Testimony

Being honest about Jesus means sharing your life. One of the problems I see in American Christianity is that we look to degrees and books for authority, and then assume our own lives somehow disqualify us from speaking with any. But the heart of the New Testament tells a different story. Jesus didn’t hand out diplomas. He said, “Follow Me.” And the people who followed Him didn’t write systematic theologies—they told stories of what they had seen, and heard, and lived. Christian authority originally came from witness, character, suffering, obedience, transformation, and lived faith—not credentials. Yet modern American Christianity often treats degrees and books as the primary source of authority. So, we have to ask: is this simply a natural progression, or a sign that we’ve drifted from the way God actually forms people? God does not meet people in abstract theories. He meets them in the real, unfiltered places of life—the places where we bleed, hope, fail, and rise again. Any theology that avoids those places becomes disconnected from the God it claims to describe. Moses encountered God in the wilderness. David met Him in caves. Paul wrote from prison. The disciples learned Him on dusty roads. Scripture itself is a record of encounters, not academic arguments. I believe lived experience is the foundation of knowing God. He is not learned in a library. Books can be valuable, but only when they connect with the life you’ve actually lived. When writing resonates with lived experience, we glimpse the shared offering of the author. So why did American Christianity drift toward degrees and books? Not because scholarship is evil, but because it’s the natural progression of institutional religion. Movements become institutions; every revival begins with experience, and every institution ends up protecting ideas. Institutions need gatekeepers. Once you have seminaries, denominations, budgets, and buildings, you need a way to decide who is “qualified.” Degrees become the shortcut. Books become badges of legitimacy. Instead of saying, “I have walked with Jesus,” the standard becomes, “I have read the right people.” A university can teach you Greek and Hebrew, but it cannot teach you how to pray in the dark, how to love someone who wounded you, or how to trust God when everything falls apart. Academic training can sharpen the mind, but only lived experience shapes the soul. And as institutional authority grew, lived experience became suspicious—less reliable, less valued. Scholarship isn’t the enemy; disconnection is. And the cost is real: testimony becomes secondary, vulnerability disappears, and faith becomes intellectual instead of relational. The danger of treating the holy as common is subtle but serious. When people trivialize what is sacred simply because it costs them nothing, they reveal an ideology they don’t even realize they hold. Scripture calls this profaning the sacred—dragging something meant for the holy place into the realm of the ordinary, not out of hatred, but out of indifference. And when we speak with authority about things we have never lived, we begin binding other people’s consciences without bearing any of the cost ourselves. Jesus confronted this posture in the Pharisees, who “tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders, but are unwilling to lift a finger to help.” When we assume our perspective is “just normal,” we stop recognizing it as a theology at all. We imagine we are being objective, when in reality we are being shaped by beliefs we refuse to name. Taking the holy and making it common is often the clearest sign of an ideology we are unwilling to admit we have. So why does testimony still carry the most authority? Because it returns us to the core truth: a shared life is the most honest witness to Jesus. People trust stories, not systems. Transformation is visible, not theoretical. Suffering teaches what books cannot. Humility grows through experience, not credentials. The early church recognized authority through character, not degrees. If we want to witness to a world that does not recognize our Lord, then we must do so with lives walked in their world—with humility, grace, and kindness that transcend institutional credentials. We should think carefully about what “authority” ought to mean in the Christian life. Scholarship has value, but it must serve lived faith—not replace it. The most powerful speakers I have ever heard are those who let their scholarship complement their testimony, not overshadow it. I believe believers must reclaim testimony as a primary form of spiritual leadership. Because if our faith does not intersect with real life, it cannot reveal the real Jesus. ...

I have dyslexia, and I’ve never read well. Entering a church culture that grew by passing books around was always a challenge for me. I felt left out, and no one understood why. I learned what I could from sermons, then marched out boldly to try life that way. After failing more times than I can count, I finally bought the Bible on tape and listened to sermons to hear how they interpreted what I could not easily read. I remember thinking, If he can make that connection here, then I can do the same here, here, and here. That kind of thinking was a disaster. But it did reveal something important: the inconsistency we all bring when we treat the Word as the only document needed to follow Jesus, instead of a living witness pointing us to Him. Meanwhile, my life kept imploding through hard and painful seasons. I needed more than borrowed interpretations. I needed a living God. But the Holy Spirit felt distant because I believed something in me was unforgivable—better left alone, better not touched. So, I clung to two simple truths: Jesus loves me. Seek, and you will find. Those two lines carried me through surgeries, failures, loss, and loneliness. And somewhere along the way, I was introduced to a Jesus who is real and working today, and to a Holy Spirit who is active and alive in me—not to win arguments, but to walk humbly and share His wisdom. Today I look for Jesus everywhere and in everything, just as David did, just as Jesus Himself did. I no longer see the Bible as a rulebook I must master, but as a map pointing to a Living Lord who reigns—a Lord who meets me in my weakness, my questions, and my searching. And the more I look for Him, the more I find Him. ...

I learned to see my sin the hard way—when the books I couldn’t read were replaced by a voice that named what I’d been hiding. I was six years old when my friends and I found a large box of pornography in an old shed. Even at that age the images were spellbinding. My brothers caught us looking at it, and in a rare moment of moral clarity, they marched from house to house to tell our friends’ mothers what we had done. One by one, the mothers shrugged it off. But as we approached the last house before mine, my brothers warned their friends, “If she doesn’t care, we’re not telling on him. He’ll get beaten.” She cared. And they told. My mother, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided to tell my father—who had been distant for a long time. I was terrified. At dinner she slid one of the centerfolds across the table and said, “Look at what your son was looking at today.” Everyone braced for his anger. He glanced at it, smiled, and said, “That’s my boy.” My brothers commandeered the box, and it followed us secretly for the next ten years. It seems harmless when you start because you don’t understand the price you will pay. Pornography leads to isolation and loneliness. First it trains you to rely on private pleasure as normal. Then it warps how you see the opposite sex. You begin to believe beauty equals worth. You stop looking at character. You start seeing people as objects rather than partners. To see your sin is a spiritual gift: it exposes our need and points us back to the Lord. David understood this when he wrote, “my sin is ever before me” (Psalm 51). I understood it too, though slowly. What confused me for years was Paul’s promise that one day “we shall know fully, even as we are fully known.” I wanted to be known for the noble things—the good things—not the sin. But that desire itself was flawed. If you are not known fully, you will always fear that if God or others truly saw you, you would not be enough. The truth is far better: He already sees you. And He does not turn away. The vulnerability we fear, Jesus embraced. Before a man was crucified, he was stripped naked. That is vulnerability. That is exposure. And that is the love of our God. His nakedness on the cross is not shame—it is a radical call to authenticity. A call to step out of hiding. A call to receive mercy. The human heart is made to be known. We were created for community, not performance. Living honestly with others is countercultural, but it is also the doorway to healing. It is how grace becomes real. I stopped looking at pornography twenty years ago, but the images lived in my mind long after. To free myself, I had to choose a life of celibacy, and I have carried that commitment for fifteen years. It has not been easy, but it has been freeing. It taught me that confession is not humiliation—it is liberation. If you are tired of pretending, come home. Bring the truth and let grace meet you there. ...