Being an effective witness

The essence of Acts 1:8 represents the importance of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. “…..endued with power from on high and you shall be my witnesses….”  A simple way to look at definition of the word, witness, is given thus-A witness is someone who has first-hand knowledge about a crime or significant event through their senses (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling, touching). Unless you have experienced the graces of God and have been empowered, you will find it difficult to present effective evidence that will convince people to the faith that we proclaim. We live in a cynical world which makes it difficult for some people to believe. We could however, help them if we present to them the gospel of truth by the evidence of our personal knowledge of the capabilities of the power of God through the effective working power of the Holy Spirit.

Text John 4:7-29; Acts 2:6-14

1              According to Mark 3:14, what was Jesus’ initial reason for calling the twelve disciples?

2              The first disciples were with Jesus; how can we share in the similitude of their experiences in this present day? Joh 3:11; 1 Joh 1:1-5; Joh 20:29

3              The Lord has a responsibility for the church. Comment on this from these verses: Eph 2:10; 3:10

Notice the pattern that highlights a connection of experiences and evidences when the gospel is shared- Peter explaining the “abnormal” occurrence on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:6-14. –Philip in Acts 8: 29-35, found this man who appeared confused and offered to explain to him what was written by the prophet Isaiah.

4              The day to day sharing of the gospel therefore, should come from a normal casual conversation. Let us discuss this in detail from John 4: 7-29

Without having an in-depth experiential knowledge of God, we end up telling people stories about a religion like people would do to gain political dominance. The letter of the word ends up producing a people defiant to the reality of the salvation power of God. The evidence of this can be seen by what has happened to the Church of England relative to the revival testimonies in some other parts of the world. Our aim is to get people naturally converse into understanding the salvation plan for humanity while the Holy Spirit does the conversion.