I hope, I hope

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear....” (1 Peter:3:15But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
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“To give ‘a reason for thehope that is in you’ is not at all the same thing as convincing by reasonable argument why that hope is in us. The work of the Spirit of God in us transcends reason, but never contradicts it, and when a Christian says ‘the reason I am so-and-so is because I have received the Holy Spirit,’ or, ‘I have received from God something which has made this possible,’ it does not contradict reason, it transcends it, and is an answer concerning the hope that is in you. The line we are continually apt to be caught by is that of argumentative reasoning out why we are what we are; we can never do that , but we can always say why the hope is in us.

Reason is the faculty of mind by which man draws conclusions. Every man is always striving after a true expression of what he is. When a man is born again his personality becomes alive to God as the Source of inspiration. Paul’s words ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ liveth in me’ are the expression of the only worthy rationalism . . . .

As long as we use the image of our own salvation, our experience, the image of our feelings, or answers to prayer, we shall never begin to understand what Paul meant when he said ‘Christ lives in me.’ The exercise of man’s essential reason is drawing on God as the Source of life.”

----Oswald Chambers, “The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers,” Discovery House Publishers, 2000, p. 451-52