Brothers and Sisters, you and I should always be ready to give the reason for our hope in Jesus Christ when we have the opportunity to or when we are asked. Someone may ask us why we act the way we do and that gives us an opportunity to explain our trust and hope in Jesus Christ. I’ve used the answer to that question myself to tell of Jesus Christ.
When many of our Lord’s disciples left following him after they heard a hard saying from him (symbolically eating his flesh and drinking his blood), the Lord asks the twelve if they would abandon him as well.
Peter says is very plainly for us all: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
And so it is for us and every other person living on this earth. To whom shall we go to escape the inevitable death that awaits us other than to our Lord Jesus Christ?
He died just for this very purpose so that when we believe in Him, we will receive eternal life. He did not die in vain because He searches the hearts of every living person looking into our intentions and thoughts for those that will believe in Him.
He did that for Lydia in the book of Acts and He’s doing that every day in the world as well. Lydia worshiped God but didn’t know anything about His saving Grace through His Son Jesus Christ. She was saved because the Lord put it into her to pay attention to the words of salvation through Jesus Christ that Paul preached.
Can you see how we can be like Paul and take every opportunity we get to proclaim and explain our own salvation through Jesus Christ? That person hearing your words may have already been prepared by the Lord to believe.
We can begin our answer for our hope with a testimony of our own experience in coming to faith and belief in God and our living hope in a future beyond death.
We might share that we woke up one day to the realization that the things of this world did not make us feel fulfilled and complete and no matter how much we had, we felt something was missing in our lives. We were doing things that something inside us said just wasn’t right.
We were living for ourselves, accumulating things and always seeking a better and better life: One of riches, satisfying our every desire and seeking the esteem of others. Even with some of these things that we thought would make us happy, life still had no real meaning for us and we realized there wasn’t anything we could do about it, having tried everything else.
We were living without any lasting hope; only the realization that each day, people around us were getting older and older until infirmity and death overtook them. Even younger people were getting sick and dying so we never knew if we would wake up in the morning to live another day, week or year. We wondered why all this is happening to us and why our bodies had to get sick and why we have to get old and die.
One day, someone shared with us that there is a better way of living, one that takes away that nagging feeling of helplessness, wrongness and lack of any future hope. That way is to first realize that there is a Loving Creator who made all things here on earth and the universe itself. We only need to open our eyes and look at His marvelous creation to see that it’s so and that He exists.
Our creator made us in his own image and He loves us. In fact, He loves us so much so that He made his own son into a man and allowed him to die to take away everything that was wrong in us so that we might have a sense of rightness within ourselves and a chance for a new relationship with Him. The chance God gives us is something he calls “Grace”. His Grace gave us hope for a much better life after we die if we’ll only believe in him and in his Son and repent from always doing the wrong things in our lives.
The Creator is the God of the bible which is His own writings and we call them Holy Scriptures because He that wrote them is Holy. It was written so that we would know Him, how everything came about and what he has in mind for us and what he wants us to do.
His writings start with His own creation of everything we see around us here on earth and in the sky above. He made all the living creatures on earth and us, man and woman in His own image and He began a relationship with the man as father and son and for the son, he made a woman as his wife and companion. This is how he ordered things.
But this relationship was broken when His earthly son and his wife decided to go their own way of no longer believing in and trusting God and as punishment, they would not be allowed to live forever but were changed so that they would eventually get old and die.
Because God still loved them, He gave them the ability to have children but those children were no longer made in God’s image but in the image of the man who had done wrong. And this desire to live their own way and do wrong was in their children so that their disobedience continued after the first man and woman died and then they too grew old and died.
Because God is just and righteous and loving, He did not leave his earthly son and wife without hope. God told them that he would send His own Son whom he calls the “Word of God” to erase the death sentence that was brought into the world because of their disobedience. God swore to make things right again.
God caused his only heavenly Son, the “Word of God” to be born of a woman who was a virgin and called his name Jesus. This was the very Messiah and Christ that we were told would come to change everything and make things right again. He was not born with the disobedient nature of the first man because his father was God Himself. Jesus grew up and lived a sinless life, always obedient to his Father. He taught us how to live a life pleasing to His Father. In order to make everything right again for us with God, Jesus had to shed his blood and die to take away all of our disobedient wrongness and His father then raised Him from the dead to show us all what awaits us after we die too so that we would have hope.
In raising His Son from the dead, God asks that we proclaim out loud to all that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and believe in our hearts that He raised His son from the dead. If we truly believe this, we will be raised from the dead to receive eternal life with a new and wonderful spiritual body.
God wants us to repent of doing the wrong things in our lives and look to His Son Jesus Christ as the example for living a life pleasing to Him. He knows that doing this is a hard thing after living our lives for so long in the wrong ways so He forgives us when we do wrong things by mistake but over time, He knows we’ll do fewer and fewer wrong things. God gave us part of himself to help us too. This part is known as the Holy Spirit and He only says what He hears from our Lord Jesus Christ. He gives us understanding and remembrance of God’s Word in Scripture so that we keep it always before us and in our hearts. We awaken each day renewed in the purpose of following our Lord as he would have it for us.
We believe so deeply in these things that are written by God in His Holy Scriptures that we have this amazing living hope in the promise of life after death and because of it, we live our lives in the way Jesus showed us in his own life, one in which we love God and others as we would have it for ourselves.
We strive for a life without always doing the wrong things that once made us so unhappy. In fact, now we take great joy and happiness in helping others and we always remember that Jesus Christ did that for us. We want to please our God and His Son Jesus Christ because of our love for him and the love he has for us and the life he gave on our behalf.
What is the reason for our hope?
It is because we believe that God is (by the evidence of his creation all around us here on earth and in the sky above) and that He sent us His only Begotten Son so that through Him we might not perish but have eternal life. By raising His son from the dead, He has promised us that we will receive that same resurrection from the dead with a glorified spiritual body like our Lord Jesus Christ has and we have faith in him and have a lively hope in that promise.
God’s Holy Scriptures show us all the things that he promised in the long ago past happened just as he said it would and that gives us great confidence that God does what he says he’ll do and that gives us assurance he will do everything he’s promised to us in the future. That’s our hope.
What do we say when someone asks us why we act the way we do?
Our Lord taught us to love our Heavenly Father with all our heart, mind and soul and to love others as we would have it for ourselves. Everything flows from these two things.
With this mindset in our hearts, we are humble (thinking of ourselves less), charitable (giving of ourselves and our things to meet the needs of others – this is the spirit of loving someone as we would have it for ourselves), courteous (not speaking evil of anyone and avoid quarreling), compassionate hearts, patient, kind, forgiving, merciful and loving toward everyone, even those that oppose us and God (because we are so sure about our identity and our place with God, we can do this).
With this way of living, we can be that “burning bush” that drew Moses so that God could speak with him. We can use the way we act to attract people to hearing God’s good news and for them to believe.
We know that our God doesn’t want anyone to perish but for everyone to believe and have eternal life and for those that don’t know of God, we are to share with them the new way to live and by living in that way ourselves, we can encourage them to believe. We speak the truth of God’s Word in love to others so that they might see how they can change and live their lives in a way pleasing to God as well.
Why do we have faith and hope in God?
Because we are convinced that there is only one God as described in the bible as evidenced by the creation we see all around us. We choose to believe that the Holy Scriptures are the very words of God to us. God’s Holy Scriptures tell us of His love for us and that He would and did send his only Son, Jesus Christ, to die to redeem us from our fallen natures and if we can find a way to believe that in our hearts, we will be saved and we will receive the promise of a new kind of body that doesn’t die. This belief causes us to repent from doing the wrong things and to live a brand new life doing the right things. So we have faith in God for what he has done and hope in what He’s promised us.