Finding Faith

Faith produces Our Testimonies

“And they have defeated him by the blood of the Lamb and by their testimony. And they did not love their lives so much that they were afraid to die.” Revelation 12:11 (NLT)

We all love being the first one to tell someone something. There is no credit given to the person who tells a story second. Reporters make their living on being the one that breaks a story. Punch lines aren’t as funny the second time. The person who gives the information first is most often the one who receives the recognition.

When we call someone to share news like, “Did you hear so and so is pregnant,” only to hear a less than triumphant, “Yeah, I saw that on Facebook,” we will be let down to know we aren’t the first ones to share the news. Our happiness is lessened when we aren’t the first ones to tell a story, especially good ones, because we want to feel that sense of excitement that comes with eliciting a reaction out of someone. When we share that moment with someone, it tends to satisfy something inside all of us.

These satisfying moments are called our testimonies. Testimonies are often believed to be the story someone tells about the moment they found Jesus; however, our testimony is much more than that. Our testimony includes any story we tell to others. We give a testimony any time we give an account of our life to someone else. When we tell others where we were earlier, things that happened while we were there, or what we are planning for the future, we are telling a part of our testimony.

Our testimony encompasses our entire life, and it is very important to God that we share that testimony, or the story of our lives and faith in Christ, with others.

Revelation 12:11 gives us an important look at the importance of our testimony. A testimony is what we are doing anytime we share news, good or bad, with someone. This verse tells us that telling our story will allow us to overcome the adversity that enemy has put in our lives. Revelation 12:11 says, that the enemy brought sin, but the blood of Jesus overcame it and goes on to say the enemy also brings pain, suffering, and doubt into our lives, and it is our testimonies that allow us overcome those things.

We overcome through our testimony because it is our faith in God’s will for our lives that produces our stories of victory. We can’t overcome anything without faith. If we have a testimony of victory to tell, it means we had faith to see our circumstances improve. Our faith in Christ produces a testimony that, when told to others, is a powerful witness to God’s good work in our lives that led us to victory.

Our faith in God produces our testimony because the stories we tell others are directly linked to our beliefs. When we don’t have faith, we share negative stories about how bad we have it. Negative stories are the testimonies of doubters. A trier will share stories about how they tried something, and it didn’t work out. A believer, however, will share their testimonies of victory that come from following God’s will, even if those victories haven’t shown up yet.

Testimonies are meant to be a moment to share our great faith with others, and they were designed by God to encourage whoever hears them to want and believe for more. When we share the results of our faith through our testimonies with someone, we are letting people know we love them because testimonies give hope, and love is shown when we give. However, not every testimony we give provides that love because we aren’t always sharing our stories of victory. The enemy knows the power of our positive testimony, and he will constantly be trying to put us in a place in life where we feel negative words are needed to describe our situation instead of faithful ones.

There are three different types of testimonies we tell. Our level of faith becomes evident based on which type of testimony we are telling. The faith of the listener will, in turn, be influenced by the stories we tell. Our words have tremendous power and will either increase faith or doubt in those that hear them. Faith to follow God’s will comes from hearing the Word of God, so it is important that we speak scripture to stand on and support our beliefs (Rom. 10:17).

We cannot increase faith in others when we share our testimonies about our problems, how we are unsure how to solve them, and our frustrations about them. The job of a believer is to share the testimonies of our good news, as well as our belief in God to solve our problems, so that everyone knows we have been given power to overcome the attacks of the enemy.

Types of Testimonies

Our Lack of Success

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World’s Problems

Our Lack of Success

Failure is a very common testimony. We will generally tell others how bad things are in our lives or how we’ve failed at something and just don’t understand why. We give testimonies of failure to elicit reactions of sympathy and empathy from the listener. Our hope when we tell stories of failure is that the listeners will want to comfort us, tell us everything will be okay, and tell us that our failures happened for reasons outside of our control.

It’s great that we want support for our problems; however, we will never find what we truly need when we look for support from someone other than God. Instead of going to the world to share our failures, we need to first share our testimonies of failure to the ears of God, so that He can give peace and hope for our future. Our testimony of failures, problems, and complaining will never encourage faith in our minds or the minds of others.

Let’s look at some common testimonies of failure:

• I can’t get a job because no one is hiring.

• I didn’t make any money at work today because it was so slow.

• I sat in traffic for an hour, and that’s why I was late.

These are common everyday ways of talking for most people. Social media posts have made it easy for us to vent our problems, struggles, and failures to the world in the hopes that people will sympathize and console us for how tough we have it. Even if we aren’t the ones sharing failure type testimonies, we are at least hearing or seeing them from someone in our lives. When we constantly see and hear failures.

It is in our sin nature to share testimonies of failure. We like to complain by telling others how we are not happy with the way things are going in our lives, but because of our sin nature, we don’t often blame ourselves for our problems. The moment we believe victory over a situation is not coming we declare that it’s not our fault it didn’t come. We will blame someone, or something else, long before we believe it was our own actions that prevented our success.

We are quick to share our stories of victory and take all the credit for how it happened; however, when failure comes, we are not as quick to take credit for the fault.

Look back at those common testimonies of failure. Each story provides a problem or failure and then lists what caused it. For example, when someone says, “I can’t get a job (problem) because no one is hiring (what’s to blame for the problem).”