I recently stumbled across an article at The Gospel Coalition that caught my attention. The article, titled “The Increasing Value of Christian Testimonies”, resonated. In fact, I make similar claims in my Christian missions courses at the seminary where I teach.
The personal testimony is becoming more important. Perhaps it is fair to say it never stopped being important, but shifts in the majority culture and worldview around most Western Christians reveal its real significance to gospel ministry.
Yet, while I am a proponent of teaching people about the importance of their testimony, we must carve out a better understanding of the whole enterprise. There is also a good deal of confusion surrounding the personal testimony and its relationship to evangelism and discipleship.
If it is so important, where does it fit? Let’s look at a few important points concerning the role of the personal testimony in gospel ministry.
Your personal testimony is not evangelism.
First, a testimony is not the same thing as evangelism. Now, you may share your testimony as part of a larger conversation that is an evangelistic encounter. Or, you can structure your testimony in such a way that it includes evangelism. However, the sheer act of telling your story about how Christ has saved you is not automatically evangelism.
Frankly, telling people about your life is not the same as telling them the gospel. It’s pretty common to hear well-meaning calls to evangelism in churches that equate telling someone your story with the evangelistic act of proclaiming the gospel. In most instances, it is better to consider your personal testimony as a pre-evangelistic tool that sets the stage for the gospel.
And here is why…
Evangelism is about the person and work of Christ.
Evangelism is the act of proclaiming the gospel to someone who has not heard or accepted it, and the gospel is not about you. The gospel is the good news of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. For a conversation to be evangelistic, it must include the basic tenets of the gospel message. In Acts 4, Peter testified, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). And Jesus, of course, declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:5). Evangelism centers on Jesus, not on us.
Paul grants us a look into his understanding of evangelism when he refers to it as the ministry of reconciliation. The center of evangelism is the person and work of Jesus. Paul writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…” (2 Corinthians 5:17a). The purpose of evangelism is the reconciliation of man to God. Paul continues, “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, ‘Be reconciled to God’” (2 Corinthians 5:20).
Finally, the aim of evangelism is to persuade the hearer this good news is true. Do not miss Paul’s language here. He says that we, as ambassadors, plead on Christ’s behalf. That’s desperate language. It is persuasive language. It is not enough to merely tell people what we think or believe, which is certainly the temptation in a “you do you” world. Paul presses us a step further to plead with our hearers to accept this life-changing news.
Plead does not mean manipulate, of course. Paul is not telling us to trick people into accepting the gospel. He’s not telling us to cajole people with our superior rhetoric. He’s not telling us to use shady emotional tactics to merely elicit some emotional response. He’s telling us to plead. We plead when we understand the importance of our call. We plead when we feel the weight of urgency that surrounds our call. We plead when we care enough about our hearer’s fate that we are not content to let some halfhearted presentation or vague affirmation suffice.
This is one reason our testimony is so important as we engage in gospel ministry. Your testimony is not the gospel message, but it is a clear demonstration of the gospel’s power.
Your testimony is one story of the gospel applied.
Your testimony demonstrates the gospel’s power because it is one example of the gospel applied. Paul introduces the epistle to the Romans with these words: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith” (Romans 1:16-17). That truth has everything to do with your testimony. As a Christian, one brought from death to life, your story reveals the righteousness of God.
Why? Because the righteous live by faith. If you are authentically walking in the power of the Holy Spirit and abiding in Christ, then your testimony reveals one instance of the gospel transforming a soul through its power. It’s not the gospel message, but it is one example of the gospel at work. That is powerful. That is God’s design: to make His disciples into living examples of His power to save.
Luke makes this clear in his account of the earliest days of the church. He writes, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). That word witness, and the word testimony, they’re related to one another. Witnesses provide a testimony.
Most often, I think we’re used to the words witness and testimony in a legal setting today. Witnesses take the stand in a courtroom so they can share what they have seen or experienced to be true. What they share is called their testimony. What is true in the legal courtroom is true in the courtroom of life for the Christian. We are called to the stand as witnesses, so that we can give a testimony of what we have seen and experienced to be true in the gospel.
Conclusion
It’s common nowadays to hear people parrot that misattributed quote, “Preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.”1 Not only is the quote historical fiction, it’s also logically nonsensical. The gospel is news, an explicit message, and it requires intentional communication. No amount of good living or being nice rises to the standard of biblical evangelism. However, a righteous life lived by faith is evidence of the gospel at work.
Knowing how to speak to others about the power of the gospel in your own life, your personal testimony, is an important tool for the disciple as they obey the Great Commission. When we properly place our testimony into our work as ambassadors, it creates a clear and powerful way to demonstrate the validity of our claims about the gospel. The gospel is the very center of evangelism, but our testimonies play a crucial supporting role as we testify to the good news of Jesus with those who have not heard or accepted.
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This quote is often attributed to Francis of Assisi, though he did not say it and very likely disagreed with the idea based on his actual writings and own life. ↩