grace | Pedestrian God

Is Your Testimony Boring?

Jul 08 2016

I’ve been there before. Sunday school teacher asks a couple kids to share their testimonies in front of a group and you’re one of them. The kid before you gets up and you get that sinking feeling in your gut. Here he/she goes again. It’s not that they are insincere; it’s just that their testimony is so exciting and yours is, well, it’s boring.

Everyone claps and brushes away tears as the kid in front of you finishes telling about how his/her parents died, their uncle abused them, their grandma abandoned them, they live in the children’s home, but God has protected them this whole time.

You, however, accepted Jesus when you were seven, maybe younger, and have grown up in church, never really messing up ever since. Sigh. What a boring testimony. No drugs, no alcohol, not even a good fight!

Titus: We too were once

Sep 04 2015

For we too were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved by various passions and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, detesting one another.

But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us— not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit.He poured out this Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,so that having been justified by His grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life.
Titus 3:3-7

It’s easy to forget who we were without Christ. We peer out our window at “those lost people,” glad that we’ve got it all together. But Paul reminds Timothy before closing his letter that “we too” were like them.

Foolish
Disobedient
Deceived
Enslaved by passions and pleasures
Living in malice and envy
Hateful, detesting one another

But God. He saved us – not because of how great we are, but through His mercy. The Holy Spirit washed us clean by the grace of Jesus so that we “may become heirs with the hope of eternal life.”

And yet, the very next verse, Paul reminds us to “devote [ourselves] to good works.” This is a reminder that our good works cannot and do not save us. However, they are the fruit that the world sees. They are evidence of the change inside us. With these works, we do not proclaim how great we are but how amazing our God is.

This Labor Day weekend, let’s take time to reflect on who we are without God’s mercy and thank Him that we don’t have to live that way any more.

By the Word of Their Testimony

Mar 12 2014

They conquered him [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not love their lives in the face of death. Revelation 12:11

My testimony? That’s easy. I was raised in church and I walked down the aisle when I was seven. Isn’t that how most of our testimony stories go? A yawnful summation of God’s grace. I thought my testimony ended at the end of that aisle with my cute seven-year old self. But my testimony isn’t over yet.

Tag - grace

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