YOUR TESTIMONY - AMAZING OR ORDINARY?

One of the outreach ministries of our church is the senior’s ministry.  Each month we have a luncheon for the senior members of our church and community at a nominal cost.  Each luncheon includes a short spiritual devotional message as well as a special speaker who addresses different topics of interest to seniors.

Back in the spring I was asked if I would be one of a few who would share my testimony at the September meeting.  In Christian circles when you are asked to share your testimony it’s understood that you will share how you came to faith in Jesus. 

I’ve heard some really wonderful and amazing testimonies in my years as a Christian.  There are the testimonies of prominent people like DL Moody, David Wilkerson, and CS Lewis.  There is the testimony of the man who set out to prove that the resurrection of Jesus was a myth, only to reach the end of that journey with a complete change of heart and a deep faith in the One whose resurrection he first rejected.  There are the testimonies of the drug addicts, prostitutes, and criminals, whose lives were dramatically changed when they came face to face with Jesus. 

Then there is my testimony.  It couldn’t be more ordinary. 

We weren’t a consistent church going family as I was growing up, so when it came to exposure to the gospel of Jesus Christ, I didn’t have a consistent spiritual influence.  My earliest recollection of church was when I’d stayed overnight at an aunts and she took me to Sunday school around the holidays.  Boxes of hard candies were given out and there wasn’t one for me, but thankfully that didn’t have a particularly negative influence. 

When I was in the first and second grade there was a Baptist church on our block.  I remember my mom getting me up to go to Sunday school but I don’t remember my parents going along.  I remember learning to sing “Silent Night” in German for a Christmas program and attending Pioneer Girls (sort of a Christian based Girl Scout group) with my mom helping out.  My fondest memory was of Vacation Bible School and being taught Bible stories on a flannel graph (if you’re familiar with this then you’ll know I must be ancient!).

When we moved to another apartment in the same city I decided that I didn’t just want to go to church because my parents sent me.  I wanted to go to church because God was there.  So began a quest, encouraged by my dad who accompanied me, to find a church we could all attend.  We settled on a Methodist church only a few blocks away, pastored by a wonderful young man who loved Jesus so much that just speaking of Him in a sermon would move him to tears.  His passion struck a chord and we began attending.  We stayed there for some time.  While I loved going to church (and youth group by that time as well), and I loved the pastor’s passion for Jesus, I had no such passion myself.  Church was very much a feel good experience, comfortable, accepting.

More moves, more churches, until I reached the end of my college years.  I sat under the preaching of a godly pastor and his wife, taught Sunday school and sang in the choir, but somehow I still didn’t know Jesus.  I didn’t even know that I didn’t know!  Then, once I married, Jim and I spent years not going to church at all until the Lord began to work in me.

So many people can trace back to THE day when the light of God’s truth dawned.  It was not like that for me.  The only way I could describe it is that God drew me, gently, slowly, with chords of love. Over some time He created a desire to know Him in my heart.  He used the gospel preaching of a radio pastor I listened to on my way to work to help me SEE the truth for the first time and then He opened my previously closed mind to my need for Jesus.  And over time my love for Jesus grew and the entire direction of my life was changed.

I feel a bit weird sharing this testimony.  It doesn’t fit the “pattern” of having a moment when I realized I was a sinner, repented then and there, and was saved, and it isn’t spectacular.  I wasn’t freed from drug abuse or healed of a deadly disease.  No, compared to that kind of testimony, mine is thoroughly ordinary, and yet is it really?

There really is no such thing as an “ordinary” testimony.  Every story of how the Lord changes those about whom He says:

·        “There is NO ONE righteous, no not one”

·        “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God”

·        “All our good deeds are as filthy rags”

is thoroughly AMAZING, and a testimony, not to the worthiness of the person changed, but to the depth of God’s love for those so mired in their own self-centeredness and sin that they cannot help themselves.

It’s amazing because God knows how trapped we really are in our desire to do our own thing and leave Him out!  Only He knows how helpless we are to help ourselves, to say no to sin, to live a life of loving Him and loving others.  Without Him we have no power, no desire to live any differently.  And yet, amazingly:

God does the seeking of those undeserving of His love.

God does the work – of satisfying His wrath against sin – by paying the penalty – death – Himself through the death of His Son on the cross.

Then God opens the heart to believe by His grace through faith in Jesus, and transforms the sinner from someone who could not NOT sin into someone who can say NO to sin. 

Sin’s penalty paid, sin’s power broken, eternal life beginning in the here and now.  A life made new, a life transformed – a testimony of God’s amazing grace.

Despite what our lives looked like before Jesus saved us, whether He saved us miraculously and seemingly instantaneously, or quietly and gradually, every single testimony is amazing because it is complete and final, and not a one of us did a thing to merit it. 

God saves.  God saves through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus, by His grace and through faith because of His great love.  God does FOR us what we could never do for ourselves.  And that IS amazing, every time, in every way, with every person!

So don’t let a seemingly ordinary testimony keep you from celebrating the most amazing thing that has ever, or will ever, happen to you. 

Every testimony is a testimony of God’s amazing grace.