Good morning, everyone. It's always so good to be in the house of the Lord, to be with his people. It's a delight, and it's a joy, especially in this season of these winter months when we're cooped up a little bit on the inside, and we're able to come out and worship the Lord. Excitingly, we are continuing in our study of 1 Peter. I'd like you to turn there with me to 1 Peter 3 this morning. As we look at verses 12 through 16, following as I read from the New King James translation of the scriptures. So 1 Peter 3, verses 12 through 16, following as I read. Verse 12, here we go. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayers. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. And who is he who will harm you if you become followers of what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you are blessed. And do not be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled, but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts. And always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. Having a good conscience that when they defame you as evil doers. Those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together as we begin. Our father. You are so great and full of glory. And we praise you that we have this privilege to open your Holy Word. Study it together. to exalt the name of Jesus through it, to worship you in our hearts, to magnify your holy name. We praise you, Father, that you've given us these words of life. We pray your blessing as we break them and feast upon these thoughts, that they would transform and they would change us. Building us like in your image. Bringing us more like you. Thank you Father for your love to us. We give you the praise and the glory in Jesus name, Amen. So the theme of the sermon today is probably slightly off pace. It says every believer in Christ is an apologist. So that probably begs several questions like what does it mean to be an apologist? What does that word mean? And I think we'll be answering that as we work through this passage today, because this 1 Peter 3.15 is kind of the flagship verse that uses that word that is often called apologetics. And we'll see that as it goes. But as we start out, One who defends the faith with words would be an apologist. You defend the faith. That's really the idea of what an apologist is. In a big picture, an apologist would be one who believes that the Christian faith has a rational defense. So I just wanted to start there and at least define the term. But as we work through the scripture, we're gonna flesh it out. I remember when the Ligonier Conference was here, I was able to just sit way up in the back balcony. This place was packed. And the speaker, which we weren't able to hear because in the hallway, the speakers weren't working, as you guys recall. So I had to kind of sneak in and steal a seat, almost no room at all. And it was exciting because that whole conference was about apologetics. And if you talk to your kids that were there, they probably know more about this than what some of us do. Right a lot of good things and the speaker started out right Right where you'd expect them to start right in this verse verse 15 of first Peter all right, so There's a lot of good things, but we're gonna unravel that as we go today We've been working through the book of first Peter for quite a while took a little bit of an interim break from it over the Christmas season to talk about the major themes of Of Christmas, but now we're coming back to it. We started out the beginning of the year. Where we entered into Chapter 3 and as you recall, kind of in the middle of Chapter 2, Peter starts working on specific groups of people. Or how specific groups relate to other groups. He talks about how we should relate to government authorities. He talks to a group who were called servants. And really, he deals with some of those employee-employer relationships. And we all wrestle with those sorts of things, right? We all report to some governing authority. We often have some employer that we're accountable to. Then in chapter three, he addressed a group that not everybody is a part of, but some, husbands and wives. You remember as we started to dig right in after the holidays, we looked at the scriptures not through the lens of what's called evangelical feminism. That's not a political term. It's a hermeneutic, a way of interpreting the scriptures where it sees no differences, right? No roles. Well, we took the scripture at face value and said, you know, the Bible doesn't really teach that there aren't roles between husband and wife. It teaches a complementarianism, that we complement one another. It doesn't teach some form of male domination. The pagans had that. You remember from the history of the Roman Empire, you go back to Julius Caesar about 68 BC. And the pagans had called the patria potestas, where the man had so much authority and power, he could have his wife executed legally. Obviously, Christianity kind of brought an honoring of women. a freeing of women. And as we looked in the text, we realized that yes, there are differences in roles that are ordained of God, but remember it said you are both heirs together of the grace of life. Remember that? That's kind of the idea where we approach the scriptures not putting on glasses that are like modern day glasses and saying, hey, let's just X everything out that we don't like. All right, but we interpreted it in its normal literary sense. It makes sense, it's in a normal way. And really, that's how we approach the Bible in general. Now last week, we went to a broad category. It's where, remember, Peter says, now everybody, he says all of you, I want you to do these things. And he hit us up with some virtues. Remember, the theme of Peter is suffering. He's talking to a church who was in the midst of a global persecution. It just had started. Prior to that time, there were local persecutions. But now, as you recall, the emperors were getting involved. Things were getting difficult for Christians. There was a diaspora, a dispersion. There was suffering going on. In the midst of suffering, Peter says, you're not a victim. You can't, just because you feel you're being persecuted, suddenly start lashing out at people, acting in a way that's not consistent with the Christian faith. And so as you recall, last week, we looked at that text where Peter says, finally, all of you, he says, be of one mind. Have compassion for one another. Love his brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous. These are like five unique words. Hapaxes, hapaxlegomenas, unique words used like one time in the New Testament. Peter uses almost like five. You could argue maybe one he uses is used somewhere else. And he's saying, listen, listen. Don't buy into the world's philosophy that says to be a Christian, and if you really act with the Christian virtues, that you're weak. Sometimes the world teaches that. These ideas are out there. But Peter says, all of you, don't return evil for evil, you recall. Don't return reviling for reviling, seeking revenge. Now, of course, the all, who is that? Who is he elect? Remember back in chapter one of 1 Peter, he addresses this group of people and he says this, Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ to the pilgrims of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father and sanctification of the Spirit for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. These are God's people, right? The ones that Peter addressed were ones who had been redeemed. What does that mean? Purchased from the market of sin and death, the slave market of sin. These are those who had turned to Christ in their conversion. They had repented from dead works and pronounced their faith in Jesus Christ. They had been brought to spiritual life. They'd been regenerated. God, in a supernatural work, when he saves a person, he brings you from death to life. They'd been justified. They'd been adopted. The spirit of adoption was in their heart now, crying, Abba, Father. They had been saved. That's what salvation is, right? Salvation isn't just saying a prayer, walking an aisle. It might be that. But it's Christ in you. It's his work in your life. It's his righteousness imputed to your account. That's what it means to be saved. And these are the ones who Peter addresses. And the context carries on because these are the ones who he says, listen, you are also one who is an apologist for Christ. You're one who defends the faith. You're one who speaks forward the truths that transform the lives of other people. So, you know, you can't be a Christian apologist and not be a Christian, right? You know, you've got to be redeemed. you know, Charles Spurgeon. I'm rereading his biography by Arnold Delamore. It's been 25 years, I think, since I read it last. And he was like a boy of 15 and 16. It happened to be a wintry day. He was in this small town and it was snowing. So his main church was canceled. He walks by, looking for a chapel to attend, finds this little hole in the wall. I guess it was called a Primitive Methodist Church. I don't even know what that is. And there were like 15 people. The pastor was snowed in. And there's an elder who, you know, so listen, you know, they're elders. You gotta be ready to preach the word of God, right? Right? Be instant in season, out of season. There was a guy who, he was instant anyway. And the way Spurgeon describes it, he could bear, you know, he was about as back country as you could be, right? But he spoke the truth of the gospel, power. He said, you must be born again. This is what you need. And Spurgeon was converted that day. He turned to Christ. Oh, he was a good boy in the terms of the world, right? But he hadn't placed faith in Christ as Savior. He hadn't been converted. You know, you can't be a Christian who defends the faith when you're not a Christian. And that's so powerful. This passage is going to be about what a Christian apologist is. And as we look, if you want to turn and kind of glance as we work through this today, look at verse 10 or look at verse 12. Here's where we'll start because a Christian apologist finds comfort and strength and motivation in the fact that God sees them and he hears them. So this is a continuation of, really, last week, where Peter's addressing everyone. He says, hey, everybody, you who are a believer in Christ, this is how a believer ought to live. Not because it's a work of the law. It's because it's a work of the Spirit in your heart, right? The Spirit does a work where you desire to live for Christ. If you're a Christian, there's fruit. There's fruit. You can't be a Christian and there not be some change in your life. It doesn't work. But here's the first part about being an apologist for Christ. He finds comfort and strength in that God sees and hears him. For it says the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayers. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous. This expression conveys the idea that God pays special attention to those who are righteous because of what he's done for them and because they desire to live for him. God watches and he observes in a special way. Yes, God sees everything. He's omniscient. There's nothing he doesn't see and doesn't hear. But this is a special work of his grace on your life. special hand of his providence, God's grace, his favor, it shines on the righteous. So the Christian apologist is aware of this. And this gives us some motivation, right? This gives us some courage. in the face of a world that is not particularly favorable to Christ. Sometimes it's favorable to talk about God, right? You want the dividing line to come up, you mention the name of Jesus. I even saw this in sports. Sometimes I see these Christian athletes and I just love to see these guys speak and praise the Lord and praise the name of Jesus. I saw an article where, oh, we want to censor some of this, because these guys are getting up after they win the game or they don't win the game, and they say, I just want to give the Lord Jesus Christ glory and honor, right? Well, there's a lot of Godfians out there, right? A lot of religious people. But they haven't tasted of the heavenly calling. So the Christian apologist is first of all aware of this grace of God, God's grace in our lives. The Christian apologist has an affinity toward the way of peace. Look at verse 13. Here Peter kind of keeps extrapolating things. He says, and who is he who will harm you if you become followers of what is good? Now this isn't quite like it says in Romans where You know, there's a passage in Romans where Paul's arguing and says, nothing, you know, hey, who will harm you in that sense? It's saying, listen, brothers and sisters, we have to have some measure of confidence in this world that by living righteously for Christ through his power, through his grace, that there's a measure of peace in walking in that way. For the most part, for the most part, if we walk for the Lord in this world, we're not really persecuted. That's not the majority of our life, right? The apostles, as they interacted with society, right? And were enjoying the benefits of being a good neighbor. People see that in the world. Not everybody sees it. But as we interact with the world, right, as we interact with one another, there is an idea that God would in generally protect us through the next, let me, it's implied that there might be those who do suffer for righteousness' sake, and while that's true, that the Savior was persecuted by wicked people, though his life was wholly spent in doing good, it's true that the apostles were put to death, Though following this example, it is true that good people who have often suffered persecution, though laboring to do good, it is still true that the general way of life is that integrity and benevolence conduces to safety even in a wicked world. Our goal with the world is not so adversarial. Do you see the lost as your enemy? Or do you have compassion for them as those who need Christ? Sometimes I think this whole area of apologetics gets very adversarial very quickly. Let's have an argument. Let's win it. All right, let me beat you over the head with my Christian argument. And at the end of the day, I'm not sure we've really succeeded in the cause of Christ being promoted. The Christian apologist is even blessed in suffering persecution. Verse 14, it says this, but even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you are blessed. You're blessed. For the most part, we have very peaceful lives, I think. I mean, there is a periodic season where, standing for the faith, we receive some sort of disparaging remark. It's very small. Isn't it? How many of you have been trotted off to jail recently because of your faith? Is that happening? It could, I suppose. Probably not. For the most part, we have a relatively peaceful life. But even if we are persecuted, even if we suffer for righteousness sake, we're blessed. Verse 14. Not with the same blessing that is back in verse nine where, remember from last week, Peter was using that word that he was blessed by good words from others and would bless others with good words. This is the blessing of the Beatitudes, the Makarios. It's not that we find positive enjoyment in being persecuted. but that we regard it as a blessed condition that's favorable to our salvation. It increases our faith, okay? The Christian apologist is blessed even when suffering persecution. Furthermore, the Christian apologist is not afraid or troubled about threats or words spoken against the truth. This is in verse 14, we see as we continue, it says, but even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you are blessed. And do not be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled. This comes from Isaiah. It's like Peter's quoting a passage from the Old Testament in Isaiah, where it was so easy for Isaiah to catch on to the winds of the day and believe the conspiracy theories that were out there. Basically, God had said, listen, Assyria is gonna come and they're gonna conquer. Don't listen to what other. talking heads are saying about how it's going to prosper and be good. Don't buy into their conspiracies. He says, I want you to listen to me and what I have to say. It comes from a passage in Isaiah which is almost similar to the New Testament quote where it says, do not say a conspiracy concerning all this that this people call a conspiracy, nor be afraid of their threats, Isaiah 8, 12. The Lord of hosts, him you shall hollow, let him be your fear, let him be your dread. You see, the thing that we should be more concerned about are not the opposing threats or the opposing arguments, but we should be more concerned about honoring the word of the Lord. That gives us strength, that gives us courage. There are a lot of statements that are made that are against the Christian faith. Sometimes we wonder, how do we answer them? There are statements that, sometimes they're gotcha statements that individuals will make. And we can have a tendency, I think, to cower, to fear. I'm not sure Christianity has an answer for this. I don't know if that's something you've ever struggled with. But I've struggled with it. When I grew up as a young man, it was kind of in that era where, you know, we all had our own little personal computers. It was right when they were coming on the scene. And I remember almost worshiping what you'd call science. Like, we're going to find all the answers to all the problems in the world. So I really elevated the thinking of certain people who were scientists or engineers or whatever like that, that, oh, they have the answers. And so when I was affronted by people of repute, particularly in the scientific community, that didn't agree with the Christian faith, it was hard for me. I respected them so much. The words that they said, it was almost like, oh, I'm not sure I can really believe. We place a lot of value sometimes on the opinions of others. The writer here, he says, don't be afraid of threats, don't be troubled. Going back to Isaiah, don't listen to the conspiracies. Listen, set your mind on the things of the Lord. And here we come to verse 15, and this is kind of the focal point of today, all right? We've been building up to it. The writer here, Peter, says, sanctify the Lord in your hearts. Set him apart. Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and in fear. Sanctify the Lord in your hearts, he's repeating Isaiah. He says, listen, don't be afraid or intimidated by others. Value God and his word and his way more. Place a higher value on him, a higher value on his word. Don't be so easily swayed by those who are so convincing, so convincing. You know, and I think Mike knows this guy, and I know Pastor Dickey, there was one of the, his name's Edgar Andrews. Remember Mike, that book, I think you gave it to me some years ago, or Randy did, Who Made God? And Edgar Andrews went toe-to-toe with Richard Dawkins in a debate. Richard Dawkins is one of these scientists who promotes this idea called New Atheism. And he parades it just like an evangelical would parade Christianity. So they're selling and marketing their ideas, and they use all the techniques that a Christian would in promoting the faith. And there's, I think, a time in my life where I would hear these people And I would think, boy, those arguments, they sound pretty good. Those conspiracies, those words that they're saying. And there is a time, listen, where we set apart the word of God. God's word becomes more to us. His way becomes more to us. We trust in Him. We sanctify the Lord in our hearts. We put Him first. We seek what He seeks. We set Him before all things. All things. We sanctify. This is what the Christian apologist does. He starts and he sanctifies the Lord in his or her heart. Notice in verse 15 it says, but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready. Always be ready. The Christian apologists must be prepared to give a defense. Not that being ready means you're, you know, it kind of has this term alertness, right? It doesn't mean you don't sleep or anything like that. It means that you're sober and vigilant, that you're anticipating. that there is gonna be opposition to the Christian faith. You anticipate some of the questions that might come. I don't know if you've had dialogue before and you've had to say, oh, let me go back to the drawing board. You get a question brought to you and you don't really know what the answer is. There's a lot of good ones. Just spend a little bit of time talking to teenagers, right? Just spend a little bit of time. They have some of the best questions. Don't squash it, right? But here we have to find some of those answers. We have to be ready. I think one of the biggest frustrations I had when I was younger was when I'd come with a question and it would just kind of get blown off. Like, oh no, what are you asking that for? I had some really big questions about the faith, right? I know my dad and mom didn't know all of these answers, and I surely don't. Sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board, right? We have to say, I need to get ready for this. But are we also spiritually ready? Somebody asks a question of us in the public forum or at work. Are we able to respond? Are we willing to put our neck out there, if you will? Are you willing to identify with Christ to speak a word of truth? That's part of being prepared and being ready. Sanctify the Lord in your hearts and be ready. To do what? To give a defense. A Christian apologist is able and willing to defend the faith. And this is the word for apologist, right here. When it says, be ready to give a defense. This idea is where a whole discipline evolved from in the Christian faith, where an individual works on arguments, if you will, to counter another set of arguments to speak the truth. And so apologetics has become a discipline of sorts, a discipline of study. Sometimes there's a class in Bible college or seminary, right? Isn't the context so a little bit less than that, maybe more evangelistic? Notice the text in 1 Peter, it's like, you should always be ready to give a defense. And I think that that's the case with any type of conversation that we have with others. It's not just, hey, we're defending the faith, we're fighting a battle, we're gonna knock you down, drag you out, have a fight over this. The purpose is really evangelical. The purpose is to bring the gospel forward, to preach Christ, Him crucified. So there's a lot of overlap. I think we apologize, if you want to use that word, to evangelize. Those things go together. Academia kind of takes over, and this is something we don't want in the church. There is a tendency in Christian thought to become so academic, putting thoughts so far out there that they're just gone from the common person, right? There are theories on apologetics that sometimes you'll have a person, and I'm a diehard presuppositionalist, and I'm a diehard this, and they've forgotten the big purpose, right? By the time they beat each other over the head over their theories, no, we don't want to be an elitist, I don't know what you call it, but I don't know where to go with this, an intellectual echo chamber. Listen, we want to speak the truth, come down to the common man, right? It doesn't do us any good if we are just pilfering little theories back and forth as Christians in the coffee shop, right? Our arguments have to come down to the common man. You don't have to have a PhD to argue and defend the truths of Christ. And we're obsessed with this. Christianity is obsessed with I don't know how you say it, but in higher education sometimes I think we just lose track. We miss the purpose. We're obsessed with sometimes intellectualism and advanced degrees to the point where we forget what the mission is all about. Don't lose sight of the mission. Yeah, I know some of us are gonna be more affiliated with like bookish sorts of things, right? It's just the way we're made. But Christian apologetics is something that all the people of God who are living rightly practice, not just some group of scholars hidden off in a camp by themselves. There were apologists in the early church. A lot of them. Under 165 AD, there was one Justin Martyr. He argued for toleration, or he argued, I'm sorry, that Christians were being called the immoral ones because they did not conform to the norms of society. They were considered atheists and even cannibals, and he said, no wait, Christians are actually good neighbors. There was one named Athenagoras, 177 AD. He argued for toleration on the grounds that the empire had already had a wide variety of religious views, and that the Christians had high morals, condemning abortion, infanticide, and the gladiatorial games. He was quoted as saying, how can we possibly kill anyone when we cannot even look on, lest we are polluted with the guilt of murder and sacrilege? How can we possibly kill anyone, we who call those women murderers who take drugs to induce an abortion, we who say they will have to give an account before God one day? It's Athenagoras, 177 AD. There were lots of Christian apologists. This has been something through the ages. There's always been issues that have come and confronted the church. These are the things that our children bring to us, our grandchildren, right? They have questions, questions of science and faith. I remember one lady came up to me some years ago and said, I was teaching at a Christian school, teaching creation, okay, and she said, well, I believe in science. You know, you're teaching creation. I believe in science. Okay? Are the two somehow mutually exclusive? Something to think about, right? Our children live in a society that looks at science and holds it up as if it were the God. It's called scientism. sometimes worshiping it for all the answers. Look at where some of these think tank people are heading. Elon Musk, he's working into this area of transhumanism, hooking machine to people, wiring the minds. We're in a world that has ethical questions that are extremely complicated. Genetic engineering, animal-human hybridization. We have things that we haven't even thought about as Christians that our children are gonna deal with. And they're gonna have to think about it. And there were those who are gonna take and they're gonna say, listen, how does your faith stand up to this? Right? The Bible. That's one of the big questions people always have. How do you believe the Bible is true? Why do you believe that? Tack it. There are some other areas. Well, we brought up a few, the abortion issue, euthanasia, just the issue of good and evil. I have kids that, again, we have a very big family with lots of different birds, love them. They throw some questions at me that are very difficult. Good and evil, how can God be an omnibenevolent God and yet be omnipotent and there exist evil? It's actually a very good question. What do you say? Thought about that? Miracles. Do you believe in miracles? Hmm. What about just truth? My truth? You hear that all the time nowadays. It's my truth. No, truth is truth, right? Truth is a big theory that actually ties everything we have with Christianity together. Truth is what's real. It corresponds to what's real. Christianity is real. It's real. It's true. It's history. It's reality. So there are all these issues, right? We live in a world where people will have questions. Now even if you're the best arguer that's out there, even if your arguments are just impeccable and fail safe so you think, you're never gonna argue somebody successfully to Christ. Do you know that? Do you know that God in his mercy has to intervene? You can't take a dark soul that's lost in sin and bring it to him. Christ must do that. He's gotta draw the sinner through the word of God. But it doesn't mean that Christianity is not rational and reasonable. And that's the next point. A Christian apologist gives a defense, but look at verse 15, it says, not only does he or she give a defense, who asks you, but you give a reason. You give a reason, verse 15. That's a word that's roughly equivalent to the word for logos, ordered rational thought. Christianity is reasonable and it's rational. It's not a made up story. You know, This is something for the kids to think about, okay? So if you were writing a comic book, right? Say you wrote a comic book, you did it for school, whatever, and you write this tremendous backstory, the history of this superhero that you're writing about, and he comes, you know that that's fiction, right? You write it, and that's fiction. It doesn't make it true just because you want it to be true. You might write a fictional comic and say, man, I wish this were true, but it's not. You can't make something true just by having faith in it. That's not how faith works. That's called fideism. Faith in faith itself doesn't produce anything. And the world kind of thinks that way. It says, listen, if you have enough faith, you can just make it happen. But the faith that we have in Christianity is founded on the truths of the gospel, the truths of history, the truths of reality. We don't believe in a Bible that's just a comic book that somebody wrote centuries ago. Peter addressed this in his second epistle. Listen to his words. He said, listen, we don't follow cunningly devised fables when we make known to you the power of God and the coming of our Lord. We were eyewitnesses of his majesty. You don't just make up a story and then say, hey, I believe this, this is the truth. There are religions that have done that. You realize that Mormonism is like that. The Book of Mormon is a book of fiction. It doesn't even have a shred of historical evidence supporting it. Not one bit. We can't just make something up and then say this is what we believe and this is our truth, right? Christianity holds up. It is reasonable and rational. Now there's gonna be individuals who can try to poke holes in it, but the faith holds up. It holds up under the duress of the opposition that's out there. It's real, it's true. It proceeds beyond just an academic hope, of course, it proceeds into the hope. Ultimately, Christian faith is not something that's just a bunch of arguments. It's faith in God, it's hope in him, it's hope in a life to come. But notice in verse 15, the Christian apologist proceeds in meekness and in fear. It says, Sanctify the Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear, okay? So what does that mean? Well, this is our approach to others. The debate structure that we see out there is fallen and faulty. These ideas of debates. A debate can be done properly, but it rarely results in positive fruit. Both are still convinced of their own side. We used to do this in school some years ago. The upper echelon of this particular school I was teaching at, there was a thing called rhetoric. and rhetoric was how to debate well, okay? And so you'd have structured debates where kids would, you know, throw haymakers at each other, not logical fallacies, right? How many times have you had a really good debate with somebody that's ended well in the public sphere recently? I don't know if we can debate well. Do you realize that, especially when it comes to political opposition sides, both sides thinks that the other is absolutely evil? You realize that? They think that the other side is evil. You know that that's not true. You know what that does? That shuts the conversation down completely. It shuts it down. If you believe that, if you have that adversarial view, you're not gonna have a conversation. It just won't happen. The Christian apologist proceeds in meekness and in fear. We're not looking just to win an argument. We're looking to win a soul. We're looking to approach someone in humility. We want to have that next conversation. We don't want to cut it off for good. Truncate it. A Christian apologist has a clean conscience. This is verse 16. It says, having a good conscience that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed. This is our response. This is more about less of what we say and more of what we do, how we respond. And we can have our arguments laid out like ducks in a row. and our whole purpose for defending the Christian faith is to win. Win what? Win what? To be right? No. To be right? At the end of the day, even if there's some measure of disagreement, it's that they're going to be ashamed in the day of Christ, right? Because you held in your conduct faithfully. You responded correctly. Every believer in Christ is some sort of a Christian apologist, or should be, right? What if you're not? What if you're not? What if your life is just not a reflection of what Christ is? You're in the workplace, you're at home, whatever. The reason you can't give a response is because you're not ready. Because your soul is darkening the hallways of things it ought not. You know, in the end of the day, The faith is not just a bunch of facts. It's pursuant of a life that reflects the truths of the gospel. If you go back a few chapters, remember how it says, it talks about an unbelieving wife who's with an unsaved man and it says, you know, just through your godly conduct, don't even say words, right? Sometimes it's not how we or what we say, it's what we do that has such a big impact on others. We can't put a soapbox up at our workplace. We can't start preaching every day in the workplace. But when God opens a door of utterance, right? When he brings somebody in your family and there's an opportunity, a window that opens, we need to be ready to respond to that. Being an apologist is not An academic pursuit, it's not a bunch of facts. It's just simply the way of the cross, right? This is just the way that God would have us to be. It's how we ought to live in the world, right? Live in our families. So thankful for Peter. You know, he starts with people and they're not perfect people. Did you realize that? I think we look at things that way. Like, oh man, Brother Jim, you don't know me. He doesn't start with perfect people. None of this is. But he starts with the redeemed. He starts with the righteous, right? He uses imperfect people often for his greatest glory and good. And I hope and trust that, like you, that I can be an apologist, right, in the workplace. I hope that you are, too. Not just the workplace, but wherever God takes us in our sphere. Let's pray today. Thank you, Father. Sometimes we are encountered with passages of scripture that can be very convicting, and sometimes we don't even know how to respond. Maybe, Lord, you can help us to change in our views, to not be afraid to speak up for you. Help us to maybe understand more about some of the the haymakers that the enemy throws at us. And just help us to live for you and be a light for you. Thank you, Father, for just your people here. And what a blessing each and every one is. I pray, Father, for the growth that comes through the grace of God in this congregation, that we would be a sweet savor to you of righteousness. And we'd be doing the work that, not the work to get some sort of signal to others of some virtue, but that we would just truly be doing your work of grace. Thank you, Father, that you give us breath to breathe. And while we have that breath, we pray that we would use our words for your glory. In the name of Christ, amen.