Sacred Witness

The gospel is a love story, not a action adventure that teaches you to labor in vain.

You don’t strive for holiness, you receive righteousness and He makes you holy. He marries you and carries you across a threshold of covenant and His canopy over you is love.

We are living witnesses of His mercy and a walking billboard of His grace. There isn’t a formula to follow, but there is a goodness to be embraced.

To be a witness is much more than observing, it’s a beholding that leads you into the boldness of becoming.

To the one who has been immersed in the degree of love that transforms from the inside out, you live life as a sacred witness that the same spirit in Jesus, is now in YOU.

Don’t let the mentality be:

“I must give my life for the gospel.”

Instead believe:

“Jesus gave His life and THAT is the gospel.”

Living my life as an embodiment of that kind of love transforms me into a radiant witness that makes evident that I’ve given my life to His gospel. This is the good news that has no shadows of hiding. The gospel is nothing but light. There is no gloomy shadow of darkness mingled with subtle beams of hope. The gospel is penetrating and transformative.

Surrender to the sacred gospel and that will make you a witness. The beauty of the gospel is the exchange we get to make inside of it. It’s the one that doesn’t promote fairness, but exclusivity. It’s a jealousy that says: What will He let fall away if He gets you in return? The answer is absolutely overwhelming. It’s completely undeserved, but it’s the standard of love set from the beginning. The standard is Jesus, His pearl is His creation, and He will stop at nothing until you shine like His New Jerusalem, His city set upon a hill that cannot be hidden.

The power of the gospel is the relentless love that carries you back to your seat with Him, restores what has been lost, and keeps no testimony of your false self. He restores your innocence and declares His intentions to be with you as one.

To become a witness, you must trade the logical mind of the fallen and put on the mind of the loving King who carries you back to His court and declares, “now you’re home.” Your witness for the sake of the gospel is fruitless if it has any testimony of self help attached to it. You didn’t save yourself by choosing Jesus. You were saved because of Jesus and everything you have been through testifies of His great love for you. You choose Him only because He chose you first. You are His prize. He crowns you with authority and no matter how you try to throw it back at His feet, He crowns you with more of the same. Under the weight of this goodness you bow your head and He keeps raising your eyes to meet with His. The witness of worship isn’t the songs we sing to Him, it’s the exchange we make with Him. The reason why much of the world doesn’t know Him is because they don’t see Him in us. The kind of witness He intended us to become is controversial with such a strong message of mercy that it will cause the system of this age to hate your witness the way the religious system hated Jesus.

The witness of the gospel is not an exchange of equal parts. The witness of the gospel is that I could not save myself, but His love kept reaching. I held on tight trying to make everything work, while He wanted me to really let go and let His love prove His strength. Most of the time we carry a shield of faith trying to prove our might, while the handle we grip is saying fear. Maybe the shield of faith is hands that are open, fully surrendered and not trying to preserve ourselves. Maybe our truest measure of faith is rooted in surrender, not preservation. This takes away the fear of losing, the fear of being misunderstood and even the fear of dying. We have nothing to prove but the true nature of His love and devotion for His creation.

Understand that to become a “doer of the word’, is not you learning to merely act like Jesus. The call to “action” can be nothing more than the cue for the actor who is learning to play a role, but to one being called into true identity. They learn that acting is for the actors and the doing is for those who could be no different than who they authentically are becoming. There are no masks for sons. There is no one saying, “put your best foot forward.”

The early church apostles did not go to their deaths as actors playing in a role as the disciples of Jesus. There is no way anyone willingly goes to their death for another without an immersion in love. They were willing to do so as ones who were fully possessed and satisfied by the love of the Father. But like seeds that go into the ground and die, their willingness to surrender their lives sprung like a field of glory which boldly proclaims, “we were loved, so we will love.” Although we call those early witnesses martyrs, the evidence of their love wasn’t defined in death, but in the lives they lived, the light that still streams from their words and the glory that is covering the earth today.

I am not a witness because I am perfect. I am a witness because I am perfectly loved.

Romans 12:1-2 (TPT)

“Beloved friends, what should be our proper response to God’s marvelous mercies? I encourage you to surrender yourselves to God to be His sacred, living sacrifices. And live in holiness, experiencing all that delights His heart. For this becomes your genuine expression of worship. Stop imitating the ideals and opinions of the culture around you, but be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit through a total reformation of how you think. This will empower you to discern God’s will as you live a beautiful life, satisfying and perfect in His eyes.”

1 John 1:5 (TPT)

“This is the message that we have heard from Him and now declare to you, that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.”