Joe’s recent post over at globalyawning, challenges us to use our testimonies to engage the world around us.  Our testimonies are a manifestation of that “vision of life in the kingdom of the heavens in the fellowship of Jesus” that Dallas Willard suggests is essential as we lead people to become disciples of Jesus.

Our testimonies are living.  The initial point of acknowledging Jesus as Lord of our life is just that, the beginning of our testimony, our daily learning from, walking with, and trusting of God.  The association that testimonies are limited to our initial conversion restricts us from the depth of gratefulness for that initial point that is gained in the perspective of a life giving and active relationship with God.  The more our lives our transformed into being more like Christ, the more we understand where we came from in sin without Christ.

There is often a temptation to fluff up our testimonies about God with our own ideas of what we think will least offensive or more inline with current trends and thoughts.  But there is no need for fluff.  A living testimony requires no fluff of ours because it describes the truth and reality of God’s work in us for the undeserved, grace filled expression of love that it is. This work is supernatural.  Our fluff does not do it justice.

The work in us is great primarily because of the worker, God.  The greatness of the work itself is only secondary.  Because of the magnitude and creativity of God’s power and work, each persons testimony will give a glimpse of the reality that is an omniscient, omnipresent, incomprehensible God. It is in the little bits and pieces, the glimpses of the larger reality that we experience God individually and then pass it on to inspire those whose hearts are ready in the form of our testimony.

I believe that God’s work in us, his over all design is inherently communal.  I mean to say that when we are ready to allow God’s work in us, our testimonies, our relationship with God to engage the relationships that we have with our friends and family, we will find that God’s work in us mirrors and sometimes precedes his work in the very same friends and family.  This is how we can act as the hands and feet of God.