life.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Two Phone Calls

1. There Is No Plan B (Luke 1:26–56)

2. Not Fluffy Bunnies or Facebook (Luke 4:16–19)

3. Getting into the Boat (Luke 4:29—5:11)

4. A Question of Healing (Luke 5:12–26)

5. The Halftime Break (Luke 7:36–50)

6. I Never Liked the Floor That Much Anyway (Luke 8:1–15)

7. God Said Okay and Disappeared … (Luke 8:26–39)

8. Heaven Takes a Breath (Luke 9:1–9; 10:1–24)

9. More Than Just Leftovers (Luke 9:10–17)

10. Tribute Bands and Bread and Wine (Luke 22:7–20)

Closing Thoughts

Supporting The Message?

FOREWORD

There are seven qualities I love about this book.

1. Vision: Andy is a person of vision, and yet he is a team player with a wisdom and a balance that are evident throughout this book. Balance is so needed in God’s work today. In my own walk with Jesus, now over fifty-four years, I have seen too many people fall into the trap of extremism and unbalance. This message will help people avoid that pitfall.

2. Faith: None of us can walk with God and do his will if we do not exercise faith. The Eden Project story and so many other aspects of ministry that we read about in these pages will help us take steps of faith in our own lives and ministries. It is so easy to just be singers and hearers of the Word and not so much to be doers! I pray this book will help break the barrier and thrust many people into the action.

3. Grace is such an important word and concept, in my opinion, and I love the way it comes out in this book. Andy doesn’t tie us up in duty but shows how Jesus inspires a life of gratitude and service.

4. Community: This has become a key concept in recent years. Andy wants to see transformed lives that will really bless and influence the community. We are not talking about Utopia or perfection, but we are talking about reality. Here is a model we can follow, as we contextualize it to our own pilgrimage and experience.

5. Prayer: I so appreciate the emphasis on prayer. We do not hear or see enough of that in this context. The picture of people involved in prayer should cause others to want to get involved with praying people and gather where prayer is a reality.

6. Urgency: I believe this is often a missed reality in the lives of many of the Lord’s servants and leads to a massive waste of time with little realization that we are surrounded by lost people who need the Savior. The clear challenge for all of us to share our faith is a vital part of the message of this book. The way God can change lives and use ordinary people should push all of us into action and into a life of redeeming the time to reach more people with the message.

7. Proactive is one of my favorite words, and it describes Andy and his team and The Message Trust in general. By faith, love, and action they have made things happen, and many are being transformed and on the way to heaven because of it. This work has gone on for many years and is a proven ministry that is here to stay. At the same time, they need our prayers and support, and we need to ask God to show us what he would have us do about this great message, great vision, and great ministry.

I want to urge you to take time to read this book and other similar books. The neglect of reading serious books written by men and women of God is a huge hindrance to what our God wants to do in the world today. No wonder we are not seeing many long-term missionaries heading out to the more forgotten and unreached places of the world! Let’s get a few extra copies of this message and pass it on to others.

George Verwer

Founder of Operation Mobilisation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Craig for all the input and inspiration and for making my work so much better.

To everyone at Survivor and to all the wonderful Message supporters, staff, trustees, and volunteers—what a team!

Finally, thank you, God; I’d be in deep trouble without you, and I want the world to know how amazing you are.

Introduction

TWO PHONE CALLS

I’ve just had a couple of phone calls that are making me think. Nothing much unusual about that—the phone calls or the thinking. But still, I can’t quite shift the feeling that what I’ve just heard is in some way significant.

For over twenty years I’ve been leading The Message Trust. We’re based in Manchester, England, where we live, breathe, eat, and sleep our single vision: to see the place where we live blitzed, bombed, and overpowered by the good news expressed through words and actions. At the very heart of things you’ll find us stirred up about going into the toughest places and reaching the most forgotten people. I’m not on the front lines as much as I used to be, but I keep in touch as best I can. And that’s why I’ve had these two conversations within the last few hours.

The first one was from an excited Lindsay West. That’s not a technical term for bad weather; he’s the guy who fronts our band LZ7. He was calling to tell me about his week. He’s been in a school since Monday and the week’s just peaked with a big evangelistic gig to which all the pupils were invited. Like I said, he was pretty excited, but somehow through the repetitions of words like awesome, amazing, and, for some reason, gangsta, mate, I worked it out: He’d had a very good week. God had shown up, and 160 young people had just committed their lives to Christ.

The next call was from the guy who heads up our mission department, Matt Wilson. He was asking me to pray for two of our courageous Eden workers. They’ve made the choice to live long-term on one of Manchester’s toughest estates, an area the locals used to call The Bronx. These two girls on our team have given their lives to serving and blessing that community, to living their faith out loud among people the rest of society would rather ignore. The results have been amazing: The church has grown, crime has come down, and the whole community has received a much-needed dose of the kindness of God. But Matt was calling to tell me that our girls had just had their car set on fire by one of their more unbalanced neighbors. The car was a write-off, and the front window of their house had been blown out in the blast.

These two phone calls have got me thinking: Why does it always seem to be like this? The more we push out and see good things happening, the more opposition we run into. Yet again I find myself wondering what our priorities should be. Should we be trying for the lamp on a stand approach—bold, unashamed gospel proclamation to thousands of school kids? Or should we be pushing more toward salt and yeast—serving and blessing the vulnerable and the marginalized with no questions asked?

Both. That’s the only answer that makes sense. And of course that can’t be true just for us in The Message Trust—it’s for every real Christian who has decided to follow Jesus. We must do both.

In this book we are going to look at how we can find that balance. We’ll be looking at what works, as well as wondering about what doesn’t. And all along we’ll be learning from the Master. We’ll start by jumping into Luke’s gospel. I love the fact that Jesus’ whole life’s work is based on what we read in Luke 4. There he is, just out of the desert, in the power of the Spirit, entering the synagogue. By one of those God-directed coincidences it just so happens to be his turn to read the Scriptures, and the set reading for the day just so happens to be Isaiah 61:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)

This is Jesus talking. This is Jesus reaching back into history, rooted in the present and looking forward into the future, holding all things in balance as he goes on to preach one of the shortest but best sermons ever: Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing (verse 21). That was it, just eight words. And for the next three and a half years it was precisely what Jesus did. He fulfilled the prophecy by preaching good news, setting captives free, and opening the eyes of the blind wherever he went.

And he’s still doing it today.

There’s a problem though. Almost from the very moment that Jesus spoke those eight words, people around him have been spending inordinate amounts of time trying to decide what life’s priorities ought to be. We’re still wondering about it today. The word-only guys argue that our primary aim must be the preaching of the good news. The power-evangelism guys are more likely to emphasize the miraculous healing of the blind. And the liberation theologians say that what really counts is releasing the captives.

But hold on a moment: Surely our role model did it all, in perfect harmony. What’s more, when Jesus introduced us to the Holy Spirit, he used the words As the Father has sent me, I am sending you (John 20:21). So, perhaps he really did expect us, wherever possible, to explain the good news with our words while also ensuring that we demonstrate the gospel with our actions.

Ever since I was a baby Christian, I’ve grown up on a solid diet of Bible teaching. My background is full of words, and I was taught to favor them over action anytime. It’s hardly surprising that I became an evangelist and that I love to preach. I remember a wealthy businessman in our church saying to me years ago that he couldn’t give his money to a Christian relief and development charity because they didn’t make preaching the gospel a priority. What he meant was, they didn’t necessarily use words to preach the gospel; and to him, therefore, they weren’t quite coming up to scratch. Sure, they were feeding people and helping them live a little longer, but that seemed less important than actually telling