This is Faith to Witness 99 Motivating us to leave the 99 and go find the one. 

Here’s a takeaway that travels well from this week’s episode. 

How someone responds is not a reflection of my witness. 

My witness is not a debate of perception vs perception. 

Jesus has already won the argument. There are uncomfortable moments and potential outcomes in any conversation: 

• Not being able to scripturally feed someone who has opened up with spiritual hunger
• Having the same conversation over and over again
• Not knowing the answer 
• Blowing the moment, what you perceive as the only chance to connect 
• Feeling a relationship go lukewarm, and begin to slip away
• Feeling a relationship turn colder
• Losing a relationship completely

Sometimes we abandon spiritual truth in exchange for immediate human camaraderie in this life. We compromise his image and live as if Psalm 139 is just so long ago.

We turn away from that which endures every conversation, every relationship.   

Yet our beloved John, the apostle tells us:

1 John 2:17

The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

 

Stay with us for the conversation. e211

E211 The Knowing — The Risk of Sharing My God 

(part 2 of 3)

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I have always known. 

How I bear testimony to others comes from how my relationship with God is what I have always privately called, “the knowing.” 

I have never consciously doubted he exists. I have lived through long seasons of disobedience, but my conscience, my heart, my soul has never parted ways with my Creator. Not that I know of. But I can’t tell someone that if they dig deeper they will just “know” the truth about their Creator. I have to bear a witness that yields my free will to why God has put me in front of that person, at that moment. 

What does it actually take to plant a mustard seed in a person’s conscience? I posed this question in part 1 of The Knowing because that’s the goal. I realize I left that mustard seed action dormant. Not abandoned. Dormant. I will come back to it. But not yet. 

The Knowing is where I am headed in this three-part pursuit of how to share my God better. I typically stand face-to-face with three roadblocks I know well. That’s the road we started down in e209. Check it out at this link. (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/faith-to-witness-99/id1648558274?i=1000792365969).

In Part 1 I named my first roadblock:

The personal, private nature of sharing our God. 

My personal challenge is that I am a private person. I explored a summer camp memory that taught me I would not always have a say about when something deeply personal would be called out. (1 Peter 3:15) I learned something in that experience about how private I am. How I think about God, pray to him, worship Him, understand him (feeble as it is), and hold him close, how all this attention, is uniquely mine. But that is not actually true. I am his, according to Psalm 139. I was “knitted in my mother’s womb.” I always have been. I am the image, the representation, as it is manifested in me—my personality, my soul—that God wants in front of every person he puts on my path. When I share God, whatever depth and breadth, with someone, I am honoring his work in me and illuminating his glorious image. 

That proposition is hard to turn down, don’t you think?

Paul tells us in Colossians 3:10-12 that our new self is “being renewed in knowledge in the image of the Creator.” So, the definitive response to roadblock 1 is that my Creator will protect what we have together, he will protect me in his image. 

We already considered that our conviction, our salvation and our redemption are unique to a timeless God. He knows what will come between you and another person. When you share God he will lay his hand on you. He will protect you. 

Jeremiah 32:17: “Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.”

So we can trust God to protect our precious love for him when we bring that love to others. Consider that God puts you in conversation with someone to represent who he is by how he made you. How he made you has everything to do with the conversation. 

I’m Kathryn Bise, your host. 

God’s divine assurance for roadblock 1 makes roadblock 2 approachable: The risk of sharing my God. So, what is the risk? What am I trying to avoid or feel unprepared to handle?

For starters, dealing with my own feelings. Emotionally, I get angry, impatient, condescending, resentful. I get jealous of a person’s rebellion against his spiritual destiny, that the person has not claimed the Creator who made him. Seems endlessly foolish.

I can’t fully explain it, but this is an irritation deep within my soul. Our God is a jealous God, and I believe I come from a place of taking up the cross, and placing a solid grip on the sword of truth. It makes me want to start thrashing, chopping, thrusting, stabbing.

And the suspended awkwardness, the pseudo humiliation that comes in certain moments of a conversation — when we cave in to a debate. This makes me angry. And when the person believes they have dominated the conversation, won the argument, it feels like my witness has been shutdown. 

 

When I Witness, Two People Bear Testimony

What I feel is fear of the flesh dominating the conversation. That my witness has been shut down by someone else’s perception. A perception that is personal to the hearer too. The premise for moving forward in my pursuit is anchored in this realization, just now, an affirmation that I am not the only one with spiritual skin in the game. When I witness to someone, that person bears testimony too, like it or not. Testimony about the relationship he or she has with God. Either with God. Or turned away from God. 

My witness stands because salvation and redemption do not ever take the debate stage. 

I am not saying Jesus didn’t debate, provide responses, engage back and forth with the Jewish counsel, Pharisees, those who challenged him, who tested him. I am saying that Jesus asks the questions that reveal the heart. And he listens to the answers, while standing alone, divinely sovereign in his resurrected nature. 

How someone responds is not a reflection of my witness. 

My witness is not a debate of perception vs perception. 

Jesus has already won the argument. There are uncomfortable moments and potential outcomes in any conversation: 

• Not being able to scripturally feed someone who has opened up with spiritual hunger
• Having the same conversation over and over again

• Not knowing the answer 
• Blowing the moment, what you perceive as the only chance to connect 

• Feeling a relationship go lukewarm, and begin to slip away
• Feeling a relationship turn colder
• Losing a relationship completely

Sometimes we abandon spiritual truth in exchange for immediate human camaraderie in this life. We compromise his image and live as if Psalm 139 is just so long ago.

We turn away from that which endures every conversation, every relationship.   

Yet our beloved John, the apostle tells us:

1 John 2:17

The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

 

Symptoms Are Not Solutions

I read recently, although I am not remembering where, that people know more about their symptoms—how their life feels, what the challenges are, what confuses them—than solutions to address their circumstances.

Let’s consider a few scenarios of how symptoms manifest in the human perspective:

• Someone who feels lonely, but doesn’t know why.
• Someone who feels perpetually disconnected, who accelerates connection to people, culture, trends, whoever, whatever is within human reach.
• Someone who is floundering spiritually, but doesn’t know where to turn.
• Someone who needs someone to listen, but lacks discernment on who to talk to. 
• Someone who turns to destructive behavior, but fails at grasping for a change.
• Someone who is always hungry for worldly success that can only be satiated by more worldly success.
• Someone who is not satisfied with daily life, and seeks the next trend for answers.
• Someone who loves and serves others, but feels an emptiness inside.
• Someone who believes there is a God, but that he is way “up there.”
• Someone who doesn’t know if there is a God, but too young to think it’s urgent.
• Someone who is sure there is not a God and rejects anything resembling seeking him.
• Someone who thinks God is one of many choices, and takes on a “live and let live” posture.
• Someone who knows it all, by way of reason, but is void of personal conviction. 

I could go on. By now, you may have mentally joined me, adding people in your life that have a strong grasp on how they are feeling, what they are thinking, what their human condition is, and perhaps failed attempts to provide a fix. Or believe there is not a fix. Or that they don’t need a fix. People who have no enduring solutions. 

Proverbs 14:12

12 There is a way that appears to be right,

    but in the end it leads to death.

This is King Solomon addressing human reasoning that is not tethered to the divine wisdom of God. Symptoms are not solutions. Yet the world is full of risk-free solutions anyone can try. That’s the language we hear all the time. There is no risk in trying something and if it doesn’t work we can return it. The world makes promises about our health, our relationships, our investments, our education, our family life, all the things.

The world defines risk by the length of the guarantee. 

How does God define risk?

 

Heavenly Treasures are 100% Risk Free, Forever

All of the scenarios about what people believe about God, what my emotions might be going into a conversation, what the outcome of the conversation is, have one powerful truth in common: they are all risk free. When we invest in heavenly treasures and lay down what we treasure on earth to gain glory for our Creator, there is no risk. We have eternal life, we have a Savior that sacrificed his earthly life for every earthly step we take in this life. Heavenly treasures are 100% risk free, guaranteed for life eternal.

So defining the risk of sharing God is only relevant and measured by this world’s standard of temporary earthly gain. Or temporary earthly loss (which we call persecution). Because Jesus risked it all, when we witness, we risk nothing that will last in eternal life. 

• Relationships between believers will flourish in heaven forever. 
• Relationships between believers and nonbelievers will be resolved on earth. 
• Never-ending peace and joy will redeem the struggling emotions on earth.
• A conversation that went wrong rooted a mustard seed. 

Thanks for staying with me during this process. 

When I witness I am not sharing my perception of God. 

I am sharing my conviction from God. 

I am not sharing who I think God is, I am responding to his divine persuasion of my heart. 

1 Corinthians 2:14

14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.

Help me bring this truth together in your wisdom, Lord. The personal nature of our witness, the earthly risks we walk through, and your discerning Spirit in how we bear testimony. Part 3.

Stay with us for E212, The Knowing – The Spirit of Sharing My God (part 3 of 3)

God’s faith to your witness. Go find the one.