(Acts 1: 1 – 14)
1. Who is a witness? A witness is a person present at some event and is able to give information about it. A witness is a person giving sworn testimony. A witness tells all he has seen. A witness is a person whose existence attests or proves something. A witness has experiential knowledge of something. For example a person who has never gone through the experience of pregnancy and labor can never talk about the experience of child birth. A person who has never eaten an apple can never describe the taste. From these definitions, I see two ways by which one can be a witness: by seeing something or by experiencing something. An effective witness should be both.
2. The example of the disciples: The disciples were the first to witness all that Jesus did. They had a first-hand experience of the miracles of God. They saw water turned into wine, they saw Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter raised from the dead. They saw the woman with the issue of blood healed from her infirmity. They saw all that Jesus did while He was with them in the world. That was their first level of witnessing.
The second level of witnessing for the apostles was the experiential knowledge of the power of God. That was what made their witness effective. After spending three and a half years with Jesus, our Lord understood that the only way for the Apostles witness to be effective was to receive the Holy Spirit, so before He went back to heaven, He also told them about the second level of witnessing. In Acts 1:1-14, Jesus told them about the promise and the experience of the Holy Spirit which they must have before their witness could be effective. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down and they had an experiential knowledge of the power of God.
3. Receiving Empowerment for witness:
a.
Through prayer: The Apostles and the other believers were empowered by
the Holy Spirit while they were in the upper room praying on the day of
Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). We must cry out to God to receive empowerment
for witnessing because we cannot do it by ourselves.
b. Through the word: We need to study and understand the word of God in
order to be effective witnesses. There are basic scriptures about
witnessing that we should be familiar with, for example John 3:16,
Romans 3:23, and 6:23.
c. Through our life’s testimony: Apostle Paul said in II Cor. 3:2 that
“Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men”.
Every child of God is an open letter or book that others are reading.
What kind of message we are sending out with our life’s testimony will
determine whether others will be attracted to Jesus or not. The Bible
says we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We should
therefore let our light so shine that others may see our good work and
glorify our father in heaven (Matthew 5:13 -16).
