After the
Sanhedrin told Peter and John to stop speaking and teaching in the name of
Jesus, they responded, “Whether it is right in the sight of God for us to
obey you rather than God, you be the judges. It is impossible for us not to
speak about what we have seen and heard.” [4:13-21]
To have that
faith and that attitude is remarkable to me. But we may say to ourselves, “Well, they were
eyewitnesses to those things. What have
we seen and heard like that?” I always
need to remember, especially during this Easter week, that there have been
times when I have experienced Easter. There
were times when I was discouraged, or times when there was a crisis out of
which I couldn’t see a way, and somehow, I made it through. I didn’t make it through by my own power – it
was by the grace of God. Those times
were experiences of Easter! If you’ve
had similar experiences, you’ve experienced Easter! There is something you’ve seen and heard!
And when we
can recognize those times as signs of God’s love for us, perhaps we could find
it impossible not to speak about what we’ve seen and heard. I think our most effective testimony is not
quoting Scriptures or church dogma, but about witnessing to what God has done for
us in Jesus Christ.
And may our
testimony not only be in words, but in how we live our lives. The reason Peter and John came before the
Sanhedrin, is that they healed a beggar in the name of Jesus. May our witness include acts of healing and
service to others, so that what we’ve seen and heard in our own lives can be
communicated in a way that everyone can understand.
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