“But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (1 Pet. 3:15-17). Once we have truly set Christ as Lord in our hearts, we then need to turn to the preparation for answering those who asks us why we believe as we do.

Here we encounter a decisive issue. What we prepare will determine how we respond, and we need to be prepared. No one will be influenced to follow Christ if he asks a Christian who cannot tell him why he believes what he does. Ill preparation suggests that it really doesn’t matter what we believe. No Christian by definition can hold to such a tenet. Christianity is a faith, and faith means that we believe something. If we do not believe anything, then we do not adhere to a faith and we are not Christians. And whatever that faith is that defines who we are is what we are to defend.

The above paragraph is substantiated by what the prophet Isaiah wrote in the eighth century B.C: “If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all” (Isa. 7:9). If we do not stand firm in whatever the Christian faith is, we shall not stand at all. And if we stand firm in the faith, we have to know what that faith is. If we know what it is, and we know it well, then we shall be prepared to give an answer to those who ask us.

How can we know what that faith is so that we may stand firm in it and so that we may be able to give an answer to everyone who asks us? It is simplistic to tell someone to read the Bible. The Bible is a lengthy document of sixty-six books, and people have been known to become lost in a maze of genealogies, histories, legal codes, letters, devotional works, apocalyptical visions, and prophecies not written systematically.

The preparation for giving an answer was never intended to be only a personal but also a communal matter. That is precisely why God gave us the church and gave us a teaching ministry (SeeEph. 4:1-16). Evangelists, pastors, and teachers have the responsibility to set forth the basics of the Christian faith in clear and simple fashion so that Christians may be built up and equipped to carry on their personal ministries. However, Christians should always search the Scriptures to see if what was taught them is to be found in God’s word (Acts 17:11). They should also search through creeds and confessions of the church from earliest times to now to acquaint themselves with the efforts and work of scholars through the years, for these creeds and confessions are amazingly consistent with one another and many set forth basic truths in simple and systematic order. The responsibility for preparation is incumbent on every Christian, but it is a journey that we should never undertake alone, but always with other Christians, both those living today and those who have passed on and left us a rich heritage.