“Instead, you must worship Christ as Lord of your life. And if someone asks about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it. But do this in a gentle and respectful way. Keep your conscience clear. Then if people speak against you, they will be ashamed when they see what a good life you live because you belong to Christ. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing good, if that is what God wants, than to suffer for doing wrong!”
Recall that in yesterday’s post, Peter told us to ignore the fears and threats of this world. If we do that, we’ll have a lot more time on our hands and room in our minds for other things. Today’s verses help us know where to direct our attention: worship of Jesus. Since you’ll be using your emotional energy to focus on the hope that Jesus offers you, you will be able to easily talk about it with anyone who asks.
Now everybody come in real close for a team huddle here, because this next point is critically important and we generally are horrible at this. Ready? When you are telling people about Jesus, don’t be obnoxious about it. Just be gentle and respectful, even when people are atheists or pagans or worship their dead Aunt Sally. It’s okay just to talk about your own spiritual life without being argumentative or rude. If people attack you (and you therefore suffer) because you are defensive and angry in “sharing the Gospel,” then you really won’t get any sympathy. If you suffer for doing good, serving people no one else wants to be caught dead with, then God is perfectly okay with that.
Here’s your freedom for today: God gives you permission to be gentle and kind. In our day and age, we need permission for such things because they seem so unconventional. But as we discussed when we studied Galatians 5, gentleness and kindness are evidences of the work of the Holy Spirit. You don’t need to hit anybody over the head with a Bible (old Sunday school joke: the truth hurts!). You get to just worship Jesus and tell anyone who wants to know about your experience. You can also listen to their views as well. Respectfully listen. It is not a failure of evangelism if they walk away from that conversation with only a seed planted instead of a giant oak tree fully grown.