Loyal Jones and Billy Ed Wheeler recount a story out of Sevierville, Tennessee. It happened during a revival there. It seems a barber got "saved." The preacher was excited about it. He told the barber that he had a wonderful opportunity to witness to Christ. After all, he met a lot of people and spent a lot of time with them. He had the perfect opportunity to talk to be them about religion and salvation.

The barber was a bit uncertain as to how to begin such a conversation. But the preacher told him just to start casually, to start with normal chit-chat, and then, when the opportunity arose talk to them about their soul, ask if their house was in order, if they were prepared to die.

Well, the next morning a man came by the barber shop for a shave. So the barber did what barbers do, he put a hot towel on the man’s face, talked about the weather, and the local news. Then, right after he had lathered the man up, he decided it was time to get down to business, to talk to the man about Jesus. Picking up his razor, he took it a time or two up and down the leather band attached to the chair, pointed it at the man and said, "Brother, are you ready to die?"

You can imagine what happened. The man’s eyes got big as saucers, he bolted from the chair and out the door, lather flying from his face.

When we think of witnessing to our faith, we are likely to think of stories like that of the barber of Sevierville or the street corner preacher who asks passersby if they have been "born again," or the Jehovah’s Witness that comes to the door during dinner. When we think of witnessing to our faith we picture the worst examples we can imagine—in part because we really don’t want to do it.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus calls us to be his witnesses.

• It was what he meant when he told Simon Peter, Andrew and the other disciples to follow him and become fishers of people.
• It was what he meant when he told the disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey all that he commanded.
• It was what he meant when he told the disciples that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

Witnessing is an essential Dimension of Discipleship. To be a disciple is to be a witness to God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ. There is no separating the two. To be faithful requires us to talk to others about what God has done in Jesus Christ.

This morning, I want to identify some of what it takes to do just that.

First, to be a witness requires willingness.

For all their flaws, the barber, the street preacher and the Jehovah’s Witness are willing. And that is not something we have always been. George Barna reports that only two out of every 10 members of a church like ours have shared their faith with another in the last year. That means the vast majority of us—eight out of 10 church members--fall silent when the opportunity to tell others about Jesus arises. In fact, Marva Dawn has suggested that is the real reason behind both the mainline church’s decline and the debate over traditional versus contemporary worship is our unwillingness to share the faith. She has said that because we haven’t witnessed to Jesus Christ we haven’t grown. And because we don’t want to witness to Jesus Christ, we try to attract people with newer music and hipper services. But the only places where such changes ultimately work are churches where the people in the pew also share their faith in Jesus Christ. It takes willingness.

I think some times we take for granted what took place in the lives of Jesus’ disciples. When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, they all fled. When he was being tried, his staunchest follower—Peter—denied him three times. And when he was crucified, they were hiding. And afterward, they locked themselves in the upper room for fear they would come to the same fate. Yet a mere six-weeks later these same disciples are standing before the crowds, witnessing to Jesus Christ. They are going into the Temple and telling people that the Christ has come. They are standing before the ruling authorities and testifying to the life, death and resurrection of the teacher from Nazareth. In a mere six weeks they went from being completely unwilling to be associated with Jesus to being willing to testify to him, even at the risk of being ostracized, tortured, even killed—such was the turnaround in their lives. And that never changed. They went to their graves gladly sharing Jesus Christ with others.

It is not always easy to witness to Christ, but the first step in doing so is to be willing, to embrace the opportunity when it comes.

Of course, willingness is not all that is required. Witnessing requires first-hand knowledge of Jesus Christ. Note that I said "of" Jesus Christ and not "about" Jesus Christ. The difference is substantial.

Imagine for a moment that you own a business. Sitting on your desk is the resume of a woman who wants to work there. She appears to be capable of the doing the job, so you call one of her references. The person at the other end of the phone line tells you that he doesn’t know the woman personally but he knows about her. How much stock will you give what he has to say? Probably not a lot because he doesn’t really know the woman.

The same is true with witnessing to Jesus Christ. Being a faithful witness requires more than knowing about Jesus. It requires more than being able to recount the story of his life, death and resurrection in a "just the facts" kind of way. Being a witness requires a vital and substantive relationship. One has to know our Lord to speak of him.

Again consider the disciples. They spent three years with Jesus and became intimate friends. They learned from his word and example. They discussed even the deepest of realities, his betrayal and death. That alone would have allowed them to speak with first-hand knowledge of him. But their relationship only intensified with the gift of the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit came on Pentecost, it was Jesus coming back to them, making himself available to them, and to all disciples across time and space. He was not only affirming their relationship but offering all us the same opportunity.

To effectively witness to Jesus Christ means to speak of one we know and love. It means recounting the grace that he has given to us. It means immersing ourselves in Scripture and fellowship so that he can speak to us and immersing ourselves in prayer so that we can speak with him. That is one point of our Discipleship Courses, the 2:7 Courses, so that we can get to know Jesus better, so that we can engage in a dialogue with him, come to know him better so that we can be better witnesses for him.

There is still at least one other trait that marks a faithful witness to Jesus Christ.

I have already noted how the disciples suffered for their faithfulness to Christ. They endured many hardships—Peter and John were flogged, Paul was shipwrecked, all but one was, we are told, martyred. They lived lives that we would not wish on anyone. Yet all they had to do to stop getting in trouble was to stop talking about Jesus. But they continued to do so, not because it earned them stars in a heavenly crown or because it made their new numbers look good at the end of the year or because it helped finance new ministries at First Church, Jerusalem, or because it filled the pews on Sunday. They did so because they had a heart for the world’s hurting.

• They cared about the abused and broken, the lonely and lost.
• They cared about those who lived lives of frustration and desperation.
• They cared about all those captured by sin and tortured by guilt.
• They cared about those who did not know the grace of God.

More than anything else, they wanted those in need to know the abundant life they had found in Jesus as Lord.

Effective witnesses are servants of others. They witness not for their own gain but so that others might be blessed.

Ralph Beiting was one of those street preachers we are wont to avoid. For nearly 40 years, he traveled the back roads of Kentucky going to places like Thousand Sticks, Cutshin, Quicksand and Hell-for-Sartin. They were little towns, founded years before by hearty pioneers who struggled to survive living in the hollers of Appalachia. Though they had long past, their children and their children’s children remained and continued to struggle, worn down by the hardness of life there. "Some of them," Beiting said, "believed that [even] God has forgotten them."

It was that need that led Beiting to witness to them. He wanted them to know that the God who numbers the hairs on our heads and knows when even a sparrow falls to the ground, had not forgotten them, but loves them still.

One doesn’t have to go to Hell-for-Sartin to find people who are hurting. They are everywhere across the city to in our homes. To effectively share Christ with them means having a heart broken by their pain.

Certainly it is not easy to witness to Jesus Christ. It takes willingness, knowledge and compassion to do it. But it can be done. And in fact it is to be done—and it is to be done by you and by me.

I love the way our passage from Acts ends. After Jesus tells the disciples they are to be his witnesses and is assumed into heaven, two angels appear. "Why are you standing there looking up to heaven?," they ask. "Jesus is gone, but he will come back." But what is implied is just as important, and that is "Go! There’s work to be done. Get on with it. Go and be his witnesses."

That is what disciples do. Let us pray that we might be disciples.