I received a surprise package in the mail a week ago that couldn’t have come at a better time. It was an unmarked DVD with nothing but a little note attached: “Brian, I think you’ll enjoy watching this.” I popped the DVD in the player and turned it on. There was Jeff Christiansen, standing up in front of the congregation of Bethel Church in Sheldon, Iowa. Bethel Church was the first congregation I served right out of seminary—a beautiful community of people who taught me so much about what it means to be a pastor.
Jeff held a microphone, his hands trembling. He was sharing his testimony. What made the timing of getting this DVD so good was that I had been laboring all week on a sermon on Mark 5:1-20. It’s the story of how Jesus heals a Gentile man who had been tormented day and night by a mob of demons. After casting them into a herd of pigs, Jesus instructs the man to go back home to his friends and family and tell his story of what the Lord has done for him. It’s a story that speaks to the power of testimony, and here was Jeff sharing his own story of what the Lord had done for him.
Jeff’s story goes like this. Jeff had demons of his own, and they would come out when he drank too much, which happened often. One day he was drinking, and the demons were thrashing, and he made a terrible decision that would alter the course of his life. The judge sentenced him to 30 years in the state prison.
While in prison, Jeff found Jesus. Actually, Jesus found him. I can still remember the letter he wrote me, a letter that pulsated with the kind of joy you read in some of Paul’s prison letters, explaining the forgiveness he had found in Christ. “Even though I’m locked up in a cell,” he wrote, “I finally feel like I’m free.”
Jeff started reading the Bible. He loved the Psalms most of all. His favorite was Psalm 51, where David writes: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. ….Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me….O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”
Jeff ended up getting released from prison a year ago, serving only 10 of his 30-year sentence due to good behavior. So here he was, up in front of church on a Sunday morning, sharing his story. He was fumbling his words, stammering to get them out. “I’ve been free of alcohol for 10 years now,” he said. “My life has been changed. I know that God has forgiven me. I know that I’m a child of God. And I just wanted to tell you all thank you for what you’ve done for me through all of this. You are the only family I’ve ever had, and I love you.”
As I watched Jeff and listened to him speak, my eyes grew moist and all I could think about were these words of Psalm 51: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”
And then this. Jeff picked up a loaf of bread and said to the congregation, “As many of you know, I work downtown at the bakery. I made this bread for us today as we have communion.” And I watched people flood the center aisle, coming forward to encounter the presence of Jesus in the bread that Jeff’s hands baked, the same hands that ten years ago would have held a bottle of beer and swung about violently. These hands made clean. This heart made clean. A new man with a new and right Spirit. A new man who had been set free by Christ’s mercy.
And Jesus said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown you.” And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed (Mark 5:19-20).
As I said in my sermon on Sunday, Christ sets us free from the demons within to find our voice and to tell our own story (or stories) of God’s power. Every single one of us has a story, and there is no such thing as a story that is so ordinary it cannot testify to the extraordinary grace and mercy of God. Evangelism, at its heart, is about finding our voice and daring to tell our own story of what the Lord has done for us.
So God give us all the grace to find our voice and open our lips that we, too, might tell our stories and declare God’s praise!