A dear friend was given the opportunity to share a brief word with a group of missionaries. This was his encouragement: “Be your message.”
If your message is faith, live by faith. If your message is generosity, be generous. If your message is mercy, be merciful. If your message is love, then love.
What if your message is Jesus? Was Paul arrogant to write, “I urge you to imitate me”? Paul confessed being the chief of sinners, yet he knew the mystery of God: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” As he yielded himself to His Savior, Paul knew Light would shine forth. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul knew he was becoming his message. He never claimed to arrive, but he knew the aim of the journey. “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”
How do I become the message of Jesus? No doubt God must do a mighty work in my heart, but what work am I to do? “Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one He sent.’” Oh to believe in the One God sent… every moment… every day… in every situation. If I believe He is the Way, I will want to spend time with Him and listen to His words. Oswald Chambers wrote, “It is natural to be like the one we live with most; then if we spend most of our time with Jesus Christ, we shall begin to be like Him, by the way we are built naturally and by the Spirit God puts in.”
So if you want to be merciful, sit at the feet of Jesus and know His mercy… then put into practice what you learn. If you want to love like God does, hang out with Jesus and receive the love this world desperately needs… then freely give what you freely receive. If you want to be the message that brings life, draw close to the One who is Life… then be Life to all around you.
“When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.” Acts 4:13