Testify!

The church I grew up in was big on testimony time in the Sunday night service. For the uninitiated, it was a kind of 'open mic' time when people stood to tell what God had done for them or at least what they attributed to God. We heard a lot about near misses while people were driving! I started to think that maybe Christians were really bad drivers. Sometimes the 'testimonies' sounded like plain old bragging to me especially when it focused on the award won by somebody's son!

Sometimes an anecdote provoked laughter as it revealed an ordinary human foible in contrast with God's greatness. Sometimes I was bored by the tales of faith that I heard over and over and over and over until I could almost tell them from memory even though they were not 'my story!' I was often mortified by the displays that people, who seemed so unsophisticated in their faith, ('sophisticated faith' - is that an oxymoron?) attached to their testimonies - tears, laughter, shouts, hands waving in the air, etc. It was hard for me, especially in the self-consciousness of my teen-age years, to see the value in the gritty spirituality that was so raw, so authentic. Today, nearly 50 years of age, I reflect on those services more charitably and with a different kind of appreciation.

While some crazy stuff happened when the mic got handed to people not used to having the floor, there was real value in sharing our spiritual journey, in "letting the redeemed of the Lord say" where and how they were experiencing His grace, His love, and His power in their lives! Occasionally testimony time was GREAT. Yes, there were moments when the message was nearly lost to mangled syntax or obscured by an overflow of uncontrolled emotion. But, there were those moments when the raw witness to God's work was more powerful than a sermon.

Few church meetings stand out in my mind more vividly than those in which a missionary who was serving the Lord in Africa or Asia came to testify about how they were seeing God at work.

We don't do testimony time much anymore, at least in our church services. Perhaps in our desire to avoid hearing Brother Jones long-winded and/or over- wrought presentations we have has robbed ourselves of a valuable part of our communal Christian experience- testimony time. We need a place to tell our stories and we need to hear them told, don't we?

Psalm 107:1-2 says that we must --"Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!His faithful love endures forever.Has the Lord redeemed you?Then speak out! Tell others he has saved you from your enemies."

Let me encourage you, Believer, to take a few moments next week to have a 'testimony time' at your Thanksgiving mealtime. At the Assembly, on Thanksgiving Eve, we're going to have an old-time testimony time, too! We're going to encourage one another, not by letting our light shine, but letting His Light shine through us. We're going to give the glory and honor to Jesus.
When you 'testify' whether in church, at your dinner table, or around the break table at work, do in a way that maximizes the effectiveness of the story.

Take some cues from a guy who's sat through a lot of testimony services.

- Don't brag, give God the glory.
- Don't embellish, let the simple truth bear witness.
- Tell your own story, not a second-hand one you read in a book. Your story is more interesting and compelling even if it is not so dramatic.
- Don't be afraid of real emotion. Tears aren't toxic! Relax.
- Don't preach, let the story pack it's own punch.
- Keep it short and succinct.
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