Acts 26

Read: Acts 26

One of the most powerful tools for witnessing to people is simply our personal testimony of how we came to know Jesus.  Here Paul demonstrated that quite effectively. He started out by telling about his life before he met Jesus. Paul (or Saul at that time) was a strict Jew from the time of his youth who identified as a Pharisee.  When he heard about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, he persecuted everyone who believed in that message because he believed it to be blasphemous. He zealously locked believers up in prison and even went to communities outside of Jerusalem to hunt down Christians, punish them, and support the decision to put them to death (See Acts 7:54-8:3).  

This lifestyle did not last for Paul; a surprising thing happened.  On his way to arrest people in Damascus, he saw a blinding light from heaven and heard Jesus speaking to him.  He must have been completely dumbfounded. Imagine having great zeal for a cause and a desire to serve God, and then you find out the whole time you were only serving the enemy.  I’m sure Paul was devastated, yet thankful that God did not allow his rampage to continue. Instead, God chose him to be a light to the Gentiles, “to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light.”  

As a result, Paul was obedient to the vision.  He immediately did a complete turn around. He became one of those that he used to hate, and began spreading the message that the Messiah Jesus had suffered and risen from the dead just as the prophets and Moses had foretold.  He then made an appeal. He had shared his personal conversion story and it’s hard to argue with someone’s personal experience. Paul used his story to intertwine the gospel message and appealed to those in attendance to believe in Jesus and his gift of salvation to all who believe.  

These three categories can serve as a template for how each of us can share our own stories: What was your life like before Christ?  How did you meet him? And how did meeting him change your life? True, not everyone has a story like Paul and some of us may have come to know Christ at an early age and don’t remember a lot of what happened before we knew him.  When sharing our testimonies with people, we do not need to give every little detail about every little thing. We should do our best to condense our story into 3-5 minutes and be comfortable enough with the details to tell someone about it.  Sometimes you may not even have that much time, so you need to be ready to share it in whatever time frame is acceptable. As you share, do your best to intertwine the gospel message into it, and pray and trust that the Lord will use it to point people to him.  

For more on how to formulate a 3-5 minute testimony see: Your Story is God’s Story: Creating Your Testimony.