Read 1 Peter 3:15 and look at this excellent reminder of the hope that lives within us by James Stewart:
What strikes you about the preachers of the New Testament is that they had been swept off their feet and carried away by the glory of the great revelation.
They went to men who had sinned disastrously, and they cried, “Listen! We can tell you of reconciliation and a new beginning.”
They went to others who had nothing but the vaguest fatalism for a religion, and they proclaimed exultingly the love of the eternal Father.
They went to desolate and weak and lonely souls, and with shouts of confidence exclaimed, “Lift up your heads! You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you.”
They went to others shivering in cold terror at the thought of death’s onward inexorable march, and they bade them, “Rejoice! Christ has conquered. Death lies dead!”
It is the same tremendous tidings for which the world is hungry yet… Suppose the apostles were to come back to earth today, and watch us at our weekly worship. Would they recognize the religion in whose dawn they had found it such bliss to be alive?
Might they not have to say, “What has happened? Is this the faith that once stirred the world like a thousand trumpets? Is this the miraculous religion that burnt us with its flame? How can these our descendants repeat with the chill of lackadaisical boredom words that once awakened the dead?
“‘God was incarnate’: can they say that, and not be thrilled and dazzled by the amazement of it?
“‘The Son of God was crucified, dead, and buried’: can they think of that and not be overwhelmed by its awful meaning?
“‘Christ is risen’: can they tell that, and not want to shout for the glory of it?
“Why have they allowed these breathlessly exciting facts to be written in the dull catalogue of common things and suffocated by the formalities of a routine religion? Why seek ye the living among the dead?”