9. Witness - to who and what?

Christian character is seen in lifestyle and relationships, not religiosity.
How we show our values in the workplace is important.

God requires his people to express his character. Progressively, and often falteringly on our part, he enables this by the work of his Holy Spirit in the lives of those who become his disciples. Christian character is seen in lifestyle and relationships, not in religiosity. We need to be witnesses to God's love and grace, not to decency, morality Christian lifestyle, or rules. Sin must be understood as a relational problem, not essentially a moral one. Repentance must come out of the heart in response to perceiving God's grace, not be demanded as just part of a process.

Even worship without love and justice is displeasing to God and calls into question the reality of faith. God's people reflecting his character revealed in Jesus is the fundamental aspect of witnessing to his love and grace. So the starting point is our quality of life - every little aspect of it.

An integral part of our living in accordance with God's law of faith and love is that we help other people to come to know and love God for themselves - since the eternal salvation which flows from this is every person's greatest need, even if they themselves are not aware of it. Because God is in himself innately lovable, being the source of all goodness and joy, helping people to love him is essentially a matter of revealing the truth about his nature to them. This revelation of the truth of God's nature takes many forms, including words, actions and relationships, but whatever form it takes it can be thought of as witnessing to Christ. Witness, then, is that supremely important aspect of love which aims to help people towards a real and personal relationship with God through revealing his nature to them.

In the workplace it is important to be conscientious, but never so task-centred that we don't have time to help and serve colleagues, or so that we are seen not be approachable. Both here and if one is going to a new social setting it is important to let your standards be known early. This is not by way of any boasting or Bible-bashing, but simply to nail your colours to the mast, quietly letting others know what sort of standards you have so that you are less likely to compromise them with other people watching. Correspondingly, if you do allow your standards to slip you can easily find yourself in a situation where you feel embarrassed to be calling yourself a Christian, even if you do want to be open about your faith. This is because your life witness has been below what you and others would expect of Christian standards. Therefore it is safest to let people know where you stand early on, so that the scope for temptation is curtailed.

We should aim to show a lifestyle that is engaging but controlled. The first major area requiring control is in our attitude to others whom we do not find at all congenial. Socially we can avoid such people, but in work-related environments we cannot. It is very easy to be preoccupied with their faults or disagreeable idiosyncrasies rather that making a big effort to identify the positive things about them and focus on those, especially in conversations with friends. This calls for humility, and for us to reject what might be seen as our right to take offence or pass judgment on their intellectual or social skills or their attitude. In fact it often happens that when we do focus on positives, and don't let ourselves be drawn into articulating negatives or become simply screwed up with annoyance and indignation, that we find them a lot more agreeable and pleasant to work with. This is not simply the power of positive thinking, though that certainly comes into it. It's much more a matter of prayerfully and with self-discipline drawing on God's grace to transform the situation, and maybe also the person (as well as ourselves!).

On a different tack, and in the context of the first part of this book, we need to show that we have as full and positive a view of sex as anyone else and that we enjoy our sexuality without indulging it. Sadly, much Christian witness suggests a ghettoish avoidance of any sexual excitement. Perhaps for some that is the only way to stay on track, but hopefully for most, some measure of self control will enable us to be seen living full and not depauperate social lives.

Among friends who are essentially hedonist, we need to give some thought to how we can applaud the good things they enjoy - as being given by God - while drawing attention to the way they enjoy them and any selfishness of lifestyle - which is not necessarily part of hedonism. Simply being negative is both unduly offputting and risks conveying the impression we see sex, socialising and other particular pleasures as sinful in themselves. A classical wowser or killjoy approach.

With regard to the hedonism of socialising, food, drink, etc or other pleasures which are not intrinsically wrong, the issue is moderation and how it may detract from other priorities such as relationships. With sex the same may apply, but the presenting issue is usually the context - it would be hard to "have too much of it" with a marriage partner!!

A guy in his 20s may be a positive example of using his sexuality to drive his social engagement in a considerate and generous way, operating without much restraint exactly as he is biologically and emotionally designed to. How should we react? To a large extent we can rejoice to see it. However, without the constraints of wisdom (built into a Christian approach which eschews sex before marriage) he has a significant challenge in pursuing the main aspects of a feasibility study for life partner, and is operating in disregard for the designed and appropriate commitment context for sexual intimacy. Properly evaluating the long-term prospects of relationships tends to be submerged by the enjoyment of sexual indulgence. Immediate rewards don't actually help towards gaining the long-term prize.

However, in many ways his approach - with a healthy openness - is more estimable than that of some Christians we know who toe the line legally but deny God's gift by avoiding any kind of sexually-charged relationship. But for the absence of any priority on constraint, he is functioning - as an unmarried person - more in line with God's design than many uptight Christians who are staying well out of temptation's way. That doesn't make promiscuity right, but perhaps it helps us focus on what is wrong rather than appearing to be negative about sex itself. The issue with full sexual expression in a steady relationship is not that a person (or two) is doing something intrinsically wrong, like stealing, lying, violence or indulging greed, envy or pride. Nor is it using something good to excess. It is that this sexual indulgence is occurring outside its proper relationship context of lifelong commitment. Of course, hedonism certainly isn't holiness, but neither is asceticism which arises from aversion to what God has created good.

A related problem is how we understand and talk about 'love'. For the Christian sex is but a small though significant part of their understanding of love, for many others the 'L' word is hardly used outside a family context without it having some sexual connotation. Words like 'affection' do not have the implication of commitment and belonging in friendship, let alone the proactive aspects of agape. While talking as a Christian about love is unlikely to be misunderstood, it can sound a bit odd in sexualised society.

The most conspicuous, though by no means only, manifestation of Christian witness is evangelism, in which the Gospel message - concerning God's gracious sending of his Son to die in order to purchase salvation for sinful man - is explained to unbelievers in a manner which helps them to choose for themselves how they wish to respond to God's claim on their lives. This presupposes that they have moved from apathy to being reflective on the major issues and meaning of life.

It is then very important that as Christians we are always ready to share the message of our faith with those we know and love - though, naturally, only when the time is appropriate, and in a suitable manner. It can be tempting to try to avoid this often uncomfortable aspect of Christian discipleship, and even to produce theologies which redefine it into something empty so that we feel justified in neglecting it. But a faithful Christian must boldly face up to his or her duties in this area, and so be preparing him- or herself for this most sacred of tasks.

It ought to go without saying that the most important aspect of evangelism, and indeed of all witness, is that recognition of God's sovereign power which is expressed in prayer. If we are not praying about our witness, asking God to go before us, with us and after us, to prepare, to guide, and to convict, then not only are we making things difficult for ourselves but, what is worse, we are in danger of acting outside God's will and so doing more harm than good. It is the Holy Spirit who converts people, not us.

Some of us have experienced how sometimes when witnessing to someone we are able to find words which are clearly not ours, or a way of explaining something which we could never have thought of ourselves. Maybe even a Bible verse can pop into your head which if you tried to think of normally you would never have been able to. This is such a clear indication of how God works through us, rather than us simply working for God - which would mean witness was more about us. It is God working through what we are saying and doing that is able to change someone.

For many people considering the gospel and the claims of Christ on their lives is a remote possibility until they have first become reflective and able or willing to evaluate their own actions and motives. This may not happen without some external cause which brings them up short and provokes a rethink about life and its meaning or even purpose.

The commission for Christians is to make disciples, not simply to seek 'decisions'. There needs to be follow through and ongoing engagement, leading to a new Christian knowing the fullness of God by his Holy Spirit.

Beyond evangelism, though by no means neglecting it, our whole lives as Christians are, at their best, witnesses to the truth about God's nature. By living lives of love founded on hearts of faith we reveal the character of the God who is calling all people to know and love him, and so bear witness to Christ. This witness enables those who encounter us to see in action both the love of God for us, and also the goodness and wisdom of the law which he inspires and empowers his worshippers to follow. Fortunately that doesn't mean we have to be perfect, but we should try to be consistent and authentic, emulating Jesus' servant atitude.

In our everyday life this witness can manifest itself in manifold yet often mundane ways, and one of the keys to effective whole-life witness is learning to discern the secret glory hidden in little acts of love.⁵⁹ How often does one hear: "There were some Christians ... I watched them over many months ... they had something I didn't have", etc? Would people later comment in that way if they watched us? In The Message Eugene Petersen renders a well known passage as: "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention of God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognise what he wants from you and quickly respond to it."⁶⁰

Another aspect of witness is how we show our values in the workplace. There is no room for bad work attitudes, shoddy workmanship, being unreliable, expecting things on the cheap, being slow to pay bills, or being generally inconsiderate. The fact of the matter is that every Christian is continually a witness of Christ. The only question is this: are we a good or bad witness?⁶¹

As Christians we can and should be missionaries seven days a week - not in some far-off developing country but in our workplaces. Finding out how God would like to use us in our current situation is the most important thing. If we approach a new walk of life or a new situation without the attitude of finding out what it is God wants us to do in it, then we will most likely miss the whole point of him leading us into it. We may see a new job as simply a job, but God sees it more widely, at least to some extent as a mission field, and we need to be able to share that vision. Witness is an aspect of our ministry in one sense, but more basically it is how we display Christ's character to others as a result of what he, through his Holy Spirit, may have been doing in us.

One mundane but practical aspect of witness in a culture of consumerism is avoidance of waste, especially as popular attention is devoted to sustainable development. Waste is an ethical, not primarily a resources issue. It is an insult to the Creator. Prima facie, it is more faithful stewardship of any resource to use it efficiently and avoid wasting it. This goes beyond economics to ethics and how we demonstrate the notion of "enough". It relates to how we use energy and resources as consumers, and prefer durable and repairable goods to throw-aways - though ethics and economic stewardship need to balance out somewhere. Sometimes the ethics of waste are in one sense subsumed by advocacy of living more simply. But beyond concern with levels of consumption that may be unjustified, or with lost or misused resources that benefit no-one, is the more fundamental affront to the bountiful Creator, and corresponding poor witness.

The Christian witness of faith and love should find its expression in every aspect of our lives. Hence one way of understanding all the guidance proffered in this book is that it enables practical witnessing to Christ through every part of life. Although evangelism as a deliberate activity ought never to be neglected, witnessing to God's truth is something which can come to permeate the whole of a Christian's life so that it even becomes inseparable from it. This is the high ideal which Jesus himself embodied, supremely manifesting in his own person the reality of God's kingdom rule come to earth, and it is an ideal which all Christians are called, however imperfectly, to aspire towards.

ch 9 Discussion questions:
How much do you think God's character is seen in your life by others?
In particular, how are you perceived in the workplace or where you spend most time outside home?
How do you cope with colleagues who are a real pain?
What are the main challenges of witnessing into a hedonist culture?
How do you witness to a positive and joyful view of your sexuality? How do you point to questions of context without coming across as repressed or weird?
How do you talk about love? How do you show it ?
Where do you find it hardest to share the gospel? How do you choose whom to broach this with? How much does prayer come into it?
How do you witness to values contra consumerism?

Goto chapter Previous a, p, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, a1, a2, a3, a4, a5 Next

⁵⁹ See C. S. Lewis' famous essay, The Weight of Glory.

⁶⁰ The Message, Rom 12:2.

⁶¹ From Peter Kentley, OnWatch bulletin 14/5/06.

	Down To Earth Discipleship . Getting real with issues facing young Christians today Table of Contents Chapter 9 Goto chapter Previous a, p, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, a1, a2, a3, a4, a5, a6 Next 9. Witness - to who and what? Christian character is seen in lifestyle and relationships, not religiosity. How we show our values in the workplace is important. God requires his people to express his character. Progressively, and often falteringly on our part, he enables this by the work of his Holy Spirit in the lives of those who become his disciples. Christian character is seen in lifestyle and relationships, not in religiosity. We need to be witnesses to God's love and grace, not to decency, morality Christian lifestyle, or rules. Sin must be understood as a relational problem, not essentially a moral one. Repentance must come out of the heart in response to perceiving God's grace, not be demanded as just part of a process. Even worship without love and justice is displeasing to God and calls into question the reality of faith. God's people reflecting his character revealed in Jesus is the fundamental aspect of witnessing to his love and grace. So the starting point is our quality of life - every little aspect of it. An integral part of our living in accordance with God's law of faith and love is that we help other people to come to know and love God for themselves - since the eternal salvation which flows from this is every person's greatest need, even if they themselves are not aware of it. Because God is in himself innately lovable, being the source of all goodness and joy, helping people to love him is essentially a matter of revealing the truth about his nature to them. This revelation of the truth of God's nature takes many forms, including words, actions and relationships, but whatever form it takes it can be thought of as witnessing to Christ. Witness, then, is that supremely important aspect of love which aims to help people towards a real and personal relationship with God through revealing his nature to them. In the workplace it is important to be conscientious, but never so task-centred that we don't have time to help and serve colleagues, or so that we are seen not be approachable. Both here and if one is going to a new social setting it is important to let your standards be known early. This is not by way of any boasting or Bible-bashing, but simply to nail your colours to the mast, quietly letting others know what sort of standards you have so that you are less likely to compromise them with other people watching. Correspondingly, if you do allow your standards to slip you can easily find yourself in a situation where you feel embarrassed to be calling yourself a Christian, even if you do want to be open about your faith. This is because your life witness has been below what you and others would expect of Christian standards. Therefore it is safest to let people know where you stand early on, so that the scope for temptation is curtailed. We should aim to show a lifestyle that is engaging but controlled. The first major area requiring control is in our attitude to others whom we do not find at all congenial. Socially we can avoid such people, but in work-related environments we cannot. It is very easy to be preoccupied with their faults or disagreeable idiosyncrasies rather that making a big effort to identify the positive things about them and focus on those, especially in conversations with friends. This calls for humility, and for us to reject what might be seen as our right to take offence or pass judgment on their intellectual or social skills or their attitude. In fact it often happens that when we do focus on positives, and don't let ourselves be drawn into articulating negatives or become simply screwed up with annoyance and indignation, that we find them a lot more agreeable and pleasant to work with. This is not simply the power of positive thinking, though that certainly comes into it. It's much more a matter of prayerfully and with self-discipline drawing on God's grace to transform the situation, and maybe also the person (as well as ourselves!). On a different tack, and in the context of the first part of this book, we need to show that we have as full and positive a view of sex as anyone else and that we enjoy our sexuality without indulging it. Sadly, much Christian witness suggests a ghettoish avoidance of any sexual excitement. Perhaps for some that is the only way to stay on track, but hopefully for most, some measure of self control will enable us to be seen living full and not depauperate social lives. Among friends who are essentially hedonist, we need to give some thought to how we can applaud the good things they enjoy - as being given by God - while drawing attention to the way they enjoy them and any selfishness of lifestyle - which is not necessarily part of hedonism. Simply being negative is both unduly offputting and risks conveying the impression we see sex, socialising and other particular pleasures as sinful in themselves. A classical wowser or killjoy approach. With regard to the hedonism of socialising, food, drink, etc or other pleasures which are not intrinsically wrong, the issue is moderation and how it may detract from other priorities such as relationships. With sex the same may apply, but the presenting issue is usually the context - it would be hard to "have too much of it" with a marriage partner!! A guy in his 20s may be a positive example of using his sexuality to drive his social engagement in a considerate and generous way, operating without much restraint exactly as he is biologically and emotionally designed to. How should we react? To a large extent we can rejoice to see it. However, without the constraints of wisdom (built into a Christian approach which eschews sex before marriage) he has a significant challenge in pursuing the main aspects of a feasibility study for life partner, and is operating in disregard for the designed and appropriate commitment context for sexual intimacy. Properly evaluating the long-term prospects of relationships tends to be submerged by the enjoyment of sexual indulgence. Immediate rewards don't actually help towards gaining the long-term prize. However, in many ways his approach - with a healthy openness - is more estimable than that of some Christians we know who toe the line legally but deny God's gift by avoiding any kind of sexually-charged relationship. But for the absence of any priority on constraint, he is functioning - as an unmarried person - more in line with God's design than many uptight Christians who are staying well out of temptation's way. That doesn't make promiscuity right, but perhaps it helps us focus on what is wrong rather than appearing to be negative about sex itself. The issue with full sexual expression in a steady relationship is not that a person (or two) is doing something intrinsically wrong, like stealing, lying, violence or indulging greed, envy or pride. Nor is it using something good to excess. It is that this sexual indulgence is occurring outside its proper relationship context of lifelong commitment. Of course, hedonism certainly isn't holiness, but neither is asceticism which arises from aversion to what God has created good. A related problem is how we understand and talk about 'love'. For the Christian sex is but a small though significant part of their understanding of love, for many others the 'L' word is hardly used outside a family context without it having some sexual connotation. Words like 'affection' do not have the implication of commitment and belonging in friendship, let alone the proactive aspects of agape. While talking as a Christian about love is unlikely to be misunderstood, it can sound a bit odd in sexualised society. The most conspicuous, though by no means only, manifestation of Christian witness is evangelism, in which the Gospel message - concerning God's gracious sending of his Son to die in order to purchase salvation for sinful man - is explained to unbelievers in a manner which helps them to choose for themselves how they wish to respond to God's claim on their lives. This presupposes that they have moved from apathy to being reflective on the major issues and meaning of life. It is then very important that as Christians we are always ready to share the message of our faith with those we know and love - though, naturally, only when the time is appropriate, and in a suitable manner. It can be tempting to try to avoid this often uncomfortable aspect of Christian discipleship, and even to produce theologies which redefine it into something empty so that we feel justified in neglecting it. But a faithful Christian must boldly face up to his or her duties in this area, and so be preparing him- or herself for this most sacred of tasks. It ought to go without saying that the most important aspect of evangelism, and indeed of all witness, is that recognition of God's sovereign power which is expressed in prayer. If we are not praying about our witness, asking God to go before us, with us and after us, to prepare, to guide, and to convict, then not only are we making things difficult for ourselves but, what is worse, we are in danger of acting outside God's will and so doing more harm than good. It is the Holy Spirit who converts people, not us. Some of us have experienced how sometimes when witnessing to someone we are able to find words which are clearly not ours, or a way of explaining something which we could never have thought of ourselves. Maybe even a Bible verse can pop into your head which if you tried to think of normally you would never have been able to. This is such a clear indication of how God works through us, rather than us simply working for God - which would mean witness was more about us. It is God working through what we are saying and doing that is able to change someone. For many people considering the gospel and the claims of Christ on their lives is a remote possibility until they have first become reflective and able or willing to evaluate their own actions and motives. This may not happen without some external cause which brings them up short and provokes a rethink about life and its meaning or even purpose. The commission for Christians is to make disciples, not simply to seek 'decisions'. There needs to be follow through and ongoing engagement, leading to a new Christian knowing the fullness of God by his Holy Spirit. Beyond evangelism, though by no means neglecting it, our whole lives as Christians are, at their best, witnesses to the truth about God's nature. By living lives of love founded on hearts of faith we reveal the character of the God who is calling all people to know and love him, and so bear witness to Christ. This witness enables those who encounter us to see in action both the love of God for us, and also the goodness and wisdom of the law which he inspires and empowers his worshippers to follow. Fortunately that doesn't mean we have to be perfect, but we should try to be consistent and authentic, emulating Jesus' servant atitude. In our everyday life this witness can manifest itself in manifold yet often mundane ways, and one of the keys to effective whole-life witness is learning to discern the secret glory hidden in little acts of love.⁵⁹ How often does one hear: "There were some Christians ... I watched them over many months ... they had something I didn't have", etc? Would people later comment in that way if they watched us? In The Message Eugene Petersen renders a well known passage as: "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention of God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognise what he wants from you and quickly respond to it."⁶⁰ Another aspect of witness is how we show our values in the workplace. There is no room for bad work attitudes, shoddy workmanship, being unreliable, expecting things on the cheap, being slow to pay bills, or being generally inconsiderate. The fact of the matter is that every Christian is continually a witness of Christ. The only question is this: are we a good or bad witness?⁶¹ As Christians we can and should be missionaries seven days a week - not in some far-off developing country but in our workplaces. Finding out how God would like to use us in our current situation is the most important thing. If we approach a new walk of life or a new situation without the attitude of finding out what it is God wants us to do in it, then we will most likely miss the whole point of him leading us into it. We may see a new job as simply a job, but God sees it more widely, at least to some extent as a mission field, and we need to be able to share that vision. Witness is an aspect of our ministry in one sense, but more basically it is how we display Christ's character to others as a result of what he, through his Holy Spirit, may have been doing in us. One mundane but practical aspect of witness in a culture of consumerism is avoidance of waste, especially as popular attention is devoted to sustainable development. Waste is an ethical, not primarily a resources issue. It is an insult to the Creator. Prima facie, it is more faithful stewardship of any resource to use it efficiently and avoid wasting it. This goes beyond economics to ethics and how we demonstrate the notion of "enough". It relates to how we use energy and resources as consumers, and prefer durable and repairable goods to throw-aways - though ethics and economic stewardship need to balance out somewhere. Sometimes the ethics of waste are in one sense subsumed by advocacy of living more simply. But beyond concern with levels of consumption that may be unjustified, or with lost or misused resources that benefit no-one, is the more fundamental affront to the bountiful Creator, and corresponding poor witness. The Christian witness of faith and love should find its expression in every aspect of our lives. Hence one way of understanding all the guidance proffered in this book is that it enables practical witnessing to Christ through every part of life. Although evangelism as a deliberate activity ought never to be neglected, witnessing to God's truth is something which can come to permeate the whole of a Christian's life so that it even becomes inseparable from it. This is the high ideal which Jesus himself embodied, supremely manifesting in his own person the reality of God's kingdom rule come to earth, and it is an ideal which all Christians are called, however imperfectly, to aspire towards. ch 9 Discussion questions: How much do you think God's character is seen in your life by others? In particular, how are you perceived in the workplace or where you spend most time outside home? How do you cope with colleagues who are a real pain? What are the main challenges of witnessing into a hedonist culture? How do you witness to a positive and joyful view of your sexuality? How do you point to questions of context without coming across as repressed or weird? How do you talk about love? How do you show it ? Where do you find it hardest to share the gospel? How do you choose whom to broach this with? How much does prayer come into it? How do you witness to values contra consumerism? Back to top Goto chapter Previous a, p, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, a1, a2, a3, a4, a5 Next ⁵⁹ See C. S. Lewis' famous essay, The Weight of Glory. ⁶⁰ The Message, Rom 12:2. ⁶¹ From Peter Kentley, OnWatch bulletin 14/5/06.