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A Good Testimony Through Faith
| Bro Green Mumbelunga (Ndola, Zambia)
“W
ithout faith it is impossible to please
Him, for he who comes to God must
believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder
of those who diligently seek Him.” (Hebrews
11:6).
This is the truth about our God, but one might
ask, has God rewarded all the worthies and
faithful ones of old down through the count-
less generations of all believers to the present
day? Hebrews 11:39-40 has a satisfying answer
for such questions. It says, “And all these,
having obtained a good
testimony through faith,
did not receive the
Promise, God having
provided something better
for us, that they should
not be made perfect
apart from us.” A good
testimony which was
obtained through faith is
fully revealed in the Bible.
If we read with attention
the family history of the
Fathers of old, starting
with Adam, then Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, David and the
Prophets, we will find that
when all that was promised to them is accom-
plished, they will all be living witnesses of
these promises. That means they will be resur-
rected from the dead and then receive the gift
of eternal life.
The testimony of the apostles, which is not at
all different from the testimony of the Old
Testament worthies, helps all of us today who
rely on the Bible as the true Word of God. We
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God, and that believing we might also have
life through his name - because our faith
should be directed by the things concerning
the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus
Christ, as explained in Acts 8:12. We should
labour to give a good account or testimony of
ourselves so that in the end Jesus Christ will
say of us, “Well done, good and faithful
servant, you were faithful over a few things,
I will make you ruler over many things. Enter
into the joy of your Lord.” (Matthew 25:21).
Such words will not be said to those who lose
faith. Take a little time and consider the early
generations of shining examples of faithfulness
– the likes of Abraham, the Father of the
faithful and many more, which Hebrews
records, and you will see how little we do.
Surely there is no comparison. These all served
the Lord in hunger and in thirst, in cold and
nakedness, in toil and
weariness, in prayer and in
meditations and in perse-
cution. They preached the
gospel of the Kingdom and
the name of Jesus. They
were strangers to the
world, but they were
God’s witnesses through
their works of faith. After
you have seen such exam-
ples of faith, it will be
difficult for you to fall
asleep spiritually.
Paul, through his letter to
the Thessalonians, also
exhorts us not to fall
asleep by saying, “You are all sons of light and
sons of the day. We are not of the night nor
of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep as
others do, but let us watch and be sober. For
those who sleep, sleep at night, and those
who get drunk are drunk at night. But let us
who are of the day be sober, putting on the
breastplate of faith and love, and as a
helmet, the hope of salvation. For God did not
appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation
through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us
that whether we wake or sleep, we should
live together with him.” (1 Thessalonians 5:5-
10).
Such faith is the kind that sees the invisible
things, the kind that believe the incredible
things. For with God everything is possible and
in Christ everything is “Yes”.