Witnessing

 Witnessing

Paul Stroble

Psalm 126:1-3

When I was a teenager and then a college student, I thought I should be able to witness to my faith. As Pastor Jason reminds us, witnessing is one of the most important but most neglected spiritual practices. I wanted to be sufficiently comfortable in my faith to speak naturally to other folks about religion, so that they might gain faith as well.  I even purchased a popular book of the time, How to Give Away Your Faith.

But witnessing can be difficult. If you talk about your faith “cold,” a person may feel that you’ve crossed their boundaries. Even if you have a relationship with that person, it’s awkward to bring up religion. It seems easier to talk about sports or the weather!

When I was in college, a pastor suggested that we should be so warm and joyful as Christians, people will naturally want to know why. Then you can tell them about Jesus because Jesus is so positive in your life.

But I’m someone who has struggled all my life with depression. There are lots of times when I’m not joyful. It’s my brain chemistry, not an absence of faith. You can “fake it till you make it,” as the saying goes. But faking joy isn’t a good way to be Christian! Plus, I’m an introvert by nature, and I didn’t want to pretend to be extroverted.

In time, I learned to be natural in my expression of faith, including honesty about my struggles of faith and the ways I’d messed up. I shared about ways I’d experienced Christ in my life—especially Christ’s faithfulness across the years, creating “story arcs” of care in the lives of me and my family. (Of course, I hadn’t had many years with Christ when I was a teenager.)

But we don’t always have to describe our faith to people. As Pastor Jason reminds us, we all have different gifts. Some of us may share our faith in music, or in art, or in writing, or in kinds of service.

In our Evangelism seminar at Eden Seminary, we’ve talked about the role of the Holy Spirit in Evangelism. If the Holy Spirit hasn’t prepared the situation, there’s really no point in trying to force an evangelistic situation. When I was young, evangelism seemed more like a kind of persuasion, rather than a sharing that the Spirit had already put in motion.

In that seminar, we’ve also talked about hospitality and welcoming as powerful ways to be evangelistic. In the spirit of the Epistle of James, we seek to find out people’s needs and help meet them. We don’t pressure people, but rather create safe places for them to share faith.

That brings me to our lesson, Psalm 126:1-3. Psalm 126 is the text for the old hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I sang the hymn for years as a boy before I knew what a “sheaf” was. I thought it was a euphemism for someone you invited to church.

A sheaf, of course, is a bundle of harvested grain stalks wrapped for easy carrying. Why are the people so happy “carrying their sheaves”? They’re happy because this has been a life-or-death situation. The people have returned to the land after the Babylonian exile, and they must rebuild their farms in order to survive. They can’t run to Schnucks if crops failed: to have sheaves of grain meant that they had food!  Having food was to them a sign of God’s blessing.

Having successful farms, the people naturally were very happy! “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.”

What has the Lord done in your life? It might be something big, or it might be faithful comfort over a period of time. This week, think about ways you could tell someone about how God has been in your life.  Amen.