Be the Message - Couverture souple

Maybe you’re troubled by the disconnect between the words you speak and the life you live. Maybe you’d like to see your faith become more active and life-changing in the world around you.
 
Pastor Kerry and Chris Shook felt that way. Even though their calling involved preaching and teaching, they became weary of sermons and words. They felt a gap between what they were saying and the needs of people around them.
 
They decided to do something about it.
 
Be the Message is their story of waking up to the gospel—not just a gospel of words and sermons, but the gospel of intention and action and people. They discovered a profound secret:
 
You Are the Gospel
 
As they explored the deeper truths of scripture, the verse “the word of God lives in you” came alive. Digging deeper, they discovered that the gospel message is really about life message—your life lived out. God’s call to you is simple:
 
Be the Message
 
Be the Message opens up a new world of understanding about what God calls you to. As the Shooks learned, the gospel is not about what you say. It’s about who you are and what you do—and how you can be God’s hands and feet in the world. 
 
What would happen if we talked about God less and walked with God more?
 
Be the Message reminds us that Christianity was meant to be a faith of action, not a faith of words. Yet often we sacrifice doing something for the sake of talking about it. When we actually act out on our faith, we find our faith grows even more.
 
You can do more than nothing.  People’s lives are changed when you allow your life to be the gospel to the world.
 
Living out the gospel in the world today is both simple and costly.  The Shooks explore that paradox through biblical stories and their own experience of making a decision to live out the gospel in practical ways.  Choosing to be the gospel changed their family, church and personal relationships with God.
 
How can it change your life?

FOREWORD BY RICK WARREN
Hudson Taylor once said, “All God’s giants have been weak people.” My favorite example of a giant is Jacob. Jacob was a deceiver, a manipulator, and even a schemer. He spent much of his life scheming to get his way, making one mess after another. Then he’d run from it. This was the pattern of his life: create a mess and run.

Then one night Jacob had an encounter with God. He literally wrestled with God and said, “I’m not going to let go until you bless me, God.” And God said, “Okay, I’ll bless your life.” The Lord grabbed Jacob’s thigh and pulled his hip out of socket. He touched him. God touched him at a point of strength and turned it into a weakness. The Bible says that from that point on, Jacob’s life was blessed, but he walked with a limp.

Kerry and Chris Shook know that instead of hiding and denying our weaknesses, we need to recognize them and learn from them. We need to learn to share them. We need to learn to glory in our weaknesses. If God is ever going to use us greatly, we’ll walk with a limp the rest of our lives. We can hear about people’s successes all day, and it will have absolutely no benefit to us. But when they start talking to us about their pain, all of a sudden they have our attention. Sharing our handicaps causes others to stop making excuses, to see the possibilities, and to rely on God.

If we’re going to have a Christlike ministry, that means sometimes other people are going to find healing in the wounds in our lives.

In Be the Message Kerry and Chris have written a powerful guide on how to stop hiding behind our images so we can truly discover and live our authentic life message. This book is not for those who seek to be impressed;it’s for those who want to have an impact on the lives of others. We can impress people by talking about our successes, but we’ll impact people when we admit our failures and weaknesses and point them to the God who can work a miracle out of our mess.

—Rick Warren
Pastor, Saddleback Church
Author, The Purpose Driven Life