Now, Here’s a Way to Tell it – a continuation of “You Have a Testimony”
by Drew Narmour
A few weeks ago I wrote about how every Christian has a testimony, even if they’ve never thought of it that way. Naturally, the next questions are when to use it and how can we shape it into something you can use.
The most obvious reason to spend time piecing together your testimony is that it is a great evangelistic tool. You can have a genuinely worthwhile conversation with a skeptical colleague about the origins of the universe, the basis for morality, the authenticity of Scripture. But every one of them can be deflected with a counterargument, however good or bad that argument might be. What no one can do is produce evidence that your experience of God isn’t real. A personal account is harder to dismiss, not because it settles every question, but because it isn’t a position to argue against.
But evangelism isn’t the only reason. Paul consistently returns to the idea that believers need to regular encouragement (Rom. 1:11-12; 1 Thess. 3:6-7; Heb. 10:24-25). But how do we do this? Just constantly poke your head into a colleague’s office and say, “hey Sarah, you got this!” Probably not. One of the most effective ways we can encourage one another is by simply telling fellow believers what God has done and is doing in our lives.
The working world is relentlessly good at narrowing your vision down to what is immediately in front of you: the deadline, the difficult client, the meeting that should have been an email. It crowds out the larger story. Hearing what God has done in someone’s life has a way of restoring perspective, of reminding us that God is actively working in and ruling over all of it (Rom. 8:28; Phil 1:6; Col 1:17).
This brings us to the practical question of how to actually piece our testimony together. Most people default to a purely chronological approach by sharing the events of their life before, the turning point, and life after. That’s not wrong, but I’d like to suggest a slightly different set of questions. Rather than asking what happened in your life, ask how you saw God.
1. What did you misunderstand about God before the gospel became real to you? What was the distorted picture of him that you lived by?
2. What was it about the glory of Christ that broke that picture apart and drew you to him?
3. How do you relate to God differently now that you understand, more truly, who he is?
The reason this framing works better in practice is that distorted views of God are far more universal than the details of our lives. The person who saw God as a distant judge keeping score. The one who assumed grace was available to everyone except them. The one who treated faith as fire insurance rather than a relationship. Those misunderstandings are everywhere. When your testimony is built around your view of God rather than just what happened to you, it gives other people something to locate themselves in.
Notice that none of these questions are really about you. They are about who God is and what it means to actually know him. That is what your testimony is building toward. The events of your life are just the setting. When you share it that way, you are not asking someone to relate to your circumstances. You are pointing them toward a God who is the same regardless of circumstances.