Our Sunday Table

When the Testimony Touches Us

This week’s scripture: Acts 22

This Sunday we sat with Acts chapter 22, and I have not been able to shake it. Paul is standing in front of a crowd in Jerusalem, and he does not preach a sermon. He just tells his story. Where he came from. How hard he had fought against the very people standing in front of him. How Jesus met him on a road he thought he understood, and turned his whole life around.

And they listened. That is what stayed with me. They listened through his past. They listened through the Damascus road. They were quiet for all of it, right up until his story reached them. The moment Paul said the Lord was sending him to the Gentiles, to the people they had decided did not belong, the listening stopped and the shouting started. His testimony was welcome as long as it stayed in his life. It became a problem when it had something to say about theirs.

I know that room, because I have been in it, and if we are honest, most of us have. We can sit with somebody’s story at the table and nod all the way through it, the addiction, the divorce, the prodigal years, and feel genuinely moved by what God did for them. It costs us nothing while it is about them. It gets uncomfortable when the story turns a corner and starts naming the people we have written off, the grudge we are still holding, the obedience we have been quietly negotiating. That is usually right where we stop listening too. Not out loud. We just close something inside.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Paul did not fall apart when the room turned. He did not take back the part they hated, and he did not shrink his story down to the size of their approval. He could stand there because his identity was never the crowd’s to give him. Jesus had already met him on that road and named him His own. Applause could not add to that, and rejection could not take it away.

Some of us are still editing our testimony for the room. We tell the beginning and the victory and skip the middle, the part where Jesus confronted us, the part where He sent us toward people we never would have chosen on our own. But the middle is usually the part somebody else is starving to hear. And the parts of the Word we would rather skip in our own reading are often the exact parts aimed at our healing.

So this week, do not only admire Paul’s courage from a safe distance. Let the testimony touch you. Let it reach the person you have written off. Let it reach the part of your own story you keep leaving out.

This week, tell your testimony to one person, and tell the middle too, the part where Jesus confronted you and changed your direction. One person. The whole story. Do not edit Him out of it to keep the room comfortable.

Lord, thank You for meeting us the way You met Paul, in the middle of a road we were sure about. Give us soft hearts for the parts of Your Word that touch us, not just the parts that comfort us, and give us the courage to keep telling the truth of our story when the room gets quiet. So this week, maybe sit with the Lord and ask: where does my testimony stop, right before it has something to do with me? Let Him finish the sentence. Amen.