Bethel Lutheran Church - Pastor Luke Bernthal
Soli Deo Gloria

Always Be Prepared! ; 1 Peter 3: 15 - 18; 2008-04-27

1. Know Your -Hope-
2. Give an Answer

The Bulletin (order of service)

Text: 1 Peter 3: 15 - 18;
15 But in your hearts set apart 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, 16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. 17 It is better, if it is God's will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. 18 For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit.

Obviously the same is true of our spiritual lives. Jesus tells us to “Watch and pray” (Mark 13:32-33) and to Always be Prepared for His return on Judgment Day. We memorize and store in our hearts the many passages of Scripture that give us comfort and strength so that we can Always be Prepared for times of trouble, trial, or temptation that may come our way during our lifetime. But how many of us are Always Prepared to “witness” to others; to tell others about who Jesus is and what He has done to save them? Are we, as Peter instructs us to in our text, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (v. 15)?

The apostle Paul once told the young pastor, Timothy, “Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2). What did he mean by “in season and out of season”? He meant that we should at all times and in all situations Always be Prepared to speak about the Word of God to people; specifically the Gospel. A well known pastor of one of the largest churches in our country, a man named Bill Hybels, tells the story of being on a sailing trip and getting to know some people who invited him to socialize with them on their boat. Just as he was about to climb down the ladder to leave, one of them, who had discovered that he was a pastor asked him, “Before you go, can you answer a question? What does it mean to become a Christian?” Bill knew he had about 45 seconds before he would lose the attention span of this group of friendly, but non-religious sailors.

If you were Bill, what would you say? Could you communicate the central message of the Christian faith in a clear and concise fashion? Would you feel comfortable doing it, even in a situation like that? Most of us would feel uncomfortable. So today, we are going to try to look at these words from 1 Peter and learn HOW we can Always be Prepared to give the reason for the hope that we have.

HOW can we share our hope? Well, first off, we’ve got to 1. know our hope—we’ve got to know what it is we’re hoping for! Now, the “hope” that Peter is speaking of in our text is not some mere wish, like we use the word most often today; like when we say, “I hope it doesn’t rain when we go to the park today.” Rather when this word is used in the Biblical sense “hope” refers to the Christian’s joyful expectation of the fulfillment of God’s promises—most often it refers to the promise of the sure “hope” of salvation in heaven. Think of it like children looking forward to Christmas Day. They know it’s coming in the future, but they wait in eager expectation and “hope” for it to come quickly.

Do you have that type of sure “hope” for salvation? Do you know that your entrance into heaven on your last day is a “done deal” because of what Jesus did for you? If you don’t 1. know your hope you simply aren’t prepared—not to witness Jesus to others, and sadly you aren’t prepared for Jesus’ return on the Last Day.

Well then, let’s discuss very briefly and simply what that “hope” is so that we can first solidify this message in our own hearts and then share it effectively and more easily with others. (I have outlined these points in the printed copies of the sermon if you’d like to follow along and use them for yourself in the future). Ironically, sharing our “hope” most effectively actually begins by sharing some “bad news!”

The “Bad News” – Sin. Yes, that three letter word that has almost become unspeakable in our day is the “bad news.” The Bible tells us that we all have it; we’ve all been infected by it from birth (actually, even from conception! cf. Psalm 51:5 – “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me”). “All have sinned” the Bible tells us, “and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Now even the most self-righteous person will probably readily admit that they are not perfect; no one is. We admit that freely about ourselves as well, even though we are children of God by faith. The real bad news about our sin is that the Bible also tells us, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Physical death, spiritual death, eternal death in the place of torment the Bible calls “hell.”

“Well, pastor,” you might ask, “why in the world would we want to share this ‘bad news’ with people at all, much less first if we are going to talk with them about our hope?” It can be a mistake for us to jump ahead too quickly and tell people they can be saved through Christ before they really understand that they are sinners who stand before a holy God. Almost everyone loves to hear the fact that God is love; no one seems to have a problem with that. But the problem is that’s as far as people go in their understanding about God. They don’t bother to pay attention to what the Bible also tells us about God, namely that God is holy, completely separate from sin (which He hates!), and that God is just and requires that the payment for sin (which is rebellion against Him and His commands) must be paid. We have incurred that debt which must be paid, and there are no funds in our moral bank account to buy our way off death row. No works we can do to pay off our sins. Not enough money in the world to pay off the debt that we owed.

If our friends do not understand this, they will not see their need, or the relevancy of the Gospel to their lives. If we don’t understand what we’ve been saved from—the hell we’ve been saved from—then who’s going to care that “Jesus Saves”? Saves me from what? If a doctor came to you today and told you, “Good news! You’re cured!” But you never even realized or acknowledged the fact that you had terminal cancer, that “good news” wouldn’t mean much to you. The same is true of Jesus’ spiritual “cure” for sin. People must understand that as good as we may think we are, we all fall far short of God’s perfect standards and deserve death and hell because of it.

This is where the good news of the Gospel fits in! The word Gospel actually means "good news," and refers to what Christ did for us.

The “Good News” – Grace. You can sum up the “Good News” of the Gospel with just this one word: Grace. It means “undeserved love.” We were all suffering from the “terminal cancer” of sin and could do nothing to cure ourselves. But God, purely out of His love for us—which we didn’t ask for, earn, or deserve—sent His Son Jesus to be the cure for our sin by becoming one of us and taking on the “cancer” of all our sins upon Himself and taking the “terminal illness” of the cross and hell in our place that we would be cured and have eternal life in heaven.

There is an illustration that is used to help make what God has done for us in Jesus clear. The story is told of two men who grew up as best of friends, except that their lives took divergent paths. One became a judge, and the other a criminal. At one point the criminal ends up in the Judge’s court. He is obviously guilty, but he the judge’s friend. If the judge let him off, he would not be full filling his role of dispensing justice. So what he does is he sentences his friend to the appropriate fine for his crime, he then steps down from the bench, takes off his robe and writes his friend a check for the amount of the fine in full. This is what God does in Jesus. He sentences us to death for our sins, but then steps down from heaven and pays for our sins in full with his death.

This is the message we need to have buried in our hearts, both the “bad news” and the “good news.” Sin and Grace. Our sin and God’s grace. This message is what creates faith in our hearts and that faith; believing that message, the Bible tells us, is what makes that salvation—the “cure” for our sins, forgiveness--our own! That faith is what Peter is referring to in the first words of our text when he says, “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord” (v. 15). It is a genuine, heart-felt faith. Not “phony” in any way, or simply just “head knowledge” of what Jesus has done. If Christ is in your heart, filling your heart, taking the #1 place “set apart” just for Him, then we are going to think about Him and His Word, we are speak about Him, and we are going to live our lives for Him!

So where, then, you might ask, do “good works” fit in? Doesn’t God want us to do them? You bet He does! After one of the greatest Gospel passages in the Bible, the passage we spoke about last Sunday, the one that is inscribed in our church’s corner stone (Ephesians 2:8-9) God tells us that one of the reasons He saved us from sin, death, and hell is so we would serve Him gratefully with good works—not to gain salvation, but because He gave us salvation! “For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). “Good works” and the way we live out our Christian lives is vitally important to witnessing Jesus to others. It is an essential part of the HOW of Always being Prepared. That brings us to the second key point of our sermon, if we 1. Know our hope then we need to 2. Give an answer. I might amend that second point a little and say instead that we need to 2. Give a good answer! Listen again to what Peter says in our text about the importance of HOW we witness the “Good News” of Jesus to others. “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, 16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (v. 15-16). Our conduct, the way we live our lives should be the first and one of the “loudest” witnesses for Christ and His love and power, and for the fact that we are one of His followers. St. Francis of Assisi once said: “Preach the Gospel everywhere you go, and if necessary, use words.”

Unfortunately, some of our means of evangelism that the Christian Church has used over the years have been extremely disrespectful and very “pushy” rather than gentle, as Peter encourages in our text, and have therefore, not been very successful. A California-based Christian marketing research company says non-Christians in the United States view evangelical Christians “somewhat more kindly than prostitutes, but with less affection than lawyers.” Many folks view Christians as being very pushy and very phony with little interest in really getting to know them.

I would like to point your attention once again this morning to a great example of witnessing for Jesus with “gentleness and respect” (v. 15) even in a very unlikely and rather difficult situation. Think back to the account of the apostle Paul in Athens which we read in our Scripture reading from the Book of Acts chapter 17. Paul wasn’t pushy, phony, or disrespectful to the highly educated, but obviously very pagan men of Athens. And notice also he expressed his interest in who they were and found a way to turn a topic of conversation that they were obviously interested in to tell them about the true God and His Son, Jesus, who was crucified and risen again to save them. We read again from Acts 17, Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, "Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; "for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: "God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands” (Acts 17:22-24). Paul didn’t mock them for their pagan beliefs, He didn’t walk into the midst of them and say, “You idiots! How stupid can you be to worship anything and everything and then make an idol to an ‘UNKNOWN GOD,’ just in case you missed one! Like that’s really going to work!” No, he witnessed the truth about the true God and Jesus Christ, but he did it with “gentleness and respect” (v. 15) while at the same time, in no way did He condone their pagan beliefs or imply that they were somehow just as good as faith in Christ. He shows an interest in their culture and their interests by quoting from one of their own poets, “for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring' (Acts 17:28). Then Paul ended His “mini sermon” with a call to repentance from sin and the worship of false gods and gave a very clear testimony of the Gospel of the risen Savior Jesus, "Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:29-31).

Would you “be prepared” to give a similar witness in a similar situation? Our age and society is not much different than that of Athens in Paul’s day. Sure, people don’t usually build statues to their false “gods” in our day, but just the same many people are following a very scattered and lost spiritual path. The true God is truly an UNKNOWN GOD to many people in our day, just like He was to the people of Athens. We have the truth about Him and His Son Jesus. We have His “hope”—a living “hope” for a dying world! Do we 1. know our hope? Are we prepared to 2. Give an answer for that hope which we have, with “gentleness and respect”? Look around you today. An opportunity to share that hope will be presented to you today—and everyday—by the Holy Spirit. Are you prepared? Amen.

[By the way, this is the illustration Bill Hybels used when he was in the situation I mentioned earlier, on the boat. It is another good way of expressing the Gospel message of Christ very simply:

The difference between religion and Christianity is that religion is spelled "D-O."
It is trying to do enough good things to please God.

The problem is we never know when we have done enough and - on top of that - the Bible says we can never do enough. (Romans 3:23: "For the wagesof sin is death. ..")

Christianity, however, is spelled "D-O-N-E."
Christ did for us what we could never do. He lived the perfect life that we could not live. And He died on the cross to pay for all of our wrongdoing.]