Many Christians struggle with their own testimonies. Our stories are
boring, uninteresting, and mundane—or so it often seems to us. Who would
listen to us even if we did share?
What often qualifies as "interesting" is the sort of thing someone
would write (and read) a book about: ex-felons, ex-addicts,
ex-something-or-others. We are all sinners saved by grace, and yet, as
unclean and broken as we may be, many of us haven't gone a day in our
lives not knowing about God. Often we describe our testimonies in terms
of reshaping or renewing our current faith: we are reminded of the sin
we have, or convicted of the sin we didn't see, and now we can return to
the gospel we've known all our lives. It isn't so much a 180° change as
a couple of degrees at a time.
Always Amazing
We're suckers for big and loud stories—look at the film industry for
evidence—and so we tend to write off anything that doesn't fit that
pattern. We don't volunteer to tell people we grew up in the church and
asked Jesus into our hearts as soon as we learned to speak. Who would
find that story anything but boring?
The solution isn't to seek a more powerful testimony—let's not sin
that grace may abound—but to expand our understanding of what
constitutes a beautiful testimony. We can describe those who grew up in
the church as spared from the horrors of the criminal life, but this
story feels empty. The negation isn't nearly so powerful as the positive
expression: we are saved from the damnation we earned by the great
grace of God's Son, Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Continue at J. F. Arnold
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