“The Missing Ingredient” (Part Three)

This week we are considering the desperate need for hope among the people of God. Monday we tried to clarify what hope is and what it is not. Yesterday, we look at where hope is found. Today we consider why it is important …

Why Does It Matter? (1 Peter 3:15)

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…

So often, I have heard this verse as a justification for the need of evangelistic training and so forth, so that we are “ready to give an answer…” But this is not about evangelism, it is about hope! Notice the progression of ideas:

If we have hope;

Then they can see that hope;

They ask for the reason for our hope;

We are ready to answer them by speaking of Christ.

But the key is this: unless our lives are characterized by a true, real, living, confident hope, the trigger is never pulled—and no one ever asks. Without the evidence in our lives that we have hope, though we live in a hopeless world, we don’t show the world that we have anything different from the despair they already have.

In this regard, hope is not only the missing ingredient in our living and our attitudes—it is also the missing catalyst for evangelism. In a world of hopelessness, do our conversations and actions mark us as any different than the unredeemed world around us, or are they characterized by hope? I am convinced that, without hope, we will never be fully effective in impacting the world for Christ—for He is “Christ in us, the hope of glory…”.