Good News: Testimonies

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Last Updated on April 8, 2024 by Rocklyn Clarke

Good News Pages

Purpose

Please make sure you have used this Good News material to personally win someone to Christ before you use it to train others!

Follow this link for information about these key aspects of our Good News Training:

Now that you've seen our approach to evangelism, it's important to master one of the key ways that you can contribute - your testimony.

Your Testimony: The Story of Your Life With Jesus

Introduction

God wants your life with Jesus to be evidence that Jesus is indeed the Christ (i.e. Israel's true king) and Lord (i.e. the world's true ruler). When we use the word "testimony" we're referring to the story of how your life with Jesus got started. Your testimony is a fulfillment of Jesus' promise to his disciples:

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you;  and you will be my witnesses  in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria,  and to the ends of the earth.”- Acts 1:8 (NIV)

Your testimony is a key component of your role as a witness to the resurrection and lordship claims of Jesus! For this reason, we should learn to share our testimonies.

Instant Conversion vs. Gradually Becoming a Follower of Jesus

Before you proceed with actually writing down your testimony however, it's important to recognize that not everyone arrives at the decision to follow Jesus in the same way:

  • Some people begin following Jesus at a well-defined point in time. This is sometimes referred to as a crisis experience. This doesn't necessarily mean that they were in some kind of trouble - the "crisis" refers to the speed of the actual conversion experience - one minute they were not following Jesus and in the next minute, they were.
  • Others come to this point gradually and, although they are genuinely committed to following Jesus, they cannot recall an exact time or situation when they made the decision to follow him.

There is room for both experiences in our evangelism and it's important for us to become familiar with both kinds of testimony.

Testimony Format

Note - This format is written primarily with an instant conversion in mind - largely because the testimonies available to us at the time of this writing are instant conversion testimonies. We want very much to develop a format that will be helpful to those writing gradual conversion testimonies and, as we receive more of them, we will make the appropriate adjustments.

We can use Paul's testimonies in Acts 22 and Acts 26 as a model for composing a testimony.

Your testimony will have 6 components:

  1. Introduction
  2. Share what your life was like before following Christ.
  3. Share how you realized that you needed to follow Christ.
  4. Share how you began following Christ.
  5. Share what your life is like after following Christ or, alternatively, what following Christ means to you now.
  6. Conclusion

Dr. Ralph Neighbour of Touch Ministries, Inc. explains this format in the following video:

You can Dr. Ralph Neighbour's equipping material here:

Some people will prefer to combine components 3 and 4 into a single component: How you began following Christ.

If you already feel comfortable with writing, feel free to skip the next section on "Help With Writing Your Testimony".

Help With Writing Your Testimony

In written form, you may find it helpful to use an essay format for your testimony - yes, that writing project that many of you will remember from high school. If you want to format your testimony as an essay and you already feel confident about writing one, feel free to skip this section. If you think an essay might be the way to go, but your essay days are long behind you and you can't remember how to write one, don't worry - we're here to help!

Check out the following writing resources:

Ask someone from your life group to give you feedback as you pull together your bullet points and eventually weave them together into paragraphs and ultimately a completed testimony.

Your testimony is not a generalized essay however. Many of the components of a generalized essay are actually "locked in" by the purpose of a testimony. Thus, the key features of a generalized essay have the following specific meanings in your testimony:

  • The goal of your testimony is to help persuade people that God raised Jesus from the dead and has made him the world's true ruler and that everyone should follow him.
  • Your initial thesis is "The Jesus of the Gospels has risen from the dead, made himself real to me, and is expressing his role as the world's ruler through my life personally.
  • The introduction is: "May I tell you about the greatest thing that ever happened in my life?"
  • Sample topic sentences:
    • "Before I began following Jesus I lived my life on my own terms."
    • "Before I began following Jesus my life was controlled by . . ."
    • Not: "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away . . ."
  • The next 4 lessons will help you with developing the outline for the key sections of your essay.
  • The conclusion is: "Perhaps this has happened to you?"

Gathering the Pieces

Lesson 1: Life Before Following Christ

Here you will pull together some bullet points describing your life before following Christ. Don't agonize over this! Pick a few bullet points and move on! You will be updating and refining your testimony for the rest of your life. Don't get bogged down trying to start out with a "perfect" document. If, like many of us, you have experienced major failures after becoming a Christian, you don't need to rehearse those failures for the purposes of your testimony. Your testimony is not the story of how you became perfect. It is the story of how you began following Jesus. 

Acts 22:1-5; Acts 26:9-11

Paul

    • Paul was (and is) a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia. (Acts 22:3; 26:4)
    • Paul was brought up in Jerusalem. (Acts 22:3; 26:4)
    • Paul studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the Jewish law/tradition. (Acts 22:3; 26:5)
    • Zealous for God. (Acts 22:3; 26:9-11)
    • Persecuted Christians to their death, arrested others and threw them into prison. (Acts 22:4; 26:9-11)
    • Paul got permission to go to Damascus to bring Christians back to Jerusalem for trial. (Acts 22:5; 26:9-11)

Someone Else

    • Both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were Christian. By the time I was born my mother had turned away from following Jesus. My father died when I was 2 weeks old.
    • I did not grow up attending church, although my mother did attend briefly and took me to Sunday school for a few months sometime before I was 6 years old.
    • My ideas about God were largely formed by watching the Lutheran claymation show “Davey & Goliath” on television (a wonderful show) as a young child.
    • I attended an Episcopal summer camp for 4 consecutive summers 1971 - 1974. I became somewhat curious about church at that point and asked the priests questions but, although they gave me technical answers, they never attempted to explain the “big picture” of how to follow Jesus.
    • One of my older sisters, who was not raised with me, wrote me a letter about why I should follow Jesus and how to do so when I was 16 years old. I was offended by the letter; I tore it up and threw it away, but I never forgot what she had written.
    • At college I met a couple of Christian friends who encouraged me to follow Jesus but, although I found what they told me to be credible, I felt strongly that I would never be able to live up to the standards of the Christian life. I remember telling them that I might get saved “when I was 30”.

What about you? - You may want to use our Testimony Template.

    • Elements you might include:
      • Your ethnicity, where you were born, where you were raised:
        • The general beliefs you were raised with and/or that you eventually adopted.
        • What was your basis for deciding right or wrong?
        • What were your most important goals?
      • Your spiritual beliefs:
        • What did you believe about God generally?
        • What did you believe about Jesus?
        • What did you believe about Christians? How did you treat them?
        • Resurrection of Jesus - Jesus is of course central to your testimony. Keep in mind what you already know about Jesus as you reflect on your life before following him. The resurrection of Jesus is an extremely important point to be made in your testimony. What you believed about the resurrection or how you felt about it before you began following Jesus is worth sharing in this portion of your testimony.
      • Examples that illustrate your former beliefs.
      • Your former lifestyle:
        • What kinds of things did you do?
        • How did you behave?
        • How did you treat others?
    • Go for it! Write out some bullet points for your life before Christ.
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Lesson 2: Realizing the Need to Follow Christ

Here you will pull together some bullet points describing how you realized you needed to follow Christ. Don't agonize over this! Pick a few bullet points and move on! You will be updating and refining your testimony for the rest of your life. Don't get bogged down trying to create a "perfect" document. If, like many of us, you have experienced major failures after becoming a Christian, you don't need to rehearse those failures for the purposes of your testimony. Your testimony is not the story of how you became perfect. It is the story of how you began following Jesus. 

Acts 22:6-10; Acts 26:12-18

Paul

    • At noon, as he approached Damascus, Paul saw a bright light and fell to the ground. (Acts 22:6; 26:12-14)
    • Jesus appeared to him and said: “Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?” (Acts 22:7; 26:14)
    • Jesus told Paul to go to Jerusalem and wait for further instructions. (Acts 22:10; 26:15-18)

Timothy

    • Although 1st generation believers often become followers of Jesus through a crisis experience, their children often have a more gradual experience.
    • Timothy may be an example of this:

Someone else

    • On Sunday April 1, 1979, I was sitting in my college dormitory room looking out at the river on a beautiful spring day. I was not in any sort of crisis - there was nothing that I felt was wrong in my life. I wasn’t upset about anything.
    • Somehow Jesus made his presence known to me and made it clear that I now had an opportunity to follow him.
    • On that day in my dorm room however, Jesus somehow made it clear to me that if I decided to follow him then, it would work. I felt free to accept him and I was somehow confident that I could actually be a Christian. I also felt free to say no to Jesus, but I also had a nagging worry: I didn’t know when I would ever again feel that same freedom to follow Jesus!

What about you? - You may want to use our Testimony Template.

Some people may choose to combine this section with the next one: "Deciding to Follow Christ".