Witness

I remember being told to go witness when I first started attending church as a middle school student.  Witness was always a verb, as in: go and tell about your faith to someone.  And of course as believers, we are to tell about our faith as God leads. 

But one day I got to thinking about the verse where this concept comes from, Acts 1:8.  The verse is Jesus’ final words to his disciples before he leaves the earth.  And he says that they will be his witnesses wherever they go—to the city, the outlying areas, and even to the ends of the earth.  The interesting thing about the word witness in the Bible is that it is most often used as a noun, not a verb.

Now don’t get me wrong, witnessing, or sharing your faith, can be a great thing.  It can be a verb.  But I think that we have to be witnesses first.  That is, we have to become the ones who have seen and heard the greatness of Jesus Christ.  We become the ones whose lives have been transformed because of our encounter with him.  We become the ones who live out the Christian faith in practical and relevant ways every single day. 

We need to be his witnesses first, and only second can we witness.  It’s like a witness in a court of law.  That person has seen or heard something so important that they are called to testify about it.  First they are a witness, and only second are they called to testify.  You are not to have one without the other.

I wonder in the Christian church if we sometimes have one without the other.  We want to testify without being an actual witness.  We want to talk about our faith more than we want to live it.  But the Bible says that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk, but of power” (1 Cor. 4:20.)

Let’s go out and be his witnesses!