When They Ask

Open Your Bibles

If you have a Bible, and I hope that you or somebody around you does, let me invite you to open with me to First Peter, chapter three. First Peter three, verses fourteen and fifteen. Feel free to use the table of contents if you need to. For those of you visiting with us today, my name is Pastor Matthew, and we are in week six of a series called Share the Hope. Week six. The final week. For five weeks we have been walking through this letter from Peter, backwards, from chapter one verse twelve all the way to the beginning. And we have been doing it because Peter builds something around one phrase that he gives us in chapter one, verse three. A living hope. He has been showing us what that hope does in us. It holds us in suffering. It refines our faith like gold in fire. It produces a joy too deep for words to explain. And it stirs the curiosity of angels. Today, Peter brings it home. And I want you to hear this text, because it is going to tell us what every single believer in this room does on Monday morning with what we have been seeing for five weeks. Listen to the Word of God. 1 Peter 3:14–15 (NIV) “But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” The Word of God. Now, here is the question this text puts on the table for every single one of us. What does it actually mean to be ready? And this question matters enormously, because there is a wrong way to answer it. And if we get the wrong answer, we are going to walk out of here today and do the exact opposite of what Jesus told us to do. Listen to this. Luke 21:14–15 (ESV) “Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.” Peter says always be ready. Jesus says do not meditate beforehand on how to answer. Do you feel the tension? Good. Because if we misunderstand what Peter means by ready, we are going to spend our entire Christian lives doing what Jesus told us not to do. So what kind of readiness is Peter talking about? I want to give you three truths from this text this morning. Three truths that I believe answer the question of how we share the hope we have been learning about for five weeks. And I want to encourage you, if you are taking notes, write these down.

Truth Number One

The readiness lives inside the reverence. Look at the verse again. Peter says, “in your hearts revere Christ as Lord, always being ready to give an answer.” Now listen to this. That word being is not actually in Peter’s original sentence. It was added by translators to smooth the English. What Peter wrote is one single thought. Revere Christ the Lord in your hearts, ready always to give an answer. There is no second command. The readiness is not a separate assignment you have to work up for. It is what happens when Christ is revered in your heart. Revere Christ, and the readiness follows. It grows up inside the reverence. So what does it actually mean to revere Christ in your heart? Peter gives us enormous help here, because he is borrowing from Isaiah. Turn with me to Isaiah chapter eight. When you see what Peter is pulling from, the whole verse opens up. Isaiah 8:12–13 (ESV) “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.” What God was asking of Isaiah was not a life of constant terror. What God wanted was for the thought of displeasing Him to be a weightier thing to Isaiah than the thought of being rejected by people. Write this down. The measure of your reverence for God is the measure of your desire not to displease Him. And what would have displeased God most in Isaiah’s situation? Isaiah fearing the same things his unbelieving countrymen were fearing. Because God had made promises. Real, specific, glorious promises. And when you fear men more than you trust God’s promises, you are casting a vote against His trustworthiness. You are saying with your fear, your word is not enough. The threats are bigger than the promises. But here is the other side. When you trust God’s promises more than you trust the threats of this world, when you revere Him, the fear gets displaced. Not by grit. Not by positive thinking. Hope grows in the space where fear used to live. That is the fight. Go to His promises when you are afraid. Let them work on your fear. Day after day after day. Your fear will turn to hope. And you will have a reason to give for the hope that is in you. And church, let me say this a different way, because revere can feel like a church word. When Peter says revere Christ as Lord in your heart, what he is really describing is a heart that treasures Him. A heart that holds Him above every other affection. A heart for whom Jesus is not a belief on a shelf, but the most precious thing in its sight. When you treasure something, you do not have to be told to protect it. You do not have to be told to think about it. You already do. Warmer. This is the beside-them illustration. Slow down on Alicia. Do not perform it. Let me make this as personal as I can. I have been married to Alicia for a long time now. And every year, we are becoming more one than we were the year before. Day by day by day. And because of that, when temptations or opportunities come my way, something sits at the front of my heart. It is not will I get caught. It is not what will people think. It is, will this hurt her? That is not fear of punishment. That is what treasuring her looks like. That is a picture of what treasuring Christ looks like. The more you become His, the more you love Him, the more unthinkable it becomes to do anything that would grieve Him. Not because you are afraid of Him throwing you out. Because you treasure Him. You love Him. You do not want to disappoint the One who has loved you all the way to a cross. And hear this. The same thing is true of us as the body of Christ in this room. Paul tells us that we are one body. The arm does not harm the leg. The eye does not wound the hand. We are one. And when Christ is truly treasured in our hearts, something happens in a congregation. We start caring about one another the way we care about our own flesh. Because we belong to Him, and therefore we belong to each other. Now the personal confession. Slow down. This is the pastoral moment. Do not perform it. And church, I need to stop for just a minute and make a personal confession. Because this is where this text hit me hardest. I am your pastor. I stand up here every week and open this Book. And you might think that means I have this figured out, that I wake up every morning overflowing with hope. I do not. Not always. Some mornings the first thing I feel is fear. Fear about this church. Fear about whether I am doing this right. Fear about things I cannot control and people I cannot fix. My hope wanes. And when that fear shows up, I have learned to do one thing. I open His Word. And I say out loud, sometimes almost in a whisper, Lord, I need to hear You. I need You to speak. I cannot carry this today on my own. And I sit with Him in the Scriptures until something shifts. Until a promise lands. Until the fear that was bigger than me meets a Savior who is bigger than the fear. And every single morning the fight is the same. Will I trust the threats, or will I trust the promises? That is the fight of faith. And it is fought on your knees, with His Word, in prayer. Bring readiness down to earth. Two pictures: pre-kids, firefighters. Make the abstract concrete. Before Alicia and I had kids, there was a whole season of getting ready. The nursery. The car seat. The hospital bag sitting by the door. We were not anxious about being ready. We were getting ready because someone precious was coming, and we wanted to be prepared to receive them. Think about the fire department. Those men and women do not sit around hoping a fire does not come. They train. They check the equipment. They stay ready. So that when the call comes, they are not scrambling. They are ready to run toward it. Peter is calling us to that kind of readiness. Not anxious readiness. Loving readiness. The readiness of a heart that has already spent time with the One we are going to speak about. Which is exactly what you see in the early church. Look at Acts chapter four. Peter and John had just healed a lame man at the temple gate. The whole city was talking about it. And the religious leaders arrested them, dragged them in front of the same council that had condemned Jesus a few weeks earlier, and commanded them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus. And in that moment, with their lives on the line, Peter and John said, we cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard. And listen to what Scripture tells us about the council’s reaction. Acts 4:13 (NIV) When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. They had been with Jesus. That was the whole explanation. Not a degree. Not a training program. Not a clever argument. Nearness. They had been near Him. And it showed. This is the sustained readiness picture. Let it flow. Do not announce movement. Let each layer carry you. So what does readiness actually look like, when it is not cramming and not rehearsing? The readiness Peter is describing is not a task you complete. It is a way of living. Readiness is living in a constant awareness that Christ is sufficient for you. Not theoretically. Actually. In this hour. With the thing you are carrying today. The diagnosis. The bill. The child you cannot reach. The marriage you are trying to save. Readiness is waking up and knowing, before anything else, that He is enough for what this day is going to ask of you. Readiness is cultivating a relationship with Jesus where He is not a subject you study but a Person you know. There is a difference. You do not study your spouse. You know her. You do not memorize facts about your best friend. You walk with him. Peter wants us to know Jesus like that. Present tense. Ongoing. A friendship, not a syllabus. Readiness is saturation in His Word. Because Jesus promised that when the moment comes, the Holy Spirit will bring to your mind the very things you need to say. And the more time you spend in the Word, the more the Spirit has to draw on when that moment comes. So open your Bible. Sit with it. Let it sink down. Not because you are behind. Because the Spirit delights to take what has been treasured in your heart and put it on your lips when it is needed. Readiness is dependence. Moment by moment. Waking up in the morning and saying, Lord, I cannot do this day without You. Walking into a meeting and whispering, Lord, help me. Getting in the car after something hard and saying, Lord, I need You now. Not one big dependence at the altar once a year. A thousand small dependences every day that keep you tethered to Him. And church, there is one more picture of readiness I want you to see. Paul uses it in Ephesians chapter six. Listen to how he describes it. Ephesians 6:15 (NIV) “And with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” Feet fitted. Shoes on. Laces tied. Ready to move. Because feet are for going. And the readiness Peter is describing is not just an attitude that sits in a chair. It is shoes that are already laced up. When the Spirit says move, you are not scrambling for your shoes. You are already wearing them. That is readiness. Aware. Close to Christ. Saturated in His Word. Dependent on Him moment by moment. Shoes on. Ready to move when He says move. And notice what every single one of these has in common. Not one of them is something you manufacture. Not one of them is an assignment. Every single one of them is the fruit of treasuring Him. Of being near Him. Of letting Him become, over time, the most precious thing in your sight. Which is why I want to say this carefully. I am not saying small groups are bad. I am not saying Bible study is a waste. I am not saying the new member class or Sunday school or the discipleship class do not matter. Of course they do. These are good. These are how we get ready together. Keep going. Keep opening your Bible. Keep gathering with the saints. But church, hear this. If all that training, all that study, all that gathering is not leading you to treasure Christ more than you did last year, then what is it for? What does all that knowledge have that the heart cannot taste? You cannot share what you do not have. And if your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength is not treasuring Christ, then something is off. Not broken. Off. And the fix is not more information. The fix is to come back and taste Him again.

Truth Number Two

You are called to be a witness. Now look with me at the second half of what Peter says. Always ready to give an answer. The word Peter uses there for answer is a courtroom word. But I want you to hear this carefully. It is not the word for the defense attorney giving a closing argument. It is the word for the witness. There is a difference. A defense attorney has to make the case. A witness just tells what they saw. A defense attorney has to win the argument. A witness just tells the truth. A defense attorney has to be an expert. A witness just has to have been there. And church, that distinction matters more than almost anything in this verse. Because when most of us hear be ready to give an answer, we hear be ready to win a debate. Handle every objection. Defend the whole structure of Christian theology against anyone who challenges it. And if that is what Peter meant, none of us would ever be ready. We would spend our whole lives feeling guilty about something Peter never asked us to do. But a witness is not a spectator. A witness is someone who has seen something with their own eyes and now gets up and tells the truth about what they saw. That is the assignment. And here is what makes a Christian witness different. The power of the testimony is not in the witness. The power is in what the witness has seen. You are not standing up to say how impressive you are. You are standing up to say how impressive He is. Your story is the evidence. Christ is the verdict. Look at the best example of this in all of Scripture. John chapter nine. In John nine, Jesus comes upon a man who had been blind from birth. He spits on the ground, makes mud, puts it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. The man obeys, washes, and for the first time in his life, he can see. But instead of celebrating, the religious leaders drag him in for questioning. They interrogate his parents. They interrogate him, twice. They throw theology at him. They threaten him with being thrown out of the synagogue, which in his culture meant being cut off from everything and everyone. And in the middle of that pressure, with his whole world on the line, listen to what he says. John 9:25 (NIV) Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see. Church, I love this man. No seminary. No system. No script. He does not pretend to know what he does not know. He just tells what happened. And here is the power of it. They could argue with his theology. They could poke holes in his logic. But they could not look him in the eye and tell him that the thing that happened to him did not happen. ••• So to the person in this room this morning who is sitting there thinking, I could never share my faith. I do not know enough. I want to say to you as plainly as I can. You are not disqualified. You are exactly the kind of person God uses. Can you say, I was lost, and Christ found me? I was afraid, and He gave me peace? I was carrying something I could not put down, and He took it? I was blind, and now I see? That is your account. That is all Peter is asking for. And church, it has always been enough. Your story is the bridge. Christ is the destination. And here is what makes this humbling and freeing at the same time. God alone opens blind eyes. The blindness that keeps people from seeing the glory of Christ is real, and it is deep, and no amount of human effort removes it. If you have ever sat across a table from someone you love and watched them hear the gospel and see no glory, you know what I am talking about. You have felt that helplessness. You have sat in the car afterward and thought, what more could I possibly say? And right there, right at the place of your greatest helplessness, the commission comes. God sends us to open eyes that He alone can open. You are not the power. You are a jar of clay with a treasure inside. Paul said it this way. I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the growth. The miracle of life, the moment blind eyes open, that belongs to Him. You tell the truth about what Jesus has done. And you trust the God who spoke light into your darkness to speak light into theirs. The miracle is not your responsibility. The faithfulness is.

Truth Number Three

The way you answer is part of the answer. Peter does not just tell us to share. He tells us how. And the how is not a footnote. Look at the end of verse fifteen. 1 Peter 3:15c (NIV) “But do this with gentleness and respect.” That word respect in some translations is fear. Fear of whom? Not the person in front of you. Two verses earlier Peter just said, have no fear of them. This is reverence toward God. The same honoring of Christ as holy we have been tracing all the way through this passage. Gentleness toward the person in front of you. Deep, settled reverence for the God above you. Those two things together produce the posture of a person who does not have to win. Because repentance is a gift. Something God gives. You do not produce it by being persuasive enough. You do not force it by being louder or more theologically armed. And if the outcome is genuinely in His hands and not yours, do you see what that frees you from? You can afford to be the kindest, calmest, most patient person in the room. Because the result, the miracle of a heart coming alive, does not depend on your rhetorical skill. It depends on the sovereign mercy of God. And hear this. Gentleness is not a personality type. Some of us are naturally soft, and some of us are not. That is not what Peter is describing. Gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit. It is what the Spirit of God grows in a heart that treasures Christ and rests in His promises. You do not manufacture it. You cannot fake it. It grows in you as you stay near Him. ••• And church, we do not have to look far to see this posture. We have already seen it. This is the posture Jesus Himself carried to the cross. Peter watched it with his own eyes. He saw a Man who could have called legions of angels and stayed silent instead. He saw the kindest Man who ever lived absorb the worst that humanity could hand Him and not return it. Mocked, and not mocking back. Struck, and not striking back. Led like a lamb to the slaughter, and opening not His mouth. That is the spirit Peter is asking us into. Not a posture we summon from somewhere deep inside us. A posture that grows in us as we stay near the One who carried it first. A hope that makes you anxious does not look like hope to the person watching you. A hope that makes you defensive does not look like hope. A hope that makes you cruel when you feel cornered does not look like hope at all. But a hope that makes you calm. A hope that lets you really listen before you speak. A hope that helps you absorb an unkind word and not return it. A hope that makes you gentle when the world expects you to be sharp. That is a witness before you open your mouth. And Peter tells us the goal. Look at the very next verse, verse sixteen. The ones who slandered you. Who called you names. Who mocked what you believe. They meet you. And you were gentle. And you listened. And you did not fight back. And they went home ashamed of what they had said. The shame cracked something open. And the light got in. The way you answer is part of the answer.

Why We Are Not Ready

Now church, before we land this, I want us to stop and remember what we have actually been living in for five weeks. ••• Think about what this hope actually is. This is the hope that held you in your suffering. Not beside it. Not above it. In it. The fire did not destroy you. It refined you. The trial was never evidence that God abandoned you. It was evidence that He had not finished. That the thing He started in you on the day He spoke light into your darkness was still moving, still burning, still making you into something you could not have become any other way. The suffering was never the end of the story. It was always the refiner’s fire on the way to the inheritance. This is the hope that produced a joy this world cannot explain, cannot manufacture, and cannot take away. Not happiness. Not the absence of pain. Joy. The kind that coexists with grief. The kind that rises in the middle of the hardest season of your life and makes no logical sense, and yet there it is. Peter called it joy inexpressible and full of glory. So deep it does not have words for itself. And then this, and this is the one that has never left me since week one. The angels. The angels who announced the birth of Christ. The angels who rolled the stone away. The angels who have stood in the unmediated presence of Almighty God since before time began. Those angels lean over the edge of heaven and strain to look at what is happening in you. Not in the cosmos. Not in the movements of empires. In you. In your ordinary, broken, scared, still being made whole life. The redemption working itself out in you. They look at it and cannot stop looking. Do you understand what you are carrying? This hope does not live in a doctrine. It does not live on a shelf. It lives in a Person. In Christ. And the way it gets from Christ into your heart is through setting your mind on who He is and what He has promised. You meditate on Him. You dwell with Him. And when the heart arrives at what the mind is seeing, when His nearness becomes real and the promises do their work, something happens that you did not manufacture and cannot fake. It burns. That is the Emmaus road. Two disciples walking away from Jerusalem, carrying the wreckage of everything they thought they knew. A stranger falls in alongside them and begins to open the Scriptures, and they do not know it is Him. Not yet. And then He is gone. And they turn to each other. And one of them says the most beautiful thing in the Gospel of Luke. Luke 24:32 (ESV) “Did not our heart burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” That is what happens when a heart meets Christ in His Word. Not guilt. Not duty. Not grim determination. Him. Wonder. Love. The kind of fire that gets into your chest and will not go out. The kind of joy that makes you want to get up and go, immediately, that same hour, in the dark, and tell someone what you just saw. They did not strategize. They did not rehearse. They did not ask whether they had enough theological training. They ran. Because something had happened that was too good and too real and too alive to keep to themselves. That is what five weeks of living hope has been trying to produce in us. And this burning. This wonder. This joy in the suffering. This hope the angels cannot stop looking at. This is what we are timid about sharing? Let that sit. Then turn. Quietly. Like a man who just found the answer. Church, the reason most of us are not more free in telling people about our hope is not that we lack training. It is simpler and deeper than that. We do not feel very hopeful. And when our hearts are not full of hope in the promises of Christ, here is what happens when a conversation comes up. We feel it as a duty to defend a doctrine instead of a delight to tell somebody why we are so hopeful. Do you feel the difference? One is a burden. The other is an overflow. But here is the good news. And this is where the whole passage turns. If the problem is that we are not hopeful enough, the solution is not to try harder to witness. The solution is to get closer to the source of the hope. Revere Christ. Treasure Him. Set your mind on His promises. And the readiness will come. Because the hope will come. Because it always comes when you get near Him. The way to get ready to share your hope is to get hopeful. And notice what Peter assumes. He does not say, go find someone and make them listen. He says, be ready for everyone who asks you. Peter assumes someone is going to ask. Not because you forced a conversation. Because your life looks different enough, hopeful enough, settled enough, peaceful enough, that somebody gets curious. Are we living close enough to Christ that there is anything to ask about?

Before We Go

Now church, before we close, I want to be very direct. Because I am not assuming that every person in this room this morning is a follower of Jesus. Some of you are here because a friend brought you. Some of you grew up in church but have never personally put your faith in Christ. Some of you have been coming to this church for a long time, but if you were honest, you would say you have never actually trusted Jesus for yourself. You know the story. You have not surrendered to the Savior. And I want to say to you, right where you are sitting this morning, the greatest change possible can happen for you today. Here is what the Bible says. You, like every one of us, have sinned against God. You have turned from His ways to your own ways. And that sin separates you from God. And if you die in that separation, you will be separated from Him forever. But God loves you so much. So much that He came to us in the Person of Jesus. Jesus lived the perfectly righteous life that we could not live. And then He went to a cross, willingly, and died the death that you and I deserved to die. He took the weight of your sin on Himself. And three days later, He walked out of the tomb, alive, in victory over sin and death. And the Bible says that anyone, anyone, who turns from their sin and trusts in Jesus as Savior and Lord of their life will be forgiven of every sin they have ever committed and restored to a relationship with God forever. That is the Gospel. That is the greatest news in the world. And that invitation is open to you this morning. If you have never personally trusted in Jesus, I want to invite you, right now, in the quiet of your own heart, to pray something like this. Just between you and God. God, I know I have sinned against You. I know I cannot save myself. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sin and rose from the dead. Right now, I turn from my sin. I trust in Jesus as my Savior and my Lord. Please save me. Make me Yours. Today and forever. If you prayed that prayer this morning, even silently where you are sitting, I want you to know something. The God who does not lie has heard you. You are His. And I want to know about it. After the service, come find me, or send me a message, or tell somebody on our team. Because heaven is rejoicing over you right now, and we want to walk with you from here.

Go And to every believer in this room. This is Commissioning Sunday. This is the last sermon in Share the Hope. And I want you to hear this clearly. You are not walking out of here with an assignment that is too big for you. You are not walking out of here with a script you need to memorize by Tuesday. 1 Peter 1:3 (NIV) “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” You are walking out of here carrying a living hope. A hope that came out of an empty tomb on the third day. A hope that has been making its way through two thousand years of broken, ordinary, scared, needy, still being made whole people. People whose hearts burned on the road. People who could not stop themselves from running back to tell someone. People who stayed close enough to the source that the world could not help but notice. That is the hope of this church. That is the hope of your life. It is not something you have to manufacture. It is alive. It is sustained by the risen Christ Himself. And it will show. Stay near Him. The hope takes care of itself.