Story Bearer - How to Share Your Faith With Your FriendsSample

The power of a story

One of the great privileges and mysteries of following Jesus is that he partners with us to change the world around us. One of the ways he uses us is in helping our friends and family members to become Christians. When many people choose to follow Jesus, it is not a pastor or an evangelist that plays the most significant role, it is a Christian friend. And yet most of us could be more effective at sharing our faith. In these devotions we are going to explore the power of storytelling in evangelism with our friends.

Stories are incredibly powerful. And Jesus was a masterful storyteller. In the Luke reading, Jesus could have directly answered the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ with a simple answer. Instead he responds with a story that transcends every culture and has been told millions of times throughout the centuries. He knows the key to our hearts and minds.

Facts are twenty times more likely to be remembered if being told in a story. Our social media apps encourage us to tell the story of our day, rather than merely capture moments. Music videos do more than capture the artist playing a song, they wrap the music in a narrative. The Bible does the same with the truth of Jesus. It’s God-inspired pages tell the story of the greatness of the King, of which the Psalmist exclaims, ‘One generation commends your works to one another; they tell of your mighty acts.’

Over the coming days we will unpack how we tell our story well, listen to the story of our friends and communicate the story of God. Great storytelling is at the heart of great faith sharing and it has the highest purpose, as John declares at the end of his gospel narrative: ‘These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in his name.’ Let’s pray that we might be good story bearers, that we would recall the faithfulness of God in our own story, and live and speak in a way that invites others to know the life that the name of Jesus brings.