Evangelism - Sing Your Song
November 28, 2021 Sunday Evening Study

This morning was a pretty amazing service for me - having the privilege of seeing my wife get up and share how God has impacted her life. I know that there are many that have been praying silently for the soul of their spouse to the point where they may not believe there could ever be a time where they might have the gift of seeing them share their faith in this sort of arena. So I will say that it is not lost on me how lucky I am to have a woman in my life with whom I can share all parts of my faith.

I always liked to hear people’s testimonies. I like to know where people come from and learn how they came to be who they are. I can remember listening to a taped testimony of a guy serving life in prison after 20 years as a mafia hitman, and his transformation was incredible - like a hollywood blockbuster. When my family and I first moved to Colorado, Kahlan and I went to a Rockies game on Faith and Family night - Jeremy Camp was the Christian artist who performed after the game. 

Now I had remained a Padres fan through my 12 years in AZ largely because I hated the Diamondbacks, but was open to becoming a Rockies fan because I really had no feelings for them either way. At this game, before the concert, they had 2 players and a coach from the Rockies give their testimonies, and one of the players was Charlie Blackmon, a.k.a. Chuck Nazty - still their current center fielder. His testimony was powerful in that it was simple - he had a normal childhood raised in a Christian home and had always been very conservative and reserved. Suddenly, he is an All Star winning batting titles and making millions of dollars, yet it never changed him. At the time he was still driving the vehicle he bought when he was 16 - a 25 year old Jeep Cherokee with over 350K miles on it because, as he stated in an interview, “I don’t need a new car.” 

During his testimony he didn’t talk about baseball, or all of the charity work he did, or anything that drew attention to him. When he was introduced, they listed off the charitable foundations he started and supported - and it was a lengthy list. I read somewhere that in his first 7 figure contract year he gave away over 70% of his salary. Yet in his testimony, all he talked about was how God had saved him and given him the life that he is privileged to live. He did all he could to give glory to God for everything in his life, and he made it clear that he did his best for God - and a little for his wife. Charlie Blackmon is my favorite current player, and his testimony made me a Rockies fan.

Last week we talked about the conversational role of the musician - listening for the sour notes they sing to you so you can uncover some of their own misgivings or holes in their belief system. This week we are going to look at that from the other side to see if we can gain some perspective in identifying sour notes, as well as things we can begin to build on to create a relationship.

How many of you have ever shared your testimony - the story of God in your life? How many have done it on a stage? One on one? If you have not, why not?

People enjoy telling their story when they are at a comfort level which allows them to do so without fear. In my experience, if you can get a person to start talking, they’ll generally talk all day if it is about themselves or something important to them - even introverted people. Now some, sharing a testimony is like a nightmare scenario, but I believe that it is an important and vital part of evangelism.

Proverbs 14:25 lays it out short and sweet: “A truthful witness saves lives, but one who breathes out lies is deceitful.” A truthful witness saves lives - one who tells the truth of what they have seen, what they have experienced. Telling the truth of life has the ability to save lives. That is a considerable thing, and is the reason why we are called witnesses. We have experienced and seen God in our lives, and we are called to bear witness to who He is and what He has done in our own lives.

Last week in the sermon I talked about teaching and how I couldn’t understand why in Top Gun they had a woman who had never flown a plane before instructing elite fighter pilots. I made the statement That I teach what I know - how could I teach something I had never done?

Here we are today, talking about evangelism. Remember that effective evangelism is going to have equal parts gospel and witness - your story and your experiences. We have talked a good bit about the gospel part, and I am fairly sure that you know how to deliver a gospel presentation at this point. But what about your story?

In order to craft our story, we have to consider the musician role. What notes do we want to play in our song? When we know what we want to play, it becomes easier for us to discover the sour notes in our own song, and as we deal with them we start to hear those notes everyday coming from the people around us with whom we engage, whether we are looking for them or not.

When considering how you would tell your story, think of the very vernacular we use for this very thing - giving testimony. Telling our story is explaining what we have seen God do in our own lives and in those of the people we love and care about. When considering how we want to craft our story, there are a number of exercises we may want to entertain - all the while keeping in mind the role of the musician and trying to pre-emptively identify any sour notes. When Eleia started to write her testimony, she ran into a bit of a log jam because she had a lot of thoughts she wanted to get out, but no way to put them in a cohesive order. I suggested the following outline for her to begin as a basis for her testimony, and she grew from there. You have a copy of this outline, because - surprise! We are going to work on this over the coming weeks.

• Reason for sharing - why it is important
• God tells us to share the gospel with all nations, so this is part of it
• This is an opportunity for you to better personalize your relationship with God and the church by showing how important it is to you.
• About you
• Personality: how do you show happiness and other emotions
• Likes and dislikes - what brings you joy and what brings you struggles in life - is there anything here that may not be mentioned often with other people and what is the story behind it?
• Strengths and weaknesses: humility is important here, so long as it is genuine and leads to learning. Strengths are good - no need to downplay them
• Your Story - work in your spiritual journey wherever it fits
• Early family life and childhood/teen years. Talk about the generation and type of kid you were. Vices? Struggles?
• Marriage and family and adulthood - what does that look like for you? Married? Single? What have you learned, how have you been burned, what do you hope for, etc.
• Your Situation
• Current state of faith
• Current Struggles, current victories and strengths
• Future desires - what are you going to do about it?
• Your Biblical grounding - life verse? What keeps you going?
• What things are most important to you in life? In your faith? 
• Explain why where you are now is better than where you were without Jesus, in your own words

Now when we look at this structure, we are most likely to find the sour notes in the “About You” and the “Your Situation” sections, because you are going to be talking more about feelings around events in these sections. If we take Eleia’s testimony from this morning, playing the musician role, I recall that she mentioned that she struggles with low self esteem - definitely a sour note. Low self esteem nearly always stems from someone - a person or Satan himself telling us lies about who we are and what we can do. A belief system built on low self esteem is going to struggle to find a firm foundation - whether it is faith in God or something else entirely. These are the types of things we can see within our own stories, then see them in others.

So that’s the assignment - write your story. We are going to be writing and polishing our story for several weeks, applying each of the listening roles like the musician to our story to better anticipate what sorts of things we might hear from others. Eventually, we are going to practice sharing our stories with folks in this room, and for those who feel called, there may be opportunity to share with the church in the future the way Eleia did today. Remember the purpose of this story - to take the truth of the gospel as we have learned it and to bear witness to how that truth transforms a life - our own.

Let’s pray.