Boring Testimonies

"I've been a Christian my whole life. I feel like I'm just a Christian because I was brought up that way. I feel like I need to re-think the whole thing."

I was talking with a guy who was wrestling with his faith and doubting just about everything. He was particularly struggling with the fact that he grew up a Christian. Had he been socialized into Christianity or was it genuinely his?

"I think I'd be able to talk much more effectively to other people if I had a different type of experience, maybe if I tried some other things for a while. I think that I'd be more settled in it myself as well."

Doing ministry among dis-illusioned Bible-belt college students, I have this conversation a lot.

"I agree that people's stories that have a variety of experiences and in the end come to Christ have a certain compelling-ness to them," I said. "But I don't think that you have to explore every other possible alternative before you can settle in on the truth. That'd be impossible, you can't explore every alternative. It is possible to know what is right without experiencing alternatives. I don't have try to get 2+2 to equal 3, 5, 9, and 12 to know and come to a confident conclusion that it equals 4."

"So it might be that you need to do some exploration before you can firmly believe that your faith is your own. But do not be so quick to assume that it's a foregone conclusion that the only possible way that you can know that Christianity is real is by shelving it for a season and trying a bunch of other options. That might be what you need to do. But it might not."

"And besides," I continued, "here's the good news about your boring testimony: you've never known a day where you didn't know that God loved you. You've always had some sense of God's love and watch care over you. Your whole life. Every day. That's how it was before everything went wrong. That's how it was intended to be."

This is good news for all of us who have "boring" testimonies of God's work in our lives: we don't have to experience darkness to know the light. We don't have to play the prodigal and run away to love the rich blessings of life at home. We don't have to first-hand experience lost-ness, the wages of sin, the let-down of living in the false promises of our culture and the soul-destruction of life according the ways of the Land of the Ruins to know that we are living in reality.

Here's how we know this is true: this is how Jesus lived. Jesus had the ultimate boring testimony. He never sinned, yet no one knew better the destructive power of sin. He lived in contact with the Father always and perfectly. And because of this, no one knew better than he did how messed up the "alternatives" were...no one spoke more deliberately, passionately and recklessly about the deceitfulness of sin.

Finally, he gave his life for people who lived in the darkness of sin that he himself never once experienced, in order that we who are born in sin might not have to live there any longer. Those of us who have been spared a more tangible experience of this because we were blessed to live in homes that brought us up into faith are invited to lean into the blessing and not curse it.