A Reason for the Hope Within | Selected Scriptures

Dr. Bill Roach preaches "A Reason for the Hope Within" from Selected Scripture at The Lord's Day Service at The King's Chapel, Sunday, April 12, 2026.



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Transcript

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Amen. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, and we just pray that you will bless our time this morning as we work to preach your word, that we stand here to exalt you as our Savior. God, I pray for each and every one of us today. God, I pray for us that we will let the Word of Christ dwell richly within us. Heavenly Father, we pray that you will let us sanctify Jesus Christ as Lord in our hearts, that we will be able to give a defense of the Christian faith and to communicate the hope that we have. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Well, good morning, everyone. Like they said, I am I am Bill Roach, and it is good to be here with you. And you know, I was a little nervous today because, you know, I had my elder interview right before the service, and I thought to myself, what happens if that doesn't go so well? This is gonna be a really awkward moment for somebody here today, but I think it went well. So I just want to say thank you, and we've been attending here for a little while now, and I guess now we are joining here. So I just want to say thank God for this church. You know, the music is wonderful, God is doing great things here, and I'm very excited to see what the Lord is going to do in this church. Now, as he was saying, I have a background in Christian apologetics, which is the rational defense of the Christian faith. And a lot of people wonder what kind of background do you come from in order to become a Christian apologist? And I didn't come from a family that was committed to the Lord. I was saved out of a family that was not a church-going family. I was raised in Iowa, and I did not even know what a Bible was until I was 15 years old. Literally. You would have held this up, I would have been like, ah, it's some kind of book. I don't know, do whatever you want with it. And I was converted in high school. And after high school, I went off to Bible college, and then from there, the first church that I served at was in the city of Chicago in a community called Cabrini Green. Anyone ever heard of it? One of the most notorious gang projects in the history of the United States of America. Truly fulfills the motto that in Chicago there's only two types of people: the quick and the dead. There's nothing in between. And while we were there, we were bombarded with all sorts of questions. We're located literally in the heart of the city. And you have individuals coming from the universities into the community. You have Malcolm X and his university crew coming in, you have different religions and cults. And as a church, we were tasked with the ability to disciple these people, and I found myself with one glaring problem. I couldn't answer people's questions. And I knew that the Bible commands that we are to give a reason for the hope that we have, and I was left in this predicament. I either have to stop sharing my faith, or I need to find answers. And the Bible doesn't make it an option for us to stop sharing our faith. And I remember one night, the end of a long week, I'm walking up Chicago Avenue, and I go to Michigan Avenue, and I walk the magnificent mile, and on my way back, I popped into a bookstore, Moody Bible Institute's bookstore, and I picked up the case for Christ, read it that weekend, and I said, I know exactly what I want to do. I want to go into Christian apologetics. So I packed my bags, I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, to study at Southern Evangelical Seminary under figures like the late Norman Geisler and Gary Habermas, Wynne Cordwin, and many others. And from there, God allowed me to enter into the task of Christian apologetics, which brought me to Raleigh, North Carolina. Did a PhD under a former member at Christ Baptist, Bruce Little, longtime professor of apologetics at Southeastern. And this is what I want to do today. I want to work to equip you. The science of apologetics is not something for the other person. It's not for the experts, it's for people like you in the pews today. So with that said, let's set the context of this. In 1993, there was a group that met in Chicago of world religious leaders, and it was the Parliament of World Religions. And they met there under the banner that all doctrines found in each religion was superficial, and that there was a quote, kernel of truth in each religion. Meaning Buddhism has a little bit, Islam has a little bit, Christianity may have a little bit, but there was no one religion that had it all. And what they sought to do is they wanted to bring people together under this idea of religious unity and this unified spirituality. Now, some of the things that they sought to bring together were things like this. They wanted to bring under this new spirituality an end to war, the end to hunger through the redistribution of the world's resources and population control. That's Marxism, by the way. The conservation of the earth's resources, the genuine equality amongst all races and religions, a true be truly global ethic in this regard, and they wanted to, quote, bring on the dawn of an entirely new age of human achievement and potential. Doesn't this sound like the world we live in today? We're not that far away, really, from 1993. It's almost like a woke conference broke out in 1993 in the city of Chicago. And they met under this banner. We want to unite or perish. And they kept preaching unity, unity, unity. But if you notice anything, it's only unity for those who agree with what they have to say. They were opposed to these, what they called obstacles of unity. And guess which group was the number one group they were focused on? Christians. Why? Because we as Christians affirmed things like Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one can come under the Father except by me. We affirm the idea that there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. We herald with the apostles, for salvation is found in no other name under heaven, other than that which is Christ Jesus. Now, the task of apologetics is not anything new. The word apologetics or apology goes way back to Plato with Socrates in the apology in which he was accused of corrupting the youth and impiety towards the gods. But early Christians were able to pick up on that term because just as Socrates sought to defend himself, Christians sought to defend the historic Christian faith before their accusers. And that's where we get this idea of setting forth a defense. And historically, there's been a variety of books that have done this, but none has done it better than the city of God by the late Augustine. And during this time, Rome had burnt down. And the charge was the Christians were responsible for it. Their religion, their ethics, their way of life is the reason that we had such disunity and ultimately what led to the destruction of Rome. And Augustine set forth his defense. And the key issue that he's looking at that drives us today is how do you live for the city of God when you live in the city of man? Think about that. The title of the book was The City of God. The parallel is that there's two different cities, the city of God and the city of man. And the question is, how do you live for the city of God in the midst of the city of man? Bringing it up into our context, how many of you are familiar with the late Francis Schaefer? For some, the hand goes up. For others, it doesn't. Schaefer's been gone for almost four decades now. And Schaefer stressed the reality that we as Christians have a worldview. The way that we look at the world and the questions that we answer pertain to how that worldview is addressed. Where did I come from? Who am I? How shall we live? And where are we going? And one of the key things that Schaefer sought to show us is that there are different levels at which people answer that question. The first level comes really from just the ideas as such, the philosophy as such, coming from the key thinkers throughout the history of ideas, the figures like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, the postmodernist. We see this everywhere. But then it also manifests itself at a second level. And we could call this at the level of the arts and music, or the way that culture functions as such, because everything's downstream from the ideas. And one individual named Andrew Fletcher captures this better than anybody else. And listen to these words. He says, Give me the making of the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws. Think about that. He who controls the arts and the music and the culture is a manifestation of the values that takes place within that culture. It's the manifestation of the ideas in that culture, which brings us to the third level. If it starts at the ideas and it works down into the culture, how many of us here have conversations around a dinner table? The day-to-day conversations. This is what we would call kitchen table conversations, in which you have individuals asking questions about what's going on in the world in which we live. But I want you to see ideas have consequences, and ideas have origins, and ideas have effects that work their way down to the youngest, to the oldest, and to every arena in which we live. And you may be asking yourself, well, what kind of questions could those be for us? Well, for example, what if you had a son or a daughter, and you're planning to send them off to UNC Chapel Hill this fall, and they decide to take a class with Dr. Bart Ehrman, and all of a sudden they start coming home and they ask, how do I know that my Bible is true? That's a kitchen table conversation. Or how do you work to make disciples in a culture today that has replaced the concept of original sin with things such as systemic racism or the idea that I was, quote, just born that way? Or how do you deal with it when a well-dressed individual comes to your door, tie, nice white shirt? Hello, I'm from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What do you say? Let's keep looking at this. What do you do if one day you go out and you check your mail and you get the bills and the electric you throw aside and the gas you throw aside, but you get a wedding invitation and you open up and you look in there, and you get a wedding invitation from a family member. And Susie's getting married to Sally. Do you go? Do you not go? These are all questions and manifestations of day-to-day life that the Christian has to think about. What do you do when your angry Marxist neighbor plasters signs all over their yard and they don't talk to you for years on end? What do you do if you are in HR and you're going through resumes and all of a sudden you see John Smith colon, he slash him. This is the world that we live in, and this is the context that we live in. Will you or will you not bake the cake? And that's what I want you to see here today as we open up into our text of 1 Peter 3. There are a lot of people now, and we're gonna do an apologetic before we get into the text. You're gonna raise two questions or two objections to me right now. The first one is gonna be something like this I hear what you're saying, Bill, but please do not bring politics into the pulpit. And you know what I want to do is I want us to remind ourselves back to this idea when we're asking these types of questions. Are you familiar with C.S. Lewis and the screw tape letters? He showed us that deception rarely works by outright denying the truth. There's a reason when a person goes hunting, they wear camouflage. You want to cover things up. It works by subtly redefining the concept of truth. Sin is relabeled, categories are shifted, and what is evil begins to look reasonable, sometimes even virtuous. The most dangerous lies are the ones that no longer appear to be lies at all. But think about this as applied to the concept of theology. Instead of answering biblical truth and biblical questions with biblical arguments, our culture simply reclassifies it. Doctrine and moral convictions are no longer treated as matters of truth, but they're dismissed as politics. And once that shift has been made, the conversation seems to be ended. This is the danger facing the church today, not just the opposition to truth, but the quiet redefinition of it, where the battle is no longer about what is true, but about which categories we're allowed to use and talk about and which ones we're not allowed to talk about. And the second thing is this you're gonna have a lot of people who are in many respects hearing the echo of Isaiah, whom shall I send and who shall go for us? And your answer is, There is John, Lord, send him. I don't want to do it. If this is what I gotta do, Lord, please, I don't want to go down this. And I want to encourage you today, as you look through the text, apologetics or evangelism or discipleship is not for specialists, it's for people just like you. This is something you can do. So, with that said, I want us to have four characteristics from 1 Peter today that Grant's already read about the nature of apologetics, about the nature of what you can do today. The first characteristic is this Christians living in a pagan culture, just like ours, must recognize we are not the first ones to face persecution. When you look at this, the backdrop of 1 Peter sets the stage for why the epistle is a handbook for ambassadors living in a foreign land. Written in the mid-60s, 64, 65. The importance of this is that this is when Nero in Rome was devastatingly oppressing and murdering Christians all throughout the land. And Christians were found to be the scapegoat for this act. And they were beaten, tortured, and killed. But when you look at this passage here, if you look in your Bibles, look at chapter 1, verse 1. It says Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ to those who reside as exiles, scattered throughout Pontius, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, and who are chosen. Now, many of your translations, right in the very beginning here, will use the word reside as exiles. Or sometimes it'll say things like reside as sojourners to depict the lives of these people. That language harkens back to the Old Testament, where the people of God were scattered, living as exiles, because Israel was sent off and Judah was sent off by Assyria and Babylon. And this idea is brought in, this notion known as the diaspora, the scattering. And when you're reading Peter here, your translations that you've seen, this idea of reside as exiles, sojourners, there's a word that's in there where it says diasporos in the original. This idea that you see here is the people are referred to as the elect sojourners who are diasporos. And the apostle James uses the exact same language in his epistle to refer to this scattering of the people. This is the context in which 1 Peter is being written. You are people living scattered amongst the nations. We see this even more in 1 Peter chapter 5, verses 12 through 13, where he gives us this idea where it says this Through Selvanus, our faithful brother, as I regard him, I have written to you briefly, exhorting and bearing witness that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it. Verse 13. When you're reading this passage, the notion of Babylon here is a reference to you living in the midst of a cultural Babylon. You are living in a scattered land as the people of God. So the point is that the Babylon and the diaspora hold significant theological weight throughout the Bible. Due to Israel's sin, they were taken out of the land, sent off to Babylon, sent into exile. They endured all of the hardships of living in a foreign land under the tyranny of a foreign ruler, surrounded by those speaking a different language, worshiping different gods, they were accommodating to it left and right, and this is the context that Peter is being written in. And we know the nature of what it was like at this time. Who are the key figures that we think of when we think of Babylon? Daniel. With Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego standing forth as individuals living in a persecuted culture. And think of the context of that for us today. Doesn't this sound like the world we live in? Sojourners, living in the midst of Babylon, feeling like people are speaking a completely different language. And I'm not talking about Spanish or French at this point. I'm talking about a world in which the values and the terminology and the ethics that they affirm are completely foreign. You know what's one of the interesting things about the book of Daniel? We all recognize, you know, Daniel didn't cave, he didn't bow down. But there's something structurally about the book of Daniel. When you look at the text, chapters one through chapter two, they're all written in Hebrew. Chapter two, verse four, up to chapter seven, verse twenty eight. Very clear. It's written in Aramaic. And then the remainder of the book is written in Hebrew. And you wonder why in the world would they do that? Seriously, I mean, did the guy like wake up one day, had Hebrew on his mind, Aramaic? We know that's not the case. The case is that the Bible's inspired by God. There must be a purpose behind it. But what happened in those central chapters? That's when the Gentile rulers were over them. So structurally, as you read the book of Daniel, the people of God, enclosed by their native tongue, sent off into the foreign land, living in the foreign land. And as you recount that and as you read that, it's in Aramaic. And the reason for this structure is we find this the very structure of the language of the book of Daniel is forever preserved to communicate the fact. That in the very reading of the text of Daniel, you, the reader, experience the reality of what it looks like to live in a foreign land. And it's with this context in mind, we come to our first verse here, verse 13. Look at what it says. And who is there to harm you? Maybe like they did Daniel, if you prove zealous for what is good. Another way of stating this is that if you do everything right and you try to be a good person, you try to run your business well, you try to not get angry at people at the grocery store or Capitol Boulevard's off. You can do whatever you want there, believe me. Who's gonna say anything or do anything to you? The text here offers this conditional kind of sentence. If you prove zealous in the context of the original language, this condition isn't just a mere hypothetical. It's saying, in the context of which we're finding ourselves, it's giving us a different reality and could be understood since these people will harm you even if you prove zealous for good works. The reality of these believers living in the Roman Babylon is that they will face harm. One of the key things is that whenever you try to live in a culture opposed to Jesus Christ, people will oppose you, even if you try to do everything right. And what you find here is that the word harm in this passage, it's ensuring in this particular context that harm will be coming upon them. The exact same word here is used throughout the book of Acts. Acts chapter 12, verse 1. Now, about that time Herod the king laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to harm them. There's a specific hatred. You find it in Acts 14, too. But the unbelieving Jews instigated and embittered. The word embittered there is the same Greek word for harm here. The minds of the Gentiles against the brothers. Third one, there's very specific persecution given. And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no man will lay a hand on you in order to harm you. For I have many people in this city. The text continues to go on here into verse 14. It says this, but even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. This passage is communicating the harsh truth, you're in trouble because you did nothing wrong. The nature of suffering for righteousness' sake is that the notion that you were doing exactly what God wants you to do and requires of you, and yet you are still suffering. The apostle Peter, when you read his writings, can almost be understood as the apostle of suffering. Throughout the New Testament, the word suffer is used 41 times. It's used 12 times by Peter. More than any other New Testament book, you see Peter communicating the reality of suffering. The implications of this are quite interesting. Peter highlights the fact that goodness or proper Christian living is no guarantee that you will not suffer. You may go to work, you may go to school, or live in a society and do everything that God requires of you and still face persecution. But notice this what does he say here? You are blessed. Think about this. The Lord Jesus Christ says these words blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is in heaven is great. For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. That's our calling before the Lord. Which brings us to our second characteristic. Christian apologetics means living under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the battle for truth. Look at verse 14. And do not fear their fear, and do not be troubled. When you look at this, some of your Bibles may have this in all capitals, capitalization through there. Some may not. The point is that it's actually a quote from the Old Testament. And when you look at this and you read your Bibles, you go back and you look at those passages, and it's coming from Isaiah chapter 8. And in the context of this, it harkens back to guess what again? The diaspora, the scattering. And the language used here warns about the coming Assyrian invasion. The issue the people were struggling with is having the same fears and not relying upon Yahweh. And the principles underlying this passage are very clear. It's very straightforward. The people of God should not be afraid if what sinful men and sinful women attempt to do to you. It's a natural reaction. People are going to come at you, and the Bible says, do not be afraid of them. Isaiah 8:33 says, It is Yahweh of hosts whom you should regard as holy. Now listen to this. And he shall be your fear, and he shall be your cause of trembling. The Apostle Peter applies these principles to Christians who are facing significant harms and suffering in this culture. Peter is not alone. As we remember, the Lord Jesus Christ says this, and do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul. Look at what he says here. But rather fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. Jesus' words are very clear. There are people in this world who do seek to harm you as a Christian. But there's a limit to their persecution. There's a point in which they can't go any further. They may be able to kill your body. They may be able to ruin your reputation, but they can't kill your soul. Amen? What we find here is that in this passage, Jesus is teaching that believers ought to see the great magnitude of our God. This magnitude should cause us to fear God, for God is holy and God is just. Because God is holy and because God is just, he cannot overlook sin, including the sins of those who are persecuting you. God will bring them to punishment. God will see that every careless word spoken against you or act done against you will have a full accounting. And that's why it says here in this context of this passage, there is a true reality of the doctrine of hell. In this passage, what we find here is that both Peter and Jesus are telling you to not be intimidated by unbelievers who will use fear and intimidation to silence you, to coerce you, to get you to compromise, to fudge just a little bit. Don't back down to their threats and don't let their threats trouble you. Rather, fear God. You know, a number of years ago, Grant brought this up. We published the book Defending Inerrancy. And in the history of American evangelicalism, there was a battle for the Bible. And in that battle, you had individuals like R. C. Sproull and J.I. Packer and Francis Schaeffer, John MacArthur, and others who recognize there's a slide taking place within our churches, and there's a slide taking place within our seminaries. We've seen this. We've seen this. It's the nature of the reality. People questioning the total truthfulness of the Word of God. And what they did is they convened an organization called the International Society, I mean, uh, yeah, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. And it met in Chicago, and they produced what was known as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a series of affirmations and denials saying exactly what do we mean by this? And that statement went forth throughout the evangelical world, defining and defending exactly what we mean when we say that the Bible is the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God. Fast forward. People held to it, compromises occurred, and I'm starting to have a conversation with Dr. Geisler saying, hey, I'm seeing this, and I'm reading that. And we started to have a conversation related to this, and we decided that it's time to write another book. Hence, defending inerrancy. And in that book, we did exactly what we laid out to do. Namely, we explained exactly what the biblical doctrine was. We named names, we named institutions, we dealt with issues. And in the midst of this, we knew the book was getting ready to come out. I already had it, it hadn't come out. And I'll admit I was getting nervous. Talk about fear in a passage. Because you think, oh man, you know, we're gonna call out guys at Dallas Seminary and Trinity and even some of our Southern Baptist institutions. That's gonna go over like a concrete balloon. And I got nervous and we convened and had one final conversation because it was written with all of the living framers of the Chicago statement. And I remember being on that phone conversation. Geisler was there, Sprohl was there, Packer was there, and I was there. What is that all about? And Norm said this Bill, there are two fears in life: fear of God and fear of man. And never let your fear of man trump your fear of God. That's exactly what this passage is trying to communicate to you. In the midst of people coming against you, whether inside the church or outside of the church, fear the Lord. Which brings us to our next passage, verse 15, the key passage of apologetics here, and let's read it. But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you. In this passage, this idea of making a defense and apologia, you hear the term apologetics coming out? It's in this passage. But what you have to find here is that when you look at the context, what many people in the field of apologetics fail to see in this passage is Peter is making a clear imperative. Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. The first task of any person setting out to do Christian apologetics is to make the Lord holy in your own heart, to set your heart apart for the things of God. You're gonna need it. It's not gonna be easy. And the idea here is to treat him with the holy reverence due unto Christ. And I'm telling you, this is not the case in most apologetics today. A lot of people will bend on their convictions. What does it matter if Genesis 1 through 11 is really historically reliable? It's just a fact of creation, not the details of it. You ever hear that? Who would say that? William Lane Craig. Think about that. Individuals saying, Jesus didn't really say these words or go to these places. Rather, the genre of the New Testament allows them to make up speeches in places. So when Jesus was on the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus wasn't really at a place that's on a mount. He didn't really say it in that exact way. Rather, there's a literary freedom, doesn't that sound wonderful, to depict the words and the places and the engagements of Jesus Christ. You know that's the predominant view of New Testament scholarship amongst most New Testament scholars today. And I would tell you, it's because they have not sanctified the Lord Jesus Christ in their heart. When you look at this passage here, it harkens back to the Old Testament, going back to Isaiah 8 again. In 1 Peter 3.14 and 15, he picks up on this motif. And in 3.15, in the second half of the verse, he says this sanctify Christ as Lord and your heart. And here what we find here is he's making a connection to the Old Testament, and the word used in the Old Testament would be translated as sanctify Christ as Yahweh. Not just a ruler, but Yahweh God as ruler. Here we find the Apostle Peter commanding the church to set apart, to sanctify Jesus Christ, not as some generic Lord, but as Yahweh. And in this passage, you find him here declaring Jesus Christ to be God. Sanctify Christ as Yahweh. Peter is explicitly telling the people that Jesus Christ, the Lord of the new covenant, is Yahweh of the old covenant. In 1 Peter, we find this overarching theme is you do not fear men, but you fear God. And in this passage, the Apostle Peter makes a similar apologetic. We're not to fear men, but we're to sanctify Christ, to fear Jesus Christ. Why? Because he's truly God. The Lordship of Jesus Christ should rule how we do apologetics. We don't set the bar so low and make the target so broad. We have a very specific thing that we're trying to defend, the whole Christian faith. We do not want to come to the point where we have people believing in generic theism, a halfway reliable Bible, a mediocre doctrine of justification, a terrible view of the church, and we send them out all over the universities saying that these are our representatives defending the Christian faith. Rather, this passage is saying is that if Christian apologetics means anything, it means living under the Lordship of Christ. And this passage is not calling you to make Jesus just a merely earthly king, but your divine, eternal Messiah, Yahweh in the flesh and the battle for truth. Why? You're gonna need it. Which brings us to our next portion here. Notice this. He says, Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. The Bible routinely uses body language to talk about things. Have you ever noticed that? Stand firm, legs, take up the full armor of God, strong body, gird your loins with truth, protect your legs, the breastplate of righteousness, to shod your feet in preparation of the gospel of peace. Your feet. Peter in this passage is specifically calling you to sanctify Jesus Christ as Lord in your heart. Throughout the Old Testament, the heart was considered the central place of our emotions, the core of our being. And we have a very similar approach today. I love you with all of my heart. And several passages of the Old Testament depict this. Genesis 6, 5. Then Yahweh saw the evil of man was great on the earth, and every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. We see the the overflow who we are coming out in our hearts. Exodus 7, 3, but I will harden Pharaoh's heart. Proverbs 3, verse 5, trust in Yahweh with all of your heart. Proverbs 12, 25, anxiety in a man's heart weighs him down. But a good word makes him glad. In the context of today's passage, we must connect it to the two verses. Where would fear reside in the midst of a persecuting culture in which you're doing apologetics? In your heart. Where would loyalty unto Christ reside? In your heart. Peter is warning those who grow either faint hearted. Or disheartened due to the heartache of harms and persecuted to not become brokenhearted. This is a reality for those who are undergoing significant trials. In the midst of hardship, where God's presence may seem dim or distant, let the Lordship of Christ rule in your hearts. One of the key things that I want you to see here is that if Jesus Christ is the Lord of your life, certain issues are already settled. Certain conversations will be had, but the Bible is going to determine the answer. If Christ is Lord of your heart, there's no person who can sway you, no issue that can touch you. Christ's Lordship determines the doctrines we're to believe and how we are to defend them. Now I will tell you this that I have said in many respects, the apologetic situation of the 20th century was that of the hard sciences. Creation, evolution, those types of things. We've all seen that, and I'm not saying that they haven't gone away. But what do you think the apologetic situation is of the 21st century? That of the social sciences. And what I want you to see is that we are going to live in a culture today that's going to deal with those things radically different. For example, news broke recently up in Kentucky. Student at Boyce College was fired from her job for talking about her Christian faith, in particular as it relates to gender and sexuality. This is a girl at a coffee shop losing her job for that. Because here's what I want you to realize. With very few exceptions, you're not going to be persecuted and fired for defending the deity of Christ or creation. There's really not a lot of legal teeth in that. This is a dividing line. This is the apologetic situations of our day. Why? Everything starts in the realm of ideas. And they work down into the issues of culture, and then they became a topic around the kitchen table. And what I want you to see here is that Peter is giving us clear things as it relates to what it means to live for the city of God in the city of man. And that's where he gives us this idea of making a defense. The next key thing in this passage. And you may be thinking, I don't want to live in a culture that deals with that. Send me back to the 80s or the 50s. Make it easier. But we hearken back with Tolkien when he says this, with Frodo, I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo. So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. And that's exactly what we find here is that in Peter's letter and in the times that we live, being able to make a defense to the Christian faith is the normal thing for the Christian. Jesus did it, Peter did it, Paul did it. We find that Stephen did it and gave his life for it. All the apostles gave their lives for it. And we've seen the debates throughout the history of the church, the early Trinitarian debates, the issues related to is Jesus Christ truly man or truly God? The first attack was on his humanity, the Gnosticism that came into the church. As Christianity grew and it expanded, going into the Greco-Roman world, we see individuals struggling with this idea of how do we engage with their view of the gods and proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord of all in that context. Coming in through church history, we see this. There's nothing new under the sun. When you have figures like Luther and Calvin defending justification by faith alone, they were rightly defending the gospel of Jesus Christ according to the issues of their time. And just remember, during the Reformation, the issue was not scripture or grace or Christ or faith or the glory of God. But during the Reformation, the issues were about Scripture and Grace and Christ and faith and the glory of God alone. Amen. And these issues set the tempo for the marks of the church. And you start to see as the Protestant Reformation took forth, the issues did not go away. You have figures like Jonathan Edwards and the early Puritans coming in. What was Harvard, Yale, and Princeton founded as? Christian institutions for the training of men for the sake of ministry. We've lost that today. But think about this. Some of Edwards' early books on original sin, religious affections, how the nature of revival worked were all written in the context of the debates during his day. And Edwards, even at one point in time, served as the president of Princeton Theological Seminary for a very short time. The point is that we live in a time right now where we must deal with the issues of our day. We're downstream of the various issues facing evangelicalism. Battle for the Bible, the battle for God, defending classical theism, the battle for the true nature of Christ. And I want you to seek here in this passage, you are called to be faithful to this moment in time, not the moment in time in which you hope or you wish you could live in. Which brings us, as we we look here, the nature of the Christian apologist is to have two key things here: to communicate the reality of hope and doing it with a good conscience. And you ask yourself, why the hope of the gospel? There's many things that we could look at here. There's many things that we find here. Yes, we give reasons. Yes, we give explanations, but we're people that are more than reasons and explanations. When the rug is pulled out from underneath your feet, you have to have something more than just reasons and explanations. Nothing less than reasons and explanations, but you have to ground the fullness of the Christian faith, the practical application of the Christian faith. And we know what it's like in a world that's lost hope. You know, in the midst of writing this this week, we were preparing, and I get a phone call, a phone call that nobody ever wants to get. To find out that a family member of mine lost hope. He took his life, was raised with him. Shared the gospel with him. Known him over 40 years. When you're making your defense of the Christian faith, yes, it is answers. Yes, it is reason. But it has to communicate the hope of the gospel. There has to be some kind of true spirituality there where the significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ means more than a bare proposition that we affirm. It has to change our lives, and it's manifest in how we live and the good conscience that we have. In the world in which we live, I want you to see that people will bring accusations against you. But as the passage ends here, if you have a good conscience, there's only one opinion that matters the Lord's. So let me finish with this. A number of years ago, I read this story, it was really an obituary, about a woman named Dorothy Payne. Have any of you ever heard of her? She did missions work. None of you have ever heard of her. I guarantee none of you have ever heard of her. And I'm reading through this, and the gist of the story is Dorothy was converted, young age, served this little tiny country church as a Sunday school teacher to the youth, played the piano for over 50 years, married with children, went on mission trips, no big name, no flash, no zeal, none of it. She became a widow, lived as a widow for 35 years, running a farm, working with her family there. And in the midst of it, the communication was Dorothy was a faithful woman. And she heard an objection one time, not a normal objection. The objection went something like this: all of the kids were going to go to church camp. And in the midst of it, one kid said, Well, we can't afford to go to the church camp. So Dorothy, being the widowed farmer's wife at this point, answers that objection, writes a check, sends the kid to church camp. The kid becomes a Christian, starts preaching all throughout country churches, different venues, goes to Bible college, goes to seminary. That kid was me. You have to realize that God uses normal people. God uses you to answer the objections before you. Sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart. Keep a good conscience and proclaim the hope of the gospel to come. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We pray that you will bless our time as we leave here. Lord, we pray that you will let this church stand in defense of the gospel. We pray that you will turn this church into a platform that is known for heralding the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I pray for the people here who go forth with difficult jobs, difficult circumstances, different, difficult lives. Let them show the hope of the gospel. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.