"Let me not be ashamed of my hope." Psalm 119:116

Additional Readings: Deuteronomy 30; John 15:1-17

These words are found in the 119th Psalm, which treats of the Word and of a life according to the Word. Its language is simple and direct without embellishment of any sort.

The words "Let me not be ashamed of my hope" are a prayer--one of the deep prayers of the Word, which we may pray or not, as we choose. The words of this prayer are are so simple that they may never have arrested your situation. There is no historical setting of background to hold them up to view. No effort is needed to understand them; so they do not raise questions or challenge the intellect. They do not force their message upon us.

Yet only a deeply earnest nature will pray this little prayer, for it bids us ask nothing less than this: that the ideal of life which we secretly cherish and strive to realize may be of such a kind that, having attained it, we shall be satisfied with it, we shall not be ashamed of it.

There are many things of which we may be ashamed. We may be ashamed that we are not more unselfish, of the fact that our work is not done as well as it should be, that in trying to help others we sometimes, from lack of wisdom, say or do just the wrong thing.

Sometimes we are ashamed of things which we feel very keenly, but which in reality should affect us but lightly--ashamed of being poorly dressed, or of our social qualifications.

But in the words of the text the Psalmist prays for us that there may be one thing of which we may never be ashamed--our hope. May we never set before us such an ideal of life that, having attained it, we shall be ashamed of it.

It should be noted that the word translated "hope" in the text carries with it in the Hebrew the additional meaning of "waiting." It is not a transient hope. It is not a hope that can be suddenly aroused or attained. It refers to the life purpose, requiring that even life-long devotion to it will not be too high a price to pay. It is a hope that requires sustained effort together with patient waiting.

Examples come to mind of great men and women who have set before themselves some high purpose to which they consecrated their lives. Through their labors the world has been advanced. But can such life-long devotion be expected of the average man or woman? With our limitations, amid all the demands, the distractions, the allurements, the constant changes of this present life can it be expected that we can set for ourselves an ideal to which we shall be faithful, and in which at the end we shall find a satisfaction that nothing else could bring?

Yes, we need to hope for great things, to believe great things, to attempt great things. For life is not a mere song or dream.

Nothing today can succeed without effort. There is no business or professional man who believes that he can succeed without effort. There are, of course, the idlers, the people who merely stroll through life with as little effort as possible. But the great majority of people enter into the activities of life with earnestness, and pursue the objects of their lives--whatever these objects may be--with zeal. Men are sometimes even too intense and wear themselves out. Life, perhaps, is more intense today than it ever was.

There is the craze to make money, the craze to succeed, to "get ahead in the world," to fill the life with comforts and pleasures of every kind. There is the desire for attractive homes, good clothes, pleasant surroundings, influential friends, and natural facilities of every kind. And we want the better things, too: books, lectures, good music, churches. Yet all these in themselves, if attained are not sufficient--not excepting the churchest, for one may enter into religion from merely natural motives.

We should know that religion has no quarrel with any or all of these things. Religion owes much to wealth, industry, scholarship and art, and even to mechanical inventions for carrying the Gospel more safely and surely to all people.

But is not this true: if the heart and head of a great people, or of an individual in wholly or mainly given to material interests, if larger warehouses, larger incomes, larger investments are viewed not as a means to something beyond them, but as an end in themselves, if the production of wealth is looked upon not as the legitimate result of toil but as the supreme object of existence, then do we not need to pray to be saved from the materialism into which all this toil and luxurious living lead? For it is a law that a man become like that on which his attention is perpetually fixed. "If a man looks upwards and Godwards, his nature rises; if he looks always downward and earthward, his whole character sinks, his thoughts, his tastes, his aims, his marren of life, his very speech and literature--yes, even the movement of his body, the look in his face bear a correspondence. They become more and more material." "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

This is not a threat. It is a principle, a law. The heart shares the fate of its treasure. The reward and the labor are of a kind. If we live only for this world, then to this world must we look for the reward of our labors. If we live for the spirit, it is to the kingdom of the spirit that we must turn for blessing. Commonplace as these facts are, we are often prone to overlook them, and when we do, we make foolish mistakes and indulge in expectations which cannot be fulfilled.

Man has the power to live one of two kinds of life. He can live a life of service to God or a life of service to Mammon. He has been given perfect freedom to choose either. He cannot choose both. He has the right to make it the great object of his life to lay up earthly treasures, whether this means the amassing of a fortune, or worldly knowledge, or natural success and honors. These reward are real in their way and in their degree. Moth and rust may corrupt them, thieves break through and steal them; but while they last, they give a kind of delight and pleasure. Comfort, riches, learning, skill, honor--these things are more easily seen than spiritual blessings, and more easily acquired. But they are not imaginary blessings, nor are they powerless to bring pleasure.

The Lord, Who knew what was in man, did not deny to the man whose wealth kept overflowing his barns a certain kind of satisfaction. But that a man should stake his whole life upon a kind of satisfaction which at best could last but for a few years to the utter neglect and impoverishment of his soul, drew from His lips the judgment, "Thou fool." The man who persists in trying to save his natural life has a right to do it, but if, in the doing, he loses his higher nature, who is to blame?

But what can prevent a man from cherishing some hope, from pursuing some object of which in the end he will be ashamed? How do we come to from our purposes, whether good or bad? How can we choose some purpose that is worthy of our best efforts and whose attainment will completely satisfy us?

Let us start with the fact that man is a two-fold being, having both a spiritual and a natural part. In every one there is one force which acts and another which reacts. Man has no power of himself. The force in man which acts is life derived from the Lord through heaven. Jesus said to Pilate, "Thou shouldest have no power at all against me except it were given thee from above." This power to act is received into the spiritual part or mind, which is created into a likeness of heaven. The force in man which reacts flows in from the natural world and also from the infernal world into man’s natural parts or mind, for that mind, together with the body, bears a likeness to the world., it reacts against the spiritual mind. Why? Not from natural depravity, but because the natural mind is the outmost which covers and contains the higher degrees of the human mind. Being the outmost, it reacts against the higher or interior just as the enclosing skin of the body reacts against the viscera. This is a law of nature. If there were only action without reaction, nothing would ever really be done. The life force would simply flow on, extending itself indefinitely, reaching nothing and accomplishing nothing. But that which is of a lower degree resists that which is of a higher degree because it is by comparison passive and inert. What is natural, considered in itself, is passive or a dead force, but what is spiritual is active or a live force.

Another peculiarity of active and reactive life is this, that during life in this world we are not conscious of the active life that flows into us from the Lord, but only of the reactive life or the natural man. This reaction appears to us as our own. It induces in us a sensation that life is self-derived. This is in order that our individuality may not be destroyed. The purpose of this characteristic of life is that we may be in freedom. By this freedom we can make either the love and wisdom that flows into the spiritual mind the ruling purpose of our life, or else the reactionary affections and thoughts of the natural mind. If we make the former choice, the spiritual mind acst from above and disposes the thoughts and affections in harmony with itself until finally the two minds act as one. But if we make the other choice, we close the door of the spiritual mind, the importance of material things increases, leading us into many forms of falsity and evil, and the acknowledgment of God and of the spiritual life becomes more and more a matter of the lips, while at heart we are mere materialists.

This is the reason, apart from all sentiment or emotionalism, why man needs a religion. For whether we will or no, the inflow of God’s life through the spiritual mind and the reaction of our natural mind is going on day after day, making possible to us two kinds of lie, one in which we may be led of God, and the other in which we ignore the Divine and gradually shut ourselves up in the thoughts and desires of our lower selves.

Can we not then see the meaning of the prayer, "Let me not be ashamed of my hope?" is it not the part of wisdom for every man to choose that his life shall not be limited to its lowest level, but shall be lived in the acknowledgment of the prime fact of his existence, that "in God we live and move, and have our being," and so shall have in it the elements of eternal life, that we may receive the Divine blessing.

"Let me not be ashamed of my hope." To what are we devoting the days and years of our lives? For what do we labor from morning to night? To what do we turn our minds as our supreme desire? Is it something so small and so temporal that when we have attained it, we shall ask ourselves with shame, "is this what you have been struggling for all these years?" "Does this express your highest wish, your deepest satisfaction?" Or do we not know what we hope for; have we formed no definite ideals? Or have we chosen that high aim in our inmost souls of which we shall never be ashamed and which, when attained, will lead us to eternal satisfactions?

"As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." Psalm 17:15