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15th May 2025
ThursdayReflection
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'John Piper'
'Founder & Teacher, Desiring God'
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"Why Would the World Ask About Your Hope?"
Peter tells us,
"Always be prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you"
..... 1 Peter 3 v15
He doesn't say that they will ask about our faith.
Or about our doctrine. Or even about our good conduct. They might ask about those things. We want them to.
But Peter is expecting that they will ask about our hope. Why?
Hope is a heartfelt, joyful conviction that our short-term future is governed by an all-caring God, and our long-term future, beyond death, will be happy beyond imagination in the presence of the all-satisfying glory of God.
Why does the world ask about Christian hope?
Peter begins his letter on this note:
"According to [God's] great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead"
1 Peter 1:3
To be born again is to be alive with hope.
Hope is not an add-on to Christian experience.
It is part of the first things. The essential things.
It is a vital component of saving faith, because part of what we believe relates to our future.
Saving faith is the "assurance of things hoped for," and such faith believes that "God is the rewarder of those who seek him"
Hebrews 11:1, 6
The second coming of Jesus in glory is the earnest hope of the believer's heart.
Peter had tasted the glory with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, and he knew it was a foretaste of the second coming:
"We made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ ... we were eyewitnesses of his majesty".
So he was passionate about wakening this hope fully in the beleaguered saints scattered through the empire.
And he explained to the suffering saints that God's purpose in their sorrows is "that the tested genuineness of your faith ... may be found to result in praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ".
Their slander will be replaced with praise, their pain with glory, their shame with honour.
He tells them to hang on with hope for this short life, because soon all will be glorious:
"After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you".
Now, Tomorrow, Forever
So Peter urges the believers, with their blood-bought hope, to do the humanly impossible:
"Rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed".
Authentic Christian hope gives rise to joyful fearlessness in the face of human trouble and threats.
It appears that the question about Christians' hope is prompted by their perceived fearlessness.
In Peter's mind this makes perfect sense. Hope is the root of fearlessness.
"It is impossible to be a Christian and to keep on believing that your eternity will be bleak."
Hope is not directly visible.
It is a heartfelt conviction. Only God can see the heart directly.
But when hope produces fearlessness, it is on the way to being visible.
And Peter says that what they ask about is your hope.
Which shows that, in his mind, the Christian life gives the impression to others that we are not hoping in what they are hoping in (security, comfort, approval, wealth, etc.).
They do not know where our fearlessness and our joy in affliction are coming from. But they assume we have a hope different from theirs.
They do not assume we are indifferent to a happy future.
They just don't know what it is.
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This is an edited version.
The full article, and Bible references, is avaiable on request
Scroll down for the continuation of this discussion.
'John Piper'
is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.
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This fearless hope in the God of "great mercy" (1 Peter 1:3) and "all grace"
(1 Peter 5:10) produces a life of overflowing good deeds that even the unbelieving world often finds irresistibly compelling.
If anything competes for prominence with the breath of hope in Peter's letter, it is the wind of good deeds.
These good deeds do not simply refer to a Christian morality that avoids bad behaviours - though Peter regards that as essential:
"The time is past for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry.
Let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler"
Very few people are deeply impressed with a lifestyle that only avoids bad behaviours. This is essential.
But Peter teaches that Christian hope gives rise to overflowing good deeds that go way beyond avoiding bad deeds.
The God who gave us hope did so by "great mercy" and "all grace."
"Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing".
Indeed, as we bless those who revile us, it is possible, Peter says, to do it with joy: "Rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings".
This radically counterintuitive behaviour is possible because of hope - specifically, hope in a Christ who "suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God".
He bought our hope, and he modelled its fruit.
The triple goal in such good deeds is to silence ignorance, shame slanderers, and convert them all.
This is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.
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