The Power Of A Testimony
Last Sunday’s sermon was preached by Pastor Harry on “The Power Of A Testimony” (Romans 10:14-17). The sermon and the whole service can be watched on our WIC YouTube Channel:
We often treat our personal story as the least impressive thing we have to offer. Theology feels weightier. Doctrine feels more credible. A carefully reasoned argument feels more persuasive. And so we hold our testimony back — unsure of its value, embarrassed by its ordinariness, convinced that what happened to us isn't significant enough to share.
But what if that instinct is exactly wrong?
Scripture suggests that a testimony — a simple account of what God has done — is one of the most powerful forces in the Kingdom. Not because of who is telling it, but precisely because of who it points to. Three figures from the Gospels show us just how far a single story can travel, and just how much damage it can do to the kingdom of darkness.
The Woman at the Well: When the Wrong Person Carries the Right Word
In John 4, Jesus sits at Jacob's Well in Samaria at noon — an unusual time for anyone to draw water. And yet a woman arrives, alone. In a culture where women drew water in groups, in the cool of the morning, her solitary presence at midday tells us everything: she is an outcast, avoided by her own community.
She was the wrong gender, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong marital history, at the wrong time of day. By every social calculation of her world, she was the last person anyone would have chosen to carry an important message.
And yet Jesus waited specifically for her.
When she encountered Him — really encountered Him — she left her water jar and ran back to the very people who had excluded her. "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did," she said. And John records that many Samaritans believed because of her testimony. The village that had shunned her became the congregation that received salvation through her.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition preserves what happened next. Known as Photini — "the luminous one" — this woman went on to become a missionary and martyr. She traveled to Carthage, then to Rome, where she is said to have converted members of Emperor Nero's own household before being martyred for her faith in AD 66. She was eventually thrown into a well — the very kind of place where her story began.
From a noontime conversation at a well in Samaria, to the emperor's palace in Rome. That is what a testimony does when it is released.
The Gadarene Demoniac: When One Voice Prepares a Multitude
In Mark 5, Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee — deliberately, purposefully — to reach a man no one else would go near. He lived among the tombs, chained and shrieking, cutting himself. He was Gentile, living in an unclean land, possessed by a Legion of demons. By every Jewish measure of his day, he was the most comprehensively unclean person imaginable.
Jesus healed him completely. And when the man begged to come with the disciples, Jesus refused and gave him a simple commission: "Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you."
He was told to go home. He went to ten cities.
Here is what we often miss: the next time Jesus returned to that region, four thousand Gentiles were waiting for Him. The feeding of the four thousand — usually preached as a standalone miracle — is inseparable from what came before it. That crowd gathered because one unnamed, uncredentialed, formerly demon-possessed man had spent the intervening time telling his story across the Decapolis.
He never knew about the four thousand. He couldn't have. He simply obeyed, and the harvest came after he had already moved on.
Theologian Tom Wright calls this man "the first apostle to the Gentiles." He had no theological training, no letters of recommendation, no religious infrastructure. He had one thing — what Jesus had done for him. And that was enough to prepare an entire region for the gospel.
Your testimony is doing work you cannot see. The harvest it prepares may not be yours to witness.
Mary Magdalene: When the Inadmissible Carries the Indispensable
Mary Magdalene arrived at the tomb before dawn, weeping. She had been there at the cross. She had been there at the burial. She was the most faithful, most consistent witness in the passion narrative — present when almost everyone else had fled.
And then Jesus appeared to her. He called her by name. And He sent her: "Go to my brothers and tell them."
Here is the historical weight of that moment. In the first century, Jewish law rendered a woman's testimony inadmissible in court. The Mishnah states plainly: "The oath of testimony is conducted with men and not women." Roman courts were little better. A woman's word, legally speaking, counted for nothing.
And yet God placed the most consequential testimony in human history — the resurrection of Jesus Christ — entirely in the hands of a woman.
This is not an accident. Scholars note that this is actually one of the strongest arguments for the historicity of the resurrection: no first-century forger trying to persuade a Jewish audience would have invented a woman as the primary witness. The fact that all four Gospels agree on Mary Magdalene's presence at the tomb is evidence of authenticity, not embellishment. God did not just use an unlikely messenger — He made the unlikely messenger foundational.
St. Thomas Aquinas called her Apostola Apostolorum — the Apostle to the Apostles. She carried the word to the ones who would carry it to the world. Every sermon ever preached about the resurrection stands downstream of what Mary said in a garden before sunrise.
The Thread That Runs Through All Three
A social outcast in Samaria. A Gentile demoniac in a cemetery. A woman in a garden who had no legal right to testify.
None of them were the obvious choice. All of them were, by their world's standards, disqualified. And all of them spoke anyway — and the consequences exceeded anything a human strategist would have designed.
This is the nature of a testimony. It does not derive its power from the credibility of the messenger. It derives its power from the reality of what God has done. The Apostle Paul understood this: "How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone speaking?" (Romans 10:14). Testimony is not optional in God's economy. It is the mechanism through which faith travels.
You may feel disqualified. Too ordinary. Too broken. Too far from the kind of polished, credible witness you imagine God would prefer. But Scripture suggests that the disqualified messenger is often precisely the one God is waiting to use — because when they speak, no one can credit the messenger. The glory goes entirely to God.
So let the redeemed of the Lord say so.
Your story is not small. It is a seed. And you may never know what forest grows from it.
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