By John Ortberg
Zondervan, Grand Rapids Michigan, 2001
ISBN 0-310-23927-3

John Ortoberg’s book If You Want To Walk On Water, You Have To Get Out Of The Boat is the winner of the 2002 Christianity Today Book Award and, if you haven’t read it yet, I thoroughly recommend it to you.  Ortberg’s call to ‘water walking’ is a very enjoyable and easy book to read, written in Ortberg’s accessible style and sprinkled with his appealing sense of humour. I must admit that I really did enjoy the humour. Relating a story about when he had fainted in the middle of delivering a sermon, Ortberg says “No one interpreted it as being ‘slain in the Spirit’. When you’re a Baptist, fainting is just fainting.” I loved the book, I loved the humour, but I was confronted and challenged by it too.

Based around the Gospel story of Simon Peter walking on water at the invitation of his Lord, (“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”  He said “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat and started walking on the water....”) Ortberg’s book is a call for us to step out in faith, to step out of our comfort zone and to experience the sheer exhilaration of living as Jesus lived and doing the things he did. It’s about conquering our fears and uncertainties and choosing to have the last word over fear. It’s about fully embracing the call of Christ on our lives and experiencing his power which enables us to do things which we simply would not be capable of doing without his power at work in our lives.

Ortberg forces his readers to consider what is the ‘boat’ that Jesus may call us to step out of? A comfortable home? A career with status? Personal wealth? The approval of friends and neighbours? Ortberg leaves the reader in no doubt that each time the call comes, we (the ones called) are changed in some way. It is unavoidable. Those who accept the call learn to walk on water; they grow and become part of God’s plan of redemption for this world. Those who say “No” are also changed. They become a little harder, a little more resistant to his calling, a little more likely to say “No” again, next time he calls them. Far too many of us are what Ortberg would call “boat potatoes”; we’ve put our faith in a comfortable Christianity that never compels us to leave our comfort zone, to step out of the boat. And yet, deep within our hearts we know that Jesus has not called us to a life of stagnation, even comfortable stagnation, but has said that he came so that we would have “life in abundance.” Ortberg’s book tells us that you won’t find that “life in abundance” in the boat. Jesus calls us to step out of the boat and to walk with him on the water.

Of course, getting out of the boat involves risk. It can be quite comfortable in the boat, and it’s relatively safe in the boat. Safe and comfortable, but boring and stagnating! The cost of staying in the boat is stagnation and lack of growth and there are few things sadder. As you read this book you come to fully understand that if you choose not to get out of the boat you may be missing out on the most wonderful, exciting and rewarding things in this life. For me, one of the most poignant moments comes early in the book when Ortberg relates the story of the rich young ruler who came asking Jesus what he must do to be saved. Jesus asked him to get out of the boat (“Sell all that you have, give the money to the poor, and come and follow me.”) but, as we know, that rich young man decided not to do that. He had a very nice boat. It was comfortable in the boat and he liked it too much to give it up. “I wonder sometimes,” Ortberg ponders “if he ever thought about that encounter with Jesus when he reached the end of his life – when he was an old man and his bank account, stock portfolio, and trophy case were full. Did he remember the day a carpenter’s son called him to risk the whole thing for one wild bet on the Kingdom of God – and he said no?”

This book is certainly enjoyable, and yet in other places it can be confronting. It does confront the reader with a clear choice. Ortberg’s message is this: You are one step away from the adventure of your life; but first you have to get out of the boat!
Read it. I’m sure you will enjoy it and I am sure that it will give you serious food for thought.

Ian White