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Defense

            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, yet with gentleness and reverence; (I Peter 3:15)

Uh oh, there’s that word again: hope. Peter assumes in this verse that there is hope in us. What hope is in you? To hide from hope because having it is the #1 best way to end up being crushed?  What’s worse, Peer tells us we’re to make a defense for our hope. It’s hard to defend something you don’t have (or won’t admit you have.) It’s terrifying to defend something in which you have no trust. How effective a defense are these?

“Um, I don’t.”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“Because…”

“Because that’s what I believe.”

“Because that’s what (or how) I feel”

“Because my parents (pastor, scientist, government official) said so.”

“It’s just what I believe. I can’t help it.”

As pointed out over the past couple of days, hope has to have reasons. Revelation, light, experience and knowledge are the keys to hope. It’s not some pie-in-the-sky emotional thing. It’s not about your feels.

Among my reasons for hope are the fact that I believe that a man-made religion would follow two basic human tendencies:  you either work your way to heaven or everyone gets in. Christianity teaches neither, so it doesn’t follow the pattern of human invention. I have yet to hear of any actual evidence disproving the historical events described in Scripture. They are clearly set in a historical time period. There are theories that suggest they can’t be true. There are claims. Some folks say, “It couldn’t happen,” but that doesn’t prove it didn’t. Some may say that I lack sufficient evidence to prove my claims and therefore no reason to hope, but I have at least as much evidence to support my hope in Christ as they have to support their hope against Christ and they feel justified.

The problem is, the need to defend our hope is more frequent than we tend to realize. Often, we need to defend our hope against ourselves. So one of the questions we need to ask ourselves is what reason we have for any other hope we experience. And I suspect that the answers we find will be along the lines of experience and trust. Both are gained as something is revealed, which takes us back to vision.

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