So often, we conflate the idea of witness with evangelizing. And while there’s some conceptual overlap, there’s also a key difference that’s important because some are uniquely gifted at sharing the Gospel through words, and praise the Lord for that, while others struggle to articulate. And there’s no shame in that.

This is where “witness” comes into play and why it’s important to say a) it’s separate from our limited conceptualization of evangelism but, interestingly, b) is also its own form of it.

Tyler Staton puts this together in his chapter on witness from his book, The Familiar Stranger:

“Witness literally means ‘someone who sees or experiences something important for others to know about. Somewhere along the way in recent church history, ‘witness’ became a synonym for evangelism.

…. Witness is: to live in this world like Jesus is King.

….. There is just one simply requirement for being a witness: your eyes have to be open. If you were present at a crime scene but you were asleep when it went down, you’re not a witness. Here is where you start in supernatural ministry: Every day, ask God to open your eyes to his invisible but invading Kingdom.

‘Open my eyes today at the office, at school, at book club tonight, at daycare pickup this afternoon, at the dog park with my neighbors this morning.’ Show up to your ordinary life supernaturally, by which I mean living by the laws that govern the Kingdom of heaven.”

Amen.

In this conceptualization, we aren’t simply mouthpieces of a message – we are living representatives of Christ, and that’s not just a word thing.

After all, Jesus didn’t only minister in words, did he?

And we don’t just live in words.

This distinction between witness and evangelizing isn’t just theologically accurate, but it’s also probably liberating if you struggle with words and don’t have a certain type of personality. I know some people who live to preach. Just comes easily, they’re called to do it, and praise the Lord for that.

And I know others who preach equally as powerfully through what they do.

But I think (again, I use the word “I think” because God doesn’t explicitly tell us) the most powerful synthesis of witness and evangelizing might come from the following passage of Staton’s, which I see as a sort of fusion.

Staton:

“To speak about the love of Jesus is not, first and foremost, to try to convince your coworkers of exclusive truth claims at the Friday evening happy hours.

It’s just being completely honest about your relationship to God in an environment where you’re probably used to compartmentalizing your spirituality….. to live not manipulatively but honestly before all people, regardless of the setting. That’s it.”

Amen again.

If we’re following Jesus and sharing our lives, it will just come out, and the best thing we can do is treat our Christianity as just part of our lives. It’s not some separate topic to dance around.

So many times, Christians feel pressure: Oh, when do I bring it up? How do I bring it up? How should I phrase it?

Well, if we’re just ourselves, in every arena, including spiritually, that’s witness.

If you’re having a long talk with someone about something, and just being honest about your life, your faith is probably going to pop up.

Who knows how others will react? Are we worried about telling people what cake we like or dish? Maybe they’ll like it too, maybe they’ll hate it. They won’t hold your taste for chocolate against you (pretty rare, so maybe a a bad example), but they also wouldn’t hold your distaste for it against you.

Of course, spirituality is a trickier thing, but I’ve found that most people just don’t care, and in fact, they appreciate that you’re being honest and vulnerable, because friendship is born and grows from honesty and vulnerability.

So being a witness is actually much more simple than evangelizing and more natural. It’s just about being naturally who are are.

If we can be honest about our lives, we can be honest about that.

Now, being honest about our lives… well, that’s a different and tricky subject, and very difficult for humans to do for all kinds of reasons (including pride), but again, a different topic, and VERY difficult for people afflicted with the disease of social anxiety disorder which can be a devastating and debilitating condition and deserves treatment and care, as with other medical conditions.

If you struggle with social anxiety disorder, depression, anxiety, or any other such medical conditions — for readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.

In his book, Waking from The American Dream, Donald McCullough puts our remarkable salvation from Christ this way:

“Grace means that in the middle of our struggle the referee blows the whistle and announces the end of the game.

We are declared winners and sent to the showers. It’s over for all huffing, puffing piety to earn God’s favor; it’s finished for all sweat-soaked straining to secure self-worth; it’s the end of all competitive scrambling to get ahead in the game.

Grace means that God is on our side and thus we are victors regardless of how well we’ve played the game.”

If we doubt this, why Jesus’ death?

If we don’t agree with what McCullough says, how can Paul slam the idea of boasting about our salvation? All is mercy, all is grace, and we can do nothing to earn it. Only Christ could and only he did.

Here’s the Presbyterian minister and former Senate chaplain Lloyd Ogilvie who puts our response to redemption in the context of Peter’s denial of Christ and subsequent encounter with Jesus after the Resurrection.

“Peter had built his whole relationship on his assumed capacity to be adequate.

That’s why he took his denial of the Lord so hard. His strength, loyalty, and faithfulness were his self-generated assets of discipleship.

The fallacy in Peter’s mind was this: He believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought earned him the Lord’s approval.

Many of us face the same problem. We project into the Lord our own measured standard of acceptance. Our whole understanding of him is based on a quid pro quo of bartered love. He will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent.

But we have turned the tables; we try to live so that he will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us.”

We have trouble believing this, don’t we? (I really, really do). Why?

Because it makes no sense, based on the world we see around us — where our worth is tied up in how good we are, how productive we are, whose “political team” we’re on, how successful in any sphere we are. We can’t get away from the human conception of personal worth – no matter how a culture defines it or how a political party defines it or how we define it for ourselves.

But Christ’s work on the cross smashes all that by saying it’s about His worth – not our own. It’s about his accomplishment, not our own.

No other religion, no human mind could have devised a redemption like this because it runs counter to the natural order of things. And thus, it can only come from a supernatural one and supernatural love.

You are loved because you are loved, you are accepted – not based on your worth or efforts – but based on his worth.

As Brennan Manning writes in his book The Ragamuffin Gospel (which contained the quotes I referenced and is the most beautiful tome on God’s redemption you can find), God expects more failure from us than we do.

Think of that. He expects less out of us than we do. What other God? Certainly not the gods of this world or the ones of American society.

And that’s why he sent Jesus.

This salvation calls himself “The Light of the World.” What else could light up the dark heaviness of the world and its value system and our own expectations?

And so he says, “Come to me, all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.“

This is the answer to the world’s accusations and constant bickering. Not “winning” or “owning the other side.” But living in the light of his love.

When we think of what Jesus did for us, it’s impossible for us to judge another.

If he could look down and forgive us, how can we look down on another?

But if we look up and see what he did for us on the cross, well, as Brandon Lake sings, “All that I have is a hallelujah, and I know it’s not much, but I’ve got nothing else fit for a king. Except for a heart singing hallelujah.”

[Painting: Christ and the Good Thief, Titian]

In his new book The Familiar Stranger, Tyler Staton reminds us to walk through life as the two on Emmaus should have — actively looking for Jesus presence in places and times we’d least expect.

Staton:

“We tend to miss God in our midst, not because he’s too extraordinary but because he’s too ordinary. We tend to look for God in the wind, earthquake, and fire rather than the whisper….. what if you know him not just as the table in the evening but all the way along the road to Emmaus?”

To dovetail off his point on looking for God only in dramatic moments (whether the natural or spiritual fires and winds we endure), think about this: If you look at the most primitive, pagan religions, you see this nearly universal phenomenon of seeing gods in storms, fire, creation, destruction. All these dramatic things.

And in a way, you could say our experiential Christianity is not much more advanced.

Although we might not have a god of the storm, fire, or fertility, we retain this primitive, restrained capacity for only experiencing and finding him in those moments.

That’s not bad, of course, because he’s in all that too.

But that tendency is almost just a monotheistic advance on what the ancient pagans were doing. Instead of making many gods from the dramatic, we now try to make sense of our God in the dramatic.

But there’s also a recurring theme throughout both the Old and New Testament of finding God in ordinary moments, in whispers, and — in fact — not finding him at all, which is the dark breeding ground for Psalms.

Which is much truer to the human experience. A God we notice only in the dramas of our life isn’t a God who’s relational, but one who’s sensational — it’s an IMAX god.

But you and I crave for the God of the everyday, and what’s associated with the every day? Our family. So we want the Father who holds us, the brother who listens to us, the Spirit who prays for us and fills us when we run dry, the lover of our soul who’ll listen to us for hours and hours and loves us because he loves us.

In short, a God we talk to, and who talks to us.

Staton gets at that this way:

“Maybe God whispers because it’s the only way he can get what he wants most, what was lost in Eden: to walk with you and me in familiar intimacy that we might know God as he truly is and discover ourselves as we truly are in his presence.”

At first, it’s hard to look for God everywhere, but over time, you’ll find him anywhere. Usually.

That’s why Jesus told us to keep knocking and looking and we’ll find.

The truth is that most of us familiar with the darkness of our disease have also heard God’s whisper break through it in a way we can’t describe, but the truth is also that many, many times, we won’t hear that whisper.

Those are the toughest times. When we keep knocking and no one seems to be home. So how do we get inside to the home we long for?

But it’s in those times outside, that we have to keep, keep knocking and praying and begging, and whether you can hear God’s answer or not, he has already spoken and if you simply look at a cross for a few minutes, it will say: “This is is how much I love you.”

Of course, I’d be disingenuous to say that will always rouse us. The conditions we have are physical diseases of the brain and part of the “wonderfully made” is also the “fearfully made” and it’s hard to a get a handle on ourselves.

So the best we can do is the best we can do — keep looking for God, and also if we can’t hear or find him, maybe it’s because we’re lost in a disease of our mind, and it’s time to talk to a doctor about whether we need medical help.

But we can never stop the spiritual component, we can never stop knocking, because sometimes, when we least expect, he’ll open the door, whisper back, and you’ll walk into his presence and experience a sacred joy. We lost the easy conversation and full communion in Eden, but we’ll occasionally find something beautiful of it here, and once we’re home, well then, that’s what home is.

If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.

Martin Luther once wrote about a false “theology of glory,” which offers an incomplete picture of the Christian life, salvation itself, and — crucially, for the purposes of this website — also a flawed perspective of how we’re to look at suffering.

In response to the erroneous “theology of glory,” Luther instead proposed a “theology of the cross.”

Now, as the distinction relates to this website’s purpose, let’s get right to it.

A theology of the cross focuses on Christ’s injunction that we die to self and that, on this earth, troubles will inevitably accompany the Christian life and therefore we can’t expect that Christ will exempt us from any of the diseases (including brain disorders like depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, etc) that are part of the human experience.

Basically, it’s an ancient rebuke to the health and happiness gospel that has somehow sneaked into even evangelical circles, particularly in the way the community often dismisses things like depression and anxiety.

Theocast notes:

A theology of the cross understands that we live in a sin-sick world, full of pain, full of suffering, full of anxiety and that it is the grace of God that will get us through. A theology of glory is basically the idea that the more you do, the more faith you have, then the more relief God will provide. And that’s just not what scripture tells us.

So hopefully this is helpful for you to understand that it is not your fault if you get cancer, or if a calamity happens, or if there’s suffering- that is part of living in a sinful world. We rely on the grace of God to get us through, and one day we will be in the new heavens and the new earth, where all sin will be done away with, where God will wipe away our tears. So, for now, we live the theology of the cross. We look to Christ, we understand there’s suffering and pain, but one day it’ll all be removed. Hopefully, this is encouraging.

The great site Mockingbird pits it against one of most discouraging mindsets that’s utterly pervasive in the church today.

A window into understanding this is to look at the ways people talk about painful experiences. If someone has just undergone a difficult and unwanted break-up, for example, they often say things like ‘well, it wasn’t a good relationship for me anyway’, or ‘but I’ve really learned a lot from this whole experience’. This kind of thinking is rationalization – it basically tries to make something sound like a good thing that is in fact a bad thing. It is a strategy for avoiding having to look pain and grief directly in the face, and for not having to acknowledge that we wish life were different but are powerless to change it. This is what a ‘theology of glory’ looks like. A theology of the cross, by contrast, accepts the difficult thing rather than immediately trying to change it or transmute it. It looks directly into pain, and ‘calls a thing what it is’ instead of calling evil good and good evil. It identifies God as ‘hidden in [the] suffering’.

I’ve often called the “Theology of Glory” something like “Victorious Christian Living,” which tries to talk people out of their suffering by beating them over the heads with selectively picked passages like Paul singing in prison, while ignoring that Paul spoke of his personal experiences in much bleaker terms, for example in 2 Corinthians 1 (“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.” ) and the fact that Scripture is full of laments (over 33% of the Psalms) and cries of despair and suffering from God’s followers.

This Victorious Christian Living mindset (or, as Luther calls it, “Theology of Glory,”) is everywhere – your local evangelical church might say it doesn’t preach a prosperity gospel, but what happens when something deeply painful happens and that pain persists and you’re in a long spell of despair?

Well, in an attempt to “encourage” you, Christians will try to talk you out of that despair by continually reminding you that, “ahem, by the way, remember – you’re a Christian and you’re supposed to be joyful and we have a hope and we’re to be a light.”

What they don’t get is — all that “encouraging” actually discourages us. It makes us feel guilty.

We think: “If that’s what Christianity’s about, and I’m still locked in the pain of depression, intense anxiety, PTSD” etc, then how can I even be a Christian?”

It’s a terrible and lonely place for a Christian.

In his enormously helpful book cataloguing Charles Spurgeon’s depression and his own, Zack Eswine writes: “Suffering one form of depression makes the addition of others harder to bear….if someone struggles already with biological or circumstantial depression, they are more vulnerable to spiritual sorrows. It is hard enough to get thru the day without adding the displeasure of God to the trauma that already trounces us.”

So your pastor or Christian friend or Generic Christian Worship Song will leave you with a “Hooray, positive, snap out of it, Resurrection” message that seems entirely disconnected from your life, your suffering, and urges you to get out of it by thinking you’re way out of it.

There’s no empirical data on this (Harvard doesn’t really research this phenomenon), but I really don’t think that works.

The wisest man in the world said so in Proverbs 25:20:

“Singing cheerful songs to a person with a heavy heart is like taking someone’s coat in cold weather or pouring vinegar in a wound.”

So this type of “encouraging” is like ripping off a freezing man’s warmth in the middle of a blizzard.

Not exactly helpful. In fact, downright cruel.

And yet the “encouragers” do it, unwittingly and with good intentions, all the time.

Now…

Of course, Christianity is about the hope of the Resurrection through salvation in Christ, and that is the utterly beautiful thing that sustains and helps us through this mess.

We should celebrate that. But we shouldn’t ignore that while salvation is here, Resurrection isn’t, that while glory is ahead, the cross of this earth remains.

Songs of joy and sadness are equally true.

In his book on the resurrection, Hope in Times of Fear, Tim Keller strikes a nice balance between the reality of the Resurrection and the Cross.

“Cross alone as an isolated paradigm could lead to an attitude of asceticism or even masochism and pessimism, while resurrection alone could lead to triumphalism, what Luther called ‘a theology of the cross’.”

In other words, focusing solely on the tribulations we’re promised on earth denies the hope of the Resurrection, but focusing entirely on the hope of the Resurrection denies the inevitable tribulations and pain of the earth.

Christianity is far more realistic than it’s usually preached, far more honest about our experiences than you’ll find on an Instagram meme, and far more connected than many “encouragers” who say they want to connect and encourage, but instead, unwittingly, discourage.

We have to look both at this world honestly and the hope of the next one, as promised in the Bible on both scores. At chronic pain, as well as the relief we’re absolutely promised when we’re “raised in glory” after being “buried in brokenness.” (1 Corinthians 15:43).

Yes, chemo might be a little easier if you know it’s going to end in four years, but that doesn’t make it easy to go through.

And, in the same way, anxiety and depression and all these other conditions are still utterly brutal and punishing even though we know that, one day, we’ll have restored brains — free from disease.

I want to finish by saying something that I’m a total broken record on: You’re not alone in your battle with both the pain of “mental disorders” (which are really brain diseases). Tons of Christians (including church leaders and pastors themselves) experience this totally human and physical disease, but perhaps you feel alone because Christians hide it from each other because of fear that we’ll be judged and “Hey, everyone else at church looks so happy, something must be wrong with my Christianity.”

Sure, we do have a peace that passes all understanding (absolutely on that — it’s impossible to explain), but we also have depression and anxiety and PTSD that passes all understanding, as well.

Unless you correctly understand that those “mental conditions” are physical diseases.

Thankfully, ones you can get help for.

And to that, I always end by directing you to these links — only you and your doctor will know what’s best for you, but medication has been a life-saver for me, therapy utterly crucial, and of course, I know without God’s grace, I wouldn’t get through any of it. It’s no different from any other disease!

So be wary of a theology of glory that talks about the cross only as means to an end, and denies the reality of your disease and the cross that we bear while on earth.

And here are the links.

If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.

Brennan Manning, in The Ragamuffin Gospel.

“Whatever we have done in the past, be it good or evil, great or small, is irrelevant to our stance before God today.

It is only now that we are the in the presence of God.”

You’re reading this somewhere, and you are in the presence of God now.

If you’re going through it right now, James 1:12:

“Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.”

Read that again and KEEP GOING. God’s crown of life for you in heaven won’t be “meh.”

If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.