to death, keep on hoping.

I began by telling you about the sermon I saw on a billboard outside of the Los Angeles airport: Keep hope alive. I went on to say that hope is four things: passion, power, pain, and finally the promise of God. I believe that God keeps hope alive in us. Keep hoping. Keep hoping, Keep hoping.

Floyd Brown: I want to tell you that this is just a marvelous, marvelous talk that you gave us today. Hope is so important. You shared something privately before going on camera here that I would like for you to repeat for our audience, defining hope. Many people don't know what they really want. They say, "What do you want in life? I don't know what I want." You tell the story about talking to a class about going to heaven. Would you share that with our audience?

Lewis Smedes: Sure. I'd be glad to. It came out of a hunch that everybody sings about, everybody talks about, heaven, but are not really that eager to get there. I think one of the reasons that people really don't have passion, desire to get there, is that they have some notion of floating around and passing each other like ships in the night and just being lonely, singing hymns on Sunday.

I was a teacher at a college and I asked the students several times, just for fun -- it was kind of a mean trick I suppose -- "How many of you want to go to heaven when you die?" Everybody raised his hand. Heaven by a landslide. Then I asked, "How many of you would like to go tomorrow if you could?" All the hands went down and I was glad. I worry about young people wanting to go to heaven too quickly, don't you?

Brown: Yes, yes.

Smedes: So I rephrased the question. I said, "How many of you would like to wake up tomorrow in a world where no child ever feared to dance on the street at night, or nobody ever pointed a gun at another human being, or no child ever starved, or nobody ever put you down because you were different, or no mother ever wept over a hungry baby? How many of you would like to live in a world that finally worked right?"

Brown: Yes, yes.

Smedes: Not only that, "How many of you would like to wake up into that good world, as good as the world? You had all the capacities and powers and freedom that you longed to have? You went into that world a terrific, fantastic human being. How many of you would like to wake up into that tomorrow?" A hundred percent. I said, "Then you want to go to heaven tomorrow, because that is what biblical hope is about. Look, God created this world. He is not that interested in getting us off of it. What He is interested in is getting it to work right."

Brown: I love it. You have got to have a passion if you want to hope and want to keep it alive.

Smedes: Yes, yes.

Brown: It is a marvelous talk; it's a wonderful message. I thank you very much. We sincerely appreciate it and that topic is one I hope that you will keep alive.