An Enduring Defense: A Sunday sermon
It’s been a while since I posted on here, and it’s mostly because I’ve been preparing for and on a trip to Chicago to help out with a Bible Quizzing regional tournament, and I’ve been preparing a Sunday sermon. So I figured I would post that sermon here. The focal verse is 1 Peter 3:15, how we need to always be ready to make a defense to anyone who asks you for the hope that’s in us. Here’s the manuscript in (almost) full (aside from church-specific announcements and info). I’ll be returning to more regular posting shortly!
I want to start off by mentioning that this past weekend, I was in Chicago, along with my wife and three of our students, at the World Bible Quizzing Association Midwest Regional Tournament. So for this tournament students studied the book of 1 Corinthians and the first two chapters of 2 Corinthians and competed on their knowledge of the material they learned. Three of our youth group students scored enough points in quiz competitions this year to qualify for this regional tournament. They were divided between different teams made up of other Detroit-area students who qualified for the regional. So it was a good year for Bible Quizzing here. This is the second year we’ve done this program, and hopefully we can see even more join next year. A lot of people hear the word “quizzing” and assume it’s like school — it’s not. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds. I’ve been involved in that program for 11 years. My own youth group did it, I met my wife through it — it’s really great. So aside from the shameless plug for our Bible Quizzing program, that was not only where I learned a lot of the Bible for the first time as a fairly new Christian, but it was also where I learned how to study.
When I was in school, I didn’t really study. I was one of those students who didn’t really need to study or try very hard to get As and Bs. And teachers would always tell us that we needed to study and review and spend time at home preparing for the tests, but I rarely ever did. I just learned enough to do decent, and when something was a little more challenging, I was willing to put up with a C here and there.
It wasn’t until I joined Bible Quizzing that there was something that motivated me to actually learn how to study not just to get by and do the bare minimum, but to excel. It taught me all the study skills a good student ought to have that I never had really developed until then. And it was a good thing that I learned it when I did, because after I entered college and found that it was a lot different from high school, and I did need to study and memorize to be able to succeed, I was able to adjust a lot more quickly to those habits.
But while I was in school, just learning enough to do decent, all that talk about studying just seemed like it was for someone else. It was something that applied to some people, but not to me, I felt. I didn’t need it because I didn’t really run across a situation where I needed it. All this talk about it seemed like it was trying to prepare me for a challenge I thought would never come.
And often we feel the same way when the Bible talks about suffering or being persecuted for Christ, or even defending our faith. And the Bible talks about it a lot, because its original readers and hearers were persecuted for their faith.
The Bible is full of passages about suffering and those who suffered for their faith. Jesus especially talked about these things. In fact, he said that we can expect to suffer because we’re his followers. We’ve heard lots of stories over the last few months about Christians who were willing to suffer for Christ. Pastor Dave has told stories from the book The Insanity of God several times, all about Christians in places where it’s dangerous to be a Christian, still faithfully doing the work of the Lord, sharing the gospel with others, holding church services, and even hearing the voice of God and seeing miracles. These are people with hope, people who suffer tremendously for doing good.
But that’s them over there. Millions of people have suffered for Christ, and millions of people have been killed for Christ. For the first 300 years after Christ’s death and resurrection, suffering for Christ was the norm. In many places in the world, that’s always been the norm, as it is in many places today. But for us, it’s not really the norm. In fact, it’s pretty rare. We suffer, certainly. We get sick, we get hurt, we lose loved ones, we get mistreated and wronged. But we don’t really suffer that much for our faith. We’re not really persecuted. While other people are in constant danger of imprisonment, torture, separation from their families, and execution for Christ, our primary concerns are whether we’re able to bake cakes for who we want and keep crosses and Ten Commandments monuments up on public property. Not that those aren’t legitimate concerns, but I don’t think we could characterize our lives, like the early Christians could, as lives of suffering for Christ.
One of the primary practical books in the New Testament, 1 Peter, talks a lot about suffering. Here’s some advice Peter gives us in 1 Peter 3:13-16: “13 Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? 14 But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, 15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, 16 having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”
So what are we to think when we come across these passages giving us advice about suffering for our faith, which are all over the New Testament — particularly this one, the main passage in your bulletin today? Are these passages with advice about what to do in the face of suffering for Christ just like what I thought of the advice from my teachers about studying — just preparing us for a trial that will probably never come? I think when we look at these verses, we can see that yeah, these should apply to us, but how? How, if Peter’s readers are those who are suffering for Christ, should we who are not suffering for Christ read these?
Well, Jesus had a particular reason for warning us about suffering for our faith in him. And he talked about that reason all the time, too. Jesus answers this question when he spoke to his disciples on the night before his death and warned them about how they were about to suffer, he said, “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away.” (John 16:1)
And whenever Jesus talks about suffering, he talks about this. The Bible talks about suffering because suffering puts us in danger. But the danger of suffering is not the suffering itself. It’s not that we might be harmed physically or emotionally. If that were the case, then Jesus would have told us how to avoid that. Instead, what we do see, over and over, is how to avoid falling away. How to avoid turning our backs on Christ when we suffer. How to avoid becoming fearful and timid and unwilling to confess our allegiance to Christ in the face of persecution — or even neglecting or shrinking back from sharing the gospel of Christ with others in the face of danger.
Because the danger of suffering is that it tempts us to walk away from Christ. It tempts us to disobey Christ. Suffering challenges our faith. It puts us in danger of falling away. It puts us in danger of giving up or putting aside Christ for some temporary pleasure or relief.
But we don’t need to suffer like they did to face that same danger. All we need are the pressures and temptations of life. All we need is the potential for losing a friend because we talk too much about Jesus. All we need is easy access to pornography online. All we need is temptations to commit those sins that seem most enjoyable to us and become habituated to them instead of to Christ. All we need is the distraction of long workweeks and excessive screen time and Sunday morning fatigue and the habit of setting Christ aside for other things that seem more important to us at the time. All we need is to suffer some failure or tragedy and be deceived into believing that God wasn’t there for us. All those things put us in the same kind of danger the Bible warns us constantly about — the danger of falling away.
And we don’t need to be persecuted to doubt! We don’t need to be hunted down by the government to be tempted to walk away from Christ. We don’t need to be placed in front of a Roman statue and given a sacrificial animal to be tempted to worship other gods. We’ve got the gods of sex and money and achievement right in front of us all the time. And we don’t need to be threatened with prison and torture and death to be scared into keeping silent about the good news that we are commanded to share. The things we face every day are challenge enough. They all put us in danger of walking away. Or even if we don’t outright walk away from Christ, they put us in danger of becoming so distracted and so consumed with the world that we don’t actually do anything for Christ, and so waste our lives away on things that are worthless.
So when we read passages about suffering for Christ, we should know that even though we don’t face all the same suffering, we face the same danger, and the advice in those passages applies to anyone who faces that danger.
So I want to turn back to Peter’s advice about what to do in light of the challenges and dangers we face. This is how we deal with any spiritual danger that we may find ourselves in. This is how we stay faithful to Christ’s commands despite what it might cost us. Here’s what he says again:
“13 Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? 14 But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, 15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, 16 having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”
So he gives us three big points of advice — things that if we want to succeed in enduring challenges to our faith, and in being obedient to Christ’s command to share our faith with others, we need to make a part of our lives.
First he says, “Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy. This sentence is actually a loose paraphrase of a passage in the Old Testament where the prophet Isaiah encounters God, and God speaks directly to him, and God commands Isaiah to speak his words to the people of Israel. It’s Isaiah 8:11-13, and there it says, “For the Lord spoke to me with his strong hand upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: ‘Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.’”
So this is probably what Peter expected his hearers to think of when they heard verse 14. So Peter says have no fear of them. Don’t fear people who might cause you to suffer; don’t fear these challenges to your faith that will tempt you. And then it calls their minds back to Isaiah, who said, not only don’t fear people, but don’t fear the same things they fear. What are the things people in America fear most today? Probably stuff like: Rejection. Job loss. Disaster. Death. Not that those aren’t fearful things, but God is more fearful than all of those things. God is greater than any of those things. God has absolute power over all those things. It’s not saying you need to be constantly terrified of God that he’s going to get angry and strike you down if you screw up, but if you’re going to fear anything, you should fear God. It makes way more sense to fear God than it does to fear any of the other things you fear. God is worthy of an awe and reverence that nothing else is.
And for the Christian who is saved and doesn’t need to fear the wrath of God, there is nothing more fearful than standing before God at the judgment and learning that you failed to obey him, failed to endure challenges, failed to do anything eternally useful with your life. So we should fear God and obey him because he matters more than everything else. But ultimately, as we’ll see in the next verse, the reason we live the way we live is not primarily because of a negative fear of God. It’s because we have a positive hope in God. We know that God is greater than any of our fears and any of the things this world offers us, so we don’t just obey him out of fear, but we want to please him because we know how great he is. And we know that God, unlike the false idols of Peter’s time and the false idols of today, doesn’t promise us blessings and prosperity in this world. He promises us eternal life. He promises us that what we do in this world matters far beyond this world. And that should motivate us to do something with our lives that will matter after this life is over.
And if we live with that mindset, of fear of God and hope in God and in his promises, then people will notice. Because even in our culture that’s been saturated with Christian language and tradition and where people take Jesus for granted, an actual living, breathing, genuine hope in Christ is different. A hope that would push us to make faithfulness to Christ our first priority, our first consideration, in everything we do — and measuring success and satisfaction not by accomplishment and achievement, but by whether we’ve been faithful to Christ in everything we’ve done — is radically different from the way most people live. People will notice and will hopefully want to know what it is that makes our mindset so different. Which leads us to his second piece of advice:
always be(ing) prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.
So for anyone who does see a difference in our mindset and in our conduct, when they ask us about it, we need to be ready to give a defense. So what does he mean by this? What does he mean by making a defense? The original Greek word he used here was apologia, which is where we get the word apology and the word apologetics. It was typically the word used to describe someone defending themselves in court against an accusation, and because Peter is talking to Christians who are being persecuted, that’s probably what his hearers are picturing. Any of them might be thrown in jail and dragged into court and called on to testify about their faith, or perhaps called out publicly and confronted by their neighbors, and they needed to be constantly ready for that moment, for that challenge, for that test. It wasn’t like an exam where they could cram the night beforehand and stuff their heads with all the theology and testimony and clarity and eloquence they needed to make a good defense. They had to always be ready.
So how do we do that? How do we be prepared to make a defense? We’re not gonna be dragged into a courtroom and compelled to testify about our hope. It likely won’t be angry mobs and judges and governors demanding a reason for our hope. It’ll likely be the curious and earnest questions of our friends, coworkers, families, children — hopefully because they see that there’s a hope in us unlike anything else. Sometimes it’ll even be the voice of our own doubts, speaking to us and challenging our hope. And just like Peter’s hearers, it won’t be something we can cram the day beforehand and stuff our heads with everything we need to articulate an answer to whatever someone may ask us about our hope. We need to be ready at any moment.
Some might have objections to your faith. Some might want to know, “How can you believe in God when there’s so much evil in the world?” “How can you believe in God when science seems to explain everything naturally?” “How can you believe in miracles like the virgin birth and the resurrection?” “Don’t Christians hate gay people and transgender people?” “How can you believe in Christianity when there are so many other religions out there?”
Are we prepared to answer those questions? Are we prepared to make a defense to those who would object to the truth of the gospel? I don’t think we all need to be experts on science, history, and philosophy; I don’t think it’s a matter of intellectual expertise. Really, this is a matter of knowing God as well as we can. We should know God well enough to know how he works, and how he relates to our lives and the lives of those we interact with. What is God’s relation to science? What is God’s relation to sexuality? What is God’s relation to suffering and doubt? We should know God well enough to be able to give an answer. And looking into these things, searching for answers to these questions, is a way we can get to know God better. We should know enough to be able to make a defense. We should know God well enough to know how he relates to the big questions — not just those we’re asking, but those other people are asking. Many people who grew up in the church and later walked away say that the church just couldn’t answer their questions, gave poor answers to their questions, or dismissed their questions as unimportant.
And in this generation, where — according to a recent Barna study — the percentage of teenagers who identify as atheists is double that of adults, the number-one complaint of churchgoing Christian teenagers is that the church seems to reject science, we need more than ever to be able to react to the questions of the younger generation — particularly mine and the one coming after it — and the way we think and search for answers.
But answering questions and objections only gets us halfway there. If we really want to make a good defense, we need to, as Peter says, give a reason for the hope that is in us. And to do that, we need to ask that question to ourselves: What is the reason for the hope that is in you? Why do you believe? What makes you believe that the gospel is true?
But maybe we struggle to explain it. Maybe we struggle to make a coherent, articulate defense. Some of us just aren’t very good at expressing ourselves. How can we all be prepared to make the kind of defense Peter is talking about? Thankfully, we do have an example of what Peter means. In Acts 26, it tells us about a time when the apostle Paul was arrested and put on trial before King Herod Agrippa. This is not the same Herod from the Christmas story; this Herod was a much better character. Paul had been juggled around the justice system on trumped-up charges for a long time, left to rot in jail for years at a time. And he’d finally had enough of it and appealed directly to the Roman Emperor. But when Agrippa heard about him, he wanted to hear Paul for himself. So Paul was brought before Agrippa to stand trial, and he was given the opportunity to give his defense. Paul was a prolific debater; he was an incredible intellect; he had all the tools to make an articulate, coherent defense of the reason for his hope. And often he did debate people publicly when he traveled and preached. But here, on trial before the king, when he was expected to make the speech of his life:
He told his story. He told Agrippa about how he’d been a hater and persecutor of Christians, and how Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus and said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And how Jesus had told him, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’” And he told about all the times when people had tried to hurt him or kill him for preaching the gospel of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins, and God had delivered him from death every time. And he pointed out how this had all been foretold in the prophets that Herod, himself being a Jew, believed. And after all that, Agrippa said to Paul, “In a short time would you persuade me to become a Christian?”
And there’s some debate over whether Agrippa’s question is one of sarcasm or an indication that he was genuinely impressed by Paul’s story, but when Paul was given the opportunity to make a defense, this is what he did: He told his story. That was his defense. And he’s not the only one to make that kind of explanation. There’s a reason the Bible is full of stories, instead of being a textbook of philosophy or an outline of systematic theology. It’s because stories are powerful. Stories are real. Stories are things that have actually happened to us that people can share in and relate to. God shows us who he is through telling us the way he’s worked in people’s lives. God may show other people who he is through us telling them the way he’s worked in our lives. So whatever we know about how to answer the big philosophical and theological and scientific questions, we need to know our story. We need to know what God has done in our lives that we can convey to others. Peter adds on at the end in verse 16:
having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
For any of this to work, our behavior needs to be consistent with our talk. That’s why a story is so powerful, because it illustrates not just what we intellectually believe, but the way we’ve changed. And of course, for this kind of exemplary conduct to really help communicate the truth of the gospel, people need to hear the gospel. They need to hear the good news of what Christ has done for us, and for them. And when we make our defense as Paul did, people can hear and see that firsthand.
So what is your story? What is your defense? Some people may point to a relationship with a friend who led them to Christ. Some people may have gone on their own spiritual or intellectual search for answers. Some people might have experienced a miracle or an event that could not be explained any better than as an experience with the God of the universe. And even if you think, “I don’t have that great a story; my life isn’t that interesting,” but your story is more than just how you got saved. It’s all the ways God has worked in your life and changed you at any time. And the most amazing part of all of our stories is the one we all have in common: that the Creator of the universe, the Creator of everything from galactic superclusters and quarks, out of all that, reached down to love you individually, and gave up his life for you. That’s amazing enough in itself.
For me, it’s a lot of the above. The hope of Jesus met me when I was a depressed, socially isolated, unmotivated teenager who desperately needed a sense of purpose and hope. A girl in 9th grade was evidently moved by her hope to give a book report on a Christian apocalyptic novel called Left Behind, and it sounded cool enough that I wanted to read it. And in that book, of all places, I found an explanation of the gospel, of how Christ saves us by his grace, not because we’re good enough, but because we’re not good enough and never will be. That totally changed my outlook on God, and once I understood that I gave my life to Christ, and although it was very slow and bumpy at times, my life began to change. Two years later, I became part of a great church community full of people that loved Jesus and cared about me and each other and showed me what it really meant to be a follower of Jesus.
And over the years, I’ve found God to be the best explanation for not just that, but everything we observe in this world: the beginning of the universe, the incredibly fine-tuned physical laws of the universe, the existence of objective moral values and duties, the existence of anything at all. It’s not just wishful thinking, it’s not just because I want it to be true; it makes sense. It’s reality. And then I can also look to my personal experience and say, there’s not only all that, but I know him myself, and to think that my life has been the result of just my own effort is absurd.
So who do you know who needs to hear your reason? Who needs to hear your story? Who do you know that needs to hear about your hope? A friend? A co-worker? A family member? Maybe even you yourself need a revitalizing spark in your relationship with Jesus, and it would serve you well to reflect on the reason for your hope in the first place. Maybe even write out your story — the story of the things God has done in your life. Whatever the case, it’s absolutely vital that each of us know the reason for the hope that we have, because when you go through suffering or challenges, remembering the reason for your hope may be the only hope you have. And when it comes to the people you know who haven’t yet accepted Christ’s offer of salvation, hearing the reason for your hope might be the only hope they have.
