You Will Be My Witnesses
This week, Ed Dobson, my former pastor, has been posting updates about the sermon he’ll be preaching at Mars Hill Bible Church on Sunday. His topic is witnessing. As one Facebook friend suggested, Ed’s name is synonymous with the subject. Mine is not. For years I felt guilty about my inability to learn and use all the helpful witnessing tools that have been promoted and presented at various churches, camps, and conferences I have attended.
Then this morning, when my devotional reading was on the same subject (see Acts:1:1-8), I decided it would be a good time to post an excerpt from my book that tells how I finally resolved (for the most part) my guilt by realizing that it was based on years of faulty exposition (not by Ed) of the word witness.
Whenever I sit down in front of my computer to write, I wish I could make my words sound like those of Henri Nouwen or Anne Lamott or Philip Yancey. They don’t. If anything, my words sound more like those of an impatient preacher. I want to be soothing, not scathing; amusing, not accusing; inspiring, not indicting. Sometimes I wonder if the prophet Jeremiah wanted to write like David, the singer and songwriter, or like Moses, the historian. Or was he content to speak in the style and for the purpose that God assigned him, even though his message was unpopular?Also see “Just Be Yourself.”
My failed attempts to use someone else’s voice when I write is similar to what happens when we try to use someone else’s story to witness. To be an effective witness for God we cannot use someone else’s voice or talent or experience. Being a witness is telling others the truth about myself and my personal encounter with God; it’s not memorizing the plan of salvation so that I can explain it to strangers. Being a witness means being able to say “I once was,” but now “I am.” In the words of the hymn writer, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
One summer I worked at a Christian camp in upstate New York, and one of our duties was to go to a nearby resort town and do street evangelism. The idea of stopping total strangers on the street and “witnessing” to them about God seemed phony to me. And it was. To be a witness a person has to have seen or experienced something. The Bible is clear about that. One of the Ten Commandments is “do not bear false witness.” Standing on those lakeside streets, I felt like a false witness—even though I was a Christian who believed God, did not deny my sinfulness, and gratefully trusted Christ for forgiveness.
But I did not have the kind of dramatic conversion experience that I thought was needed to make a convincing case for God. I became a Christian at age eight—before sin had a chance to reach the fullness of its ugly potential in my life; the “was but am” aspect of my testimony was not at all compelling.
Since then I have learned that my testimony doesn’t have to be dramatic. My witness is the simple story of my life. It’s my first-hand account of how God is taking the “me” that he created and is gently and lovingly transforming and restoring it to its full potential for his glory. Slowly but surely he is turning me from a clump of clay to a work of art.
The Greek word translated “workmanship” in Ephesians 2:10 is poiema, from which we get the English word poem. This means that we are God’s poem, his artistic expression. We are God’s good work!
I still feel some residual guilt from those early failed witnessing attempts. But, looking back, I believe that I was being required to do something I was not equipped to do. I was being sent to “go, tell” before doing the prerequisite “come, follow.” I had not yet seen what God had done, was doing, and could do in my life. I didn’t realize that I had not simply been saved from the consequences of sin but also saved for the cause of righteousness. —adapted from Above All, Love
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