🎉Cyber Week Sale: Get 30% Off Everything Published by The Good Book Company
How do you serve Jesus? And (more importantly) why do you serve Jesus… and how do you feel about serving Jesus?
If you’re anything like me, serving can be a bit of a burden—just one more job in an already busy life. I often feel weary or discouraged about it. Or, when it’s going well, I feel proud and self-reliant about it.
Most of the time, it’s just the price that has to be paid to get eternity.
John Hindley, whose new book Serving Without Sinking has just launched, puts it this way:
“We Christians often seem to be a burdened, joyless bunch. It should not be like this, and it doesn’t need to be—for me or for you.”
The idea of writing Serving Without Sinking grew out of John’s own experiences, moving from serving as a joy and privilege to serving as a “chore that I resented and a duty I had to fulfil”. He found that, where once he’d looked forward to driving to church, he had ended up looking forward to driving home from church.
So this is a book for anyone who is serving Jesus (ie: Christians!) For those of us who feel like we’re sinking, this is a book which will re-energise our serving, and may just rescue our faith. For those who are serving happily, it will help avoid the pitfalls which lie ahead and often lie already in our heart.
It will do that by pointing you back to Christ, and His service of you. Now of course, all Christians books (well, all good Christian books) point you to Christ. But this one does so in a very warm, sometimes surprising, always deeply practical way. Oh, and it’s fairly short, too, weighing in at 128 pages. As David Burrowes, an MP who is an elder in his local church (ie: he's busy!), puts it: "If, like me, you don't read books much and get bogged down with Christian service, this book will help you smile".
I have the great privilege of editing a lot of books—every now and then, one of them really, deeply, changes and challenges and thrills me as I work on it. Serving Without Sinking is one of those. Just last week, as I rushed around sorting out the session for the 11-14s at our church, I recalled the content of two chapters to mind, and doing so changed my whole attitude to what I was doing.
Is it possible to serve Christ in long, hard, sacrificial ways and know joy and rest? Yes it is, says John. More importantly, yes it is, says Jesus. This book will show you how.
Carl is Editorial Director at The Good Book Company and is a member of Grace Church Worcester Park, London. He is the best-selling author of The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross and God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and also serves as series editor of the God's Word for You series. Before joining TGBC, he worked as a journalist and then as a teacher, and pastored a congregation in Hull. Carl is married to Lizzie, and they have two children. He studied history at Oxford University.
