Acts 1:8 — But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

The other day Myra and I saw a pretty hokey representation of the story of Hosea and his wife Gomer. She was a harlot. He faithfully went after her, again and again. Although the play wasn’t great it did put a couple of things in my mind. One was that there are so many people in the Bible whose story we really don’t know. We know Gomer kept running off to ply her trade as a prostitute … but we don’t know why, and we probably never will. The missing back stories are not my topic today. The other thing that tugged at my attention was the way God uses people’s lives, or incidents in their lives, to teach us about His character or plans.
Faithless Gomer was a picture of Israel, faithful Hosea a picture of God Himself in His recurrent forgiveness of faithless Israel.
Then there’s Ezekiel 4:4, “Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon it thou shalt bear their iniquity.” Ezekiel was to be a living sign, telling of God’s many years of patience with Israel and warning that His patience was rapidly coming to an end. In fact this was only the second of three living signs in which Ezekiel portrayed the siege of Jerusalem, the end of God’s patience, and Israel’s time in exile.
Then there’s the prophet Jeremiah. As the great English preacher Charles Spurgeon said:

All through the Book of Jeremiah you will observe that the prophet taught the people not only by words, but by symbols. At one time he took his mantle and hid it in the earth till it was soiled and worn, and then taught them something by wearing it. At another time he took an earthen pot and broke it in their presence. And on this occasion he put a yoke about his own neck as the token that Israel should be subdued beneath the power of Nebuchadnezzar.

So what’s my point? Acts 1:8 makes it clear that we are all to be witnesses. It’s not an option, and there are no exceptions. A lot of us try to wriggle out of it saying “I’m not good with words.” Then we move on to “my life is my witness.” Well you know, these examples — and many others from scripture — might suggest that’s true. But if you’re going to rely on that then, as the old saying goes — you’re going to have to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk!