07/26/2025
"But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect." 1 Peter 3:14-15
I’m a big fan of superhero movies. It doesn’t matter how cheesy they may be, I just love them! What’s one sequence that we see in every superhero movie? The training montage. The hero of the film doesn’t know how to fight or there’s some power that they haven’t mastered yet, so we watch 10-20 scenes of them training and learning the skills they need for whatever battle they have to face in the last 20 minutes of the movie. Then, they usually end up defeating the villain with this new found skill, the credits roll, you know the drill…
“But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you…”
A big theme of today’s verse is remembering the Lord’s holiness and being prepared to defend the “hope in [us].” This requires us to have a relationship with God and to know Him and His Word. Now, that does not mean that we only read the Bible in order to have a defense like our favorite superhero does in a movie. We are reading and studying Scripture to know Christ! If we have a strong relationship with Him, and we are studying to know Him, then we will naturally have that defense if we face those that oppose our faith.
But then, the hardest part of this whole thing: “...yet do it with gentleness and respect.”
Hold up… Our faith, the TRUE faith, is being attacked, and we have to be gentle and respectful?! Yep, that’s exactly what it says. When Paul wrote to Timothy about false teachers, he encouraged him to instruct them gently “in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth.” (2 Timothy 2:24-26)
When we are interacting with those that are against the gospel, we are told to be gentle and respectful because defending our faith is supposed to be an opportunity to share it with the person opposing it. When we are showing the truth of the gospel, that means that we are sharing the gospel. If we defend our faith with anger and hatred in our hearts, that can push people away from it. And, the Lord promises in these verses that if we suffer well for the sake of righteousness, we will be blessed! This might not be an earthly blessing, but an eternal one waiting for us after this finite life. That doesn’t make the suffering any less difficult, but it does make us remember that the hope we have in our Heavenly Father is so much greater than any suffering we might endure.
So, yes, defend your faith today if the need arises, but remember that the Savior we follow stood on the truth with love, respect, and gentleness. We are called to do the same.
