Click here to return to Blog Post Intro
Seekers Sought
True seekers are looking for something. They are people for whom life, or a part of life, has suddenly become a point of wonder, a question, a problem, or a crisis. This happens so intensely that they are stirred to look for an answer beyond their present answers and to clarify their position in life.
As Malcolm Muggeridge’s biographer wrote of the conversion of the great English journalist, “He knew what he disbelieved long before he knew what he believed.”
We think we are looking for something; we realize we are found by Someone.
The Haunting Question
For each of us our own identity matters supremely. The notion of calling, or vocation, is vital to each of us because it touches on the modern search for a basis for individual identity and an understanding of humanness itself.
A French perfume maker currently sells its fragrance to the English-speaking market under the byline “La vie est plus belle quand on l’écrit soi-meme” (or, life is best played by your own script).
Closer to home this position often comes across as “be all you can be” (courtesy, for instance, of the United States Army), or more simply “just do it,” “just be,” “follow your dreams,” or “if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything.”
Reality reminds us that all the will in the world may not make us what we want to become. As Václav Havel wrote in his concluding letter on responsibility, “one’s identity is never in one’s possession as something given, completed, and unquestionable.” Rather than a place to sit or a pillow on which to rest, human identity is neither fixed nor final in this life. It is incomplete.
Do you want to know the secret of the mystery of your very being and rise to become what you were born to be? Listen to Jesus of Nazareth; answer his call.
Everyone, Everywhere, Everything
Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service.
There are four essential strands in the biblical notion of calling that we must always hold.
- Calling has a simple and straightforward meaning. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word translated “call” has the same everyday meaning as our English word.
- In the Old Testament, to call means to name, and to name means to call into being or to make. Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.
- In the New Testament, calling is almost a synonym for salvation. In this context, calling is overwhelmingly God’s calling people to Himself as followers of Christ.
- Calling has a vital, extended meaning in the New Testament, where God calls people to Himself. This call is no casual suggestion. He is so awe inspiring and His summons so commanding that only one response is appropriate—a response as total and universal as the authority of the Caller.
In short, calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.
Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by Him, to Him, and for Him. First and foremost we are called to Someone (God), not to something (such as motherhood, politics, or teaching) or to somewhere (such as the inner city or Outer Mongolia). Our secondary calling, considering who God is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for him.
Calling is the premise of Christian existence itself. Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God’s (primary) calling. For Luther, the peasant and the merchant—for us, the business person, the teacher, the factory worker, and the television anchor—can do God’s work (or fail to do it) just as much as the minister and the missionary.
By Him, To Him, For Him
Countless people in modern society face the Catch-22 of modern work. Neither work nor career can be fully satisfying without a deeper sense of calling—but “calling” itself is empty and indistinguishable from work unless there is Someone who calls.
One contemporary bestseller argues that we need to “make a life, not just a living.”
Devotional writer Oswald Chambers went on to say, “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him… The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.”
Do we enjoy our work, love our work, virtually worship our work so that our devotion to Jesus is off-center? Do we put our emphasis on service, or usefulness, or being productive in working for God— at his expense?
Do What You Are
Somehow we human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us; and God normally calls us along the line of our giftedness, but the purpose of giftedness is stewardship and service, not selfishness.
Instead of, “You are what you do,” calling says: “Do what you are.”
Albert Einstein, even as a teenager, had theoretical physics and mathematics in his sights. He wrote in a homework essay in Aarau, Switzerland, “That is quite natural; one always likes to do the things for which one has ability.”
Søren Kierkegaard’s observed that life is lived forward but understood backward.
We must remember the distinction between the individual (or particular) calling and the corporate (or general) calling. Selfishness prefers the first, but stewardship respects both. The individual calling is that part of our life-response to God that we make as unique individuals. As we have seen, our individual callings are unique simply because each of us is unique. The corporate calling, on the other hand, is that part of our life-response to God that we undertake in common with all other followers of Christ.
George Foreman, flamboyant heavyweight champion of the world and a Baptist preacher says, “Preaching is my calling. Boxing for me is only moonlighting in the same way Paul made tents.”
A Time to Stand
The church’s deepest challenge is neither political nor ideological, and certainly it is not military. It is spiritual and theological and comes to a head where behavior expresses belief and deeds express words.
If so many of us profess to live by the gospel yet are so pathetically marginal to the life of our societies and so nondescript and inconsequential in our individual lives, is there something wrong with the gospel, or does the problem lie with us?
Do you want to know a truth that in the momentous challenges of our modern world will be at once a quest to inspire you, an anchor to hold you fast, a rich fare to nourish you, and a relationship you will prize above all others? Listen to Jesus of Nazareth; answer his call.
Let God be God
Words are the deepest, fullest expression in which God now discloses Himself to us, beginning with His calling us. So it is in listening to Him, trusting Him, and obeying Him when He calls that we “let God be God” in all of His awe and majesty.
God’s primary call, his address to us, always has two dimensions: summons and invitation, law and grace, demand and offer. Unquestionably the former comes first, yet that side is missing among many followers of Christ today.
All too often our familiarity with the Gospels breeds inattention. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer insisted, “The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus.” They did not consider His claims, make up their minds, and then decide whether to follow—they simply heard and obeyed. Their response is “a testimony to the absolute, direct, and unaccountable authority of Jesus.” The call is all. Jesus is the reason. The only way to follow is to leave everything and follow Him.
The Audience of One
When we discuss our plans and endeavors, we automatically think of achievements, but we often overlook the vital part of “audience.” Most of us, whether we are aware of it or not, do things with an eye to the approval of some audience or other. The question is not whether we have an audience but which audience we have.
A life lived listening to the decisive call of God is a life lived before one audience that trumps all others—the Audience of One.
As Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” Leaders or panderers? Gyroscope or Gallup poll? Thermostat or thermometer? Only those who practice the presence of the Audience of One can hope to attain the former and escape the latter.
Our Utmost for His Highest Still
God’s calling is the key to igniting a passion for the deepest growth and highest heroism in life.
Paul urged others to be “imitators of [Jesus] Christ.” His use of the word imitators is important. Modeling—observing and copying—is vital to discipleship because of the biblical view of the way disciples must learn. There is always more to knowing than human knowing will ever know. So the deepest knowledge can never be put into words—or spelled out in sermons, books, lectures, and seminars. It must be learned from the Master, under His authority, in experience. When we read in the Gospels that Jesus chose twelve “to be with Him,” their being with Him was not some extra privilege they enjoyed. It was the heart and soul of their discipleship and learning.
Has anyone said it better than Oswald Chambers in his matchless description of the disciple’s master passion, “My utmost for his highest”?
Where the Buck Stops, There Stand I
The notion of calling is vital to the modern search for a basis for moral responsibility and to an understanding of ethics itself. Answering the call by its very nature is a stepping forward to responsibility. Responsibility is obedience by another name.
Faith’s significance for society, Kierkegaard wrote, “ought to be to do everything to make every man eternally responsible for every hour he lives, even for the least thing he undertakes, for this is Christianity.”
Travel and technology are only two of the ways modern life thrusts us from the world of the face-to-face to the world of the impersonal and the invisible. What we do then, when no one sees but God, is the test of our true responsibility.
The Genesis story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife shows calling in action. Invited by his master’s wife to sleep with her, Joseph is completely unseen by human eyes—at that moment he has no father, no brothers, no master, no colleagues to witness his response. But his reply is unequivocal, “How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” Joseph had no human audience. But one audience was enough, the Audience of One.
People of The Call
The call of Jesus is personal but not purely individual; Jesus summons His followers not only to an individual calling but also to a corporate calling.
Community, of course, has fallen on hard times in the modern world. First, all modern people live with a greatly weakened sense of community compared with traditional people—due to modern travel, modern mobility, modern media, modern work and lifestyles, and the saturation of modern relationships.
In the New Testament, it is not so much that there are different churches in different places as that there is one church in many places. Each local church embodies and represents the whole church, so the church is both local and universal, visible and invisible, militant and triumphant.
According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, there were an estimated 1,900 Christian denominations at the beginning of the twentieth century and an estimated 22,000 at the end. Under the influence of the modern world, the historical “accident” of denominations has become a theological disaster for anyone believing in one church.
George Whitefield said, “Father Abraham, whom have you in heaven? Any Episcopalians? No! Any Presbyterians? No! Any Independents or Methodists? No, no, no! Whom have you there? We don’t know those names here. All who are here are Christians… Oh, is this the case? Then God help us to forget party names and to become Christians in deed and truth.”
William Wilberforce put it this way, “Though I am an Episcopalian by birth, I yet feel such a oneness and sympathy with the cause of God at large, that nothing would be more delightful than communing once a year with every church that holds the Head, even Christ.”
Is your allegiance truly to a nonpolitical and nonethnic assembly of people designed to gather all nations to itself, on the basis not of tribe or nation but the call of God in Christ?
Followers of The Way
Calling reminds Christians ceaselessly that, far from having arrived, a Christian is someone who in this life is always on the road as “a follower of Christ” and a follower of “the Way.”
Over the course of two thousand years, there is one unanswerable objection to the Christian faith—Christians. An American T-shirt simply states, “Jesus, save me from your followers.”
Clearly there is a direct link between the profession of faith, the practice of faith, and the plausibility of faith. Practice what you preach and you commend your faith; don’t and you contradict it. “By this all men will know you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “if you love one another.”
G. K. Chesterton expressed one side of the matter, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Archbishop William Temple expressed the other, “‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,’ and I only regret it does not exist.” Or as Søren Kierkegaard wrote from Denmark in his Christian Attack upon Christendom, “The most dreadful sort of blasphemy is that of which ‘Christendom’ is guilty: transforming the God of Spirit into…ludicrous twaddle.”
Calling reminds us that to be “a follower of the Way” is to see life as a journey, which, while we are still alive on the earth, is an incomplete journey that cannot be finally assessed.
There But for the Grace of God Goes God
We must face the darker side of calling: the reverse side of calling is the temptation of conceit. The closeness between calling and conceit is easy to see. After all, to be called is to hear God whisper three things to you in a hundred intimate ways—“You are chosen; you are gifted; you are special.” Let those three things sink in for longer than the first precious moments and you will inevitably hear another voice, honeyed and smooth: “Yes, you really are chosen…gifted…special.”
Once you start thinking, “I’m chosen. I’m gifted. I really must be special,” before you know it, the wonder of calling has grown into the horror of conceit.
During World War II, Winston Churchill’s governing coalition included, as president of the Board of Trade, Sir Stafford Cripps, later the Socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer. Cripps was a teetotaler and a vegetarian and, in Churchill’s eyes, somewhat crabbed in personality. His only concession to pleasure was smoking cigars. But Cripps renounced that habit too, declaring to a wartime rally that he was giving up cigars as an example of sacrifice for the cause. Cripps was also a strong Calvinist and, in Churchill’s eyes, Cripps’s sense of the providence of God had seeped across into his own sense of self-importance. His self-regard, we might say, was a trifle high. One day, Cripps left the cabinet room and Churchill turned to the others and said: “There but for the grace of God goes God.”
Puritans believed that God had a providential purpose for all nations, including the United States, but it was not for the United States alone. The term manifest destiny was first used in 1845 by John L. Sullivan, the editor of Democratic Review. It was a secular, nationalistic distortion of calling that needs to be challenged in a nation as much as in an individual. The old saying, “God takes care of babies, drunks, and the United States,” is pure conceit.
Pride has traditionally been viewed as the first, worst, and deadliest of the seven deadly sins. But the contemporary world has tried to transform this vice into a virtue—through changing the definition of pride to self-respect.
The deadly sin of pride is wrong because it is inordinate and overweening. Consider its synonyms: egotism, arrogance, hubris, selfishness, vanity, haughtiness, presumption, boastfulness, big-headedness, self-satisfaction, self-centeredness, and the like. None of them is admirable and neither is the conceit that is the rotten fruit of calling. “The greatest curse in spiritual life,” Oswald Chambers wrote, “is conceit.”
G. K. Chesterton warned: “For if a man can say, ‘I like to find something greater than myself,’ he may be a fool or a madman, but he has the essential. But if a man says, ‘I like to find something smaller than myself,’ there is only one adequate answer—‘You couldn’t.’”
Only grace can dissolve the hard, solitary, vaunting “I” of the sin of pride in each of us. But the good news is that it does.
What is That to You?
The truth of calling touches closely on the link between giftedness and desire and the almost inescapable temptation of envy. In his excellent book The Seven Deadly Sins Today, journalist Henry Fairlie suggests that the motto for our times might be “The Revenge of Failure.” Fairlie’s analysis is a merciless uncovering of the cancer of envy in modern society—as seen in our debunking biographies, leveling interviews, gossip columns, attack-ad electioneering, and the “boom to bust” cycle of our expectations of our leaders.
Traditionally envy was regarded as the second worst and second most prevalent of the seven deadly sins. As with pride, modern people tend to duck the sting of the classical view by changing the definition of envy. Is it wrong, they say, to see someone succeed (in business or sports, say) and aspire to succeed too? Aspiration, emulation, competition—aren’t they what drives an open society and a free market?
Envy—in Thomas Aquinas’s famous definition—is “sorrow at another’s good.” Envy enters when, seeing someone else’s happiness or success, we feel ourselves called into question.
Dorothy Sayers summed up envy succinctly. “Envy begins by asking plausibly: ‘Why should I not enjoy what others enjoy?’ and it ends by demanding: ‘Why should others enjoy what I may not?’”
Envy corrupts calling by introducing the element of competition. Like pride, envy by its very nature is comparative and competitive. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.
When Jesus calls, he calls us one by one. Comparisons are idle, speculations about others a waste of time, and envy as silly as it is evil. We are each called individually, accountable to God alone, to please him alone, and eventually to be approved by him alone. If ever we are tempted to look around, compare notes, and use the progress of others to judge the success of our own calling, we will hear what Peter heard: “What is that to you? Follow me!”
More, More, Faster, Faster…
Consider this: the greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the invention of the installment plan, or instant credit. Previously one had to save in order to buy. But with credit cards one could indulge in instant gratification. Or as another scholar put it simply, “Capitalism, having defeated all challenges, such as socialism, now faces its greatest challenge—itself, because it devours the very virtues it needs to thrive.”
Calling, which played a key role in the rise of modern capitalism, is one of the few truths capable of guiding and restraining it now.
Truth is that money is much more than a monetary issue; it was, and is, a spiritual issue. Trying to solve the problem of money through tinkering with economics or by switching systems altogether will always fail.
As we seek money and possessions, observers note, the pursuit grows into a never-satisfied desire that fuels avarice—described by the Bible as a vain “chasing after wind” and by moderns as an “addiction.” The very Hebrew word for money (kesef) comes from a verb meaning “to desire” or “languish after something.”
The insatiable pursuit of money is commonly tied to a dangerous narrowness—the narrowness of a single-minded devotion to the goal of making money. The insatiability has always been seen as a sign of other needs—for power, protection, approval, and so on. As the Bible reiterates, we become what we worship. Money almost literally seems to eat people away, drying up the sap of their vitality and withering their spontaneity, generosity, and joy.
The overall lesson of insatiability is that money alone cannot buy the deepest things we desire. Money never purchases love, or eternity, or God.
When John D. Rockefeller, Sr., was asked how much money it takes to make a man happy, he gave the immortal reply, “Just a little bit more.”
In Tolstoy’s story of Andrew Carnegie, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, “It was always ‘more, more, faster, faster.’ The race went on and on and the casualties were heavy. But still they ran, with Carnegie alternately cheering and cursing them on.”
Mammon is a genuine rival to God. The recurring biblical demand confronts us: “You shall not worship the work of your hands.” Jesus challenged his hearers to choose one master or another— God or Mammon. Either we serve God and use money or we serve money and use God. Ultimately we follow what we have loved most intensely to its natural destination—eternity or death—“for where your treasure is, there will your heart be too.”
Calling means that, for the follower of Christ, there is a decisive, immediate, and moment-by-moment authority above money and the market. The choice between Masters has been made. There is one God.
Do you allow money to dominate your priorities, assessments, relationships, and time?
Combating the Noonday Demon
In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” Bartleby confounds both his boss and his fellow-workers when “in a singularly mild, firm voice, [he] replied, ‘I would prefer not to.’” These words become Bartleby’s five-word creed.
Whether “Bartleby the Scrivener” is read on its own or read against the backdrop of its author’s life, it sharpens our appreciation of yet another aspect of the truth of calling—calling is the best antidote to the deadly sin of sloth. Sloth, the fourth of the seven deadly sins, is today the most misunderstood of all—which is ironic because, properly understood, it is the characteristically modern sin.
Sloth must also be distinguished from the modern notion of couch-potato lethargy (“Nearer my couch to thee,” as The New York Times headlined it).
We think of the rise of the modern world as the story of dynamism, energy, progress, and achievement—which it is. But we often overlook its other side. The world produced by such dynamism is a world of convenience, comfort, and consumerism. And when life is safe, easy, sanitized, climate-controlled, and plush, sloth is close.
Midlife crises that are genuine and not simply fashionable are generally due to the tensions between three very different desires: for successful careers, for satisfying work, and for rich personal lives. Sadly, studies show, a few people enjoy neither their work nor their personal lives; more enjoy their work but not their personal lives; only a few say they enjoy both.
A World with Windows
Calling directly counters the great modern pressure toward secularization because the call of Jesus includes a summons to the exercise of the spiritual disciplines and the experience of supernatural realities.
Less and less of life has been left to God, chance, or human spontaneity, as more and more of life has been classified, calculated, and controlled by the use of reason—in science and technology. What matters more is to recognize that secularization affects religious believers just as much as it does atheists and agnostics. The same vast assembly of plans and procedures that we use to put an astronaut on the moon or market a new computer chip can also be mustered to “grow a church” or “evangelize an unreached people.”
Jesus not only calls us to follow him but shows us the essential place of spiritual discipline in His own life. Called by God at His baptism, He is driven into the wilderness to confront Satan’s temptations, which He overcomes through spiritual warfare. There is only a rhythm of engagement and withdrawal, work and rest, dispensing and recharging, crowds and solitude, in the midst of one of the shortest, busiest public lives ever lived.
While it is fruitful to reflect on a Christian critique of society’s view of leisure at any particular time, it is absolutely essential to think through Christ’s view of rest and spiritual discipline for his disciples for all time. Only then can we answer the call and resist the sleep of death.
Locked Out and Staying There
Followers of Christ live by faith alone to the glory of God alone. Calling keeps us from the deadly triangle of pitfalls currently bedeviling faith in public life.
- “Privatization”: An ugly word but of immense importance to religious believers in the modern world. Privatization is the process by which modernization produces a cleavage between the public and private spheres of life and reinforces the private sphere as the special arena for individual freedom, fulfillment—and faith. More people can choose more, do more, buy more, see more, and travel more than ever before. What privatized faith lacks, in one word, is totality. People may say and sing that “Jesus is Lord,” but what they demonstrate is something else. The problem with Western Christians is not that they aren’t where they should be but that they aren’t what they should be where they are.
- “Politicization”: A direct reaction to privatization. For two hundred years the churches in the United States have avoided this pitfall—thanks largely to the genius of the First Amendment, the constructive separation of church and state, and the creation of the voluntary associations that shifted the moral agency from the local church as a corporate body to individual Christians acting in concert with others. But the last quarter of a century indicates a different story. To the degree that Christian activism in public life becomes a politicization of the church—an identification with political movements on either right or left without critical tension—to that degree Christian activism will betray Christ and stoke the fires of its own and the church’s rejection.
- “Pillarization”: Protestants built not only churches but also Protestant schools, Protestant universities, Protestant newspapers, Protestant labor unions, and so forth. The effect was to “pillarize” society. Protestant society attempts to maintain its overall national unity while encouraging diversity within it.
If privatization is a denial of the totality of faith and politicization is a denial of the tension of faith, pillarization has proved deficient too. In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions—whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes— they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being “salt” and “light”—images of a permeating and penetrating action—Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.
A Focused Life
The calling of Jesus provides the priorities and perspectives that are essential for a focused life in an overloaded age. The modern world exerts pressure through the proliferation of choice and change, which rapidly multiplies the number of options. This affects the private sphere of modern society at all levels, from consumer goods to relationships to worldviews and faiths.
The increase in choice and change leads to a decrease in commitment and continuity—to everyone and everything. Thus obligation melts into option and givenness into choice.
In the modern world there are simply too many choices, too many people to relate to, too much to do, too much to see, too much to read, too much to catch up with and follow, too much to buy.
Calling subverts the deadly modern idolatry of choice. Ultimately only one thing can conquer choice— being chosen. Thus, for followers of Christ, calling neutralizes the fundamental poison of choice in modern life. “I have chosen you,” Jesus said, “you have not chosen me.” We are not our own; we have been bought with a price.
Calling helps us to be single-minded without being fanatics. Modern choice and change, reinforced by the pace and pressure of modern life, constantly threaten to diffuse our concentration and dissipate our energy. There is good reason for the prevalence of such phrases as “burnout,” the “tyranny of the urgent,” and the “dictatorship of the diary.”
The modern world makes the focused life harder and makes it virtually impossible simply to muddle through. Calling is a “yes” to God that carries a “no” to the chaos of modern demands.
Dreamers of the Day
Calling is a prime source of Christian vision and Christian visionaries. In practical-minded circles today, it is fashionable to disdain “the vision thing.”
H. L. Mencken wrote in an essay, “Jews, from time immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets.”
Calling’s vision must be guarded at three main points:
- Beware of spurious visions. Vision and imagination, cut loose from the anchor of God’s calling, are vulnerable to debunking. The author of Hebrews says of them, “Those who use such language show plainly that they are looking for a country of their own.” The secret of visionary faith lies in that sentence. How did they manage to transcend their times, surmounting the immediate, living against the generally accepted, looking for the possible beyond the impossible? Called by God, their whole lives were speaking and acting with the language and logic of the alternative vision that is proper to faith. These are the sort of people of whom the newly elected Pope says in Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, “Find me men with fire in their hearts and wings on their feet.”
- Guard visionary faith by watching out for the pitfalls toward which genuine vision pulls us. George Bernard Shaw’s, quoted by Robert F. Kennedy: “You see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’”
- Guard visionary faith by watching out for deceptive look-alikes. One modern example is the powerful stream of “self help” and “positive thinking.”
Patches of Godlight
Calling transforms life so that even the commonplace and menial are invested with the splendor of the ordinary.
“In politics,” as Abraham Lincoln used to say, “every man must skin his own skunk.” “Someone has to do it,” we often say of the dirty work, doing our utmost to make sure it won’t be us.
Convenience has joined choice and change to form the holy trinity of the consumer lifestyle. With “instant” this and “user-friendly” that, all wrapped up in packaging free from sin, pain, dirt, and hassles, everyone reasonably well off can achieve a way of living that obscures drudgery. So a dangerous combination grows—unpleasant realities recede while distaste for unpleasant realities grows.
Calling transforms things by reminding us once again of our audience. Drudgery done for ourselves or for other human audiences will always be drudgery. But drudgery done for God is lifted and changed. Hudson Taylor, a great nineteenth-century pioneer missionary to China, used to teach: “A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in a little thing is a big thing.” Similarly, Mother Teresa said, “I don’t do big things. I do small things with big love.”
Calling transforms things by focusing our attention, under God, on things as they are.
The Christian faith, by contrast, has a bifocal vision—it is world affirming and world denying at the same time. Seen one way, the world is marred, broken by the ravages of evil. But seen another way, the world was made and pronounced good.
For the called person, work should be as close as possible to the fulfillment of our natures and the expression of our God-given creativeness— “work shall be such as a man may do with his whole heart, and that he shall do it for the very work’s sake.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, and in one sermon spoke similarly, “To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.”
“No man makes a greater mistake,” Edmund Burke warned, “than he who does nothing because he knows it is not everything.”
Calling transforms things by reminding us that drudgery is part of the cost of discipleship. Oswald Chambers repeatedly hammers home the point that “drudgery is the touchstone of character.”
Are you blind to the splendor of the ordinary? Do you depend on the adrenaline of the impressive and the inspirational?
Let All Your Thinks be Thanks
Calling is a reminder for followers of Christ that nothing in life should be taken for granted; everything in life must be received with gratitude.
In his Notes from Underground in 1864, Dostoevsky wrote of humanity, “If he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”
Ingratitude and forgetfulness are ultimately moral rather than mental; they are the direct expression of sin. We pride ourselves on being autonomous, self-created, and freestanding. A modern world with no need of God produces modern people with no sense of gratitude.
The modern world has transformed a sense of debt into a sense of rights and entitlement. Gradually wrong has been debased from being “sin,” defined before God, to “crime,” defined before law, to “sickness,” once defined carefully by psychiatry but now subject to the shifting breezes of pop-cultural fashion.
As Bart Simpson, America’s favorite cartoon kid, put it baldly when asked to say grace at supper time, “Dear God, we pay for all this ourselves. So thanks for nothing.”
The link between calling and gratitude, chosenness and wonder touches our lives practically in two main places:
- It reminds us that with so much grace given to us, we should be givers of grace to others.
- It reminds us that gratitude must be our first and constant response to God.
Augustine described the Christian as an “alleluia from head to foot.” George Herbert, a seventeenth-century Anglican poet, wrote a prayer in one of his poems, “You have given so much to me. Give me one thing more—a grateful heart.” G. K. Chesterton stated as “the chief idea of my life” the practice of “taking things with gratitude and not taking things for granted.”
Adapting G. K. Chesterton, we may state the motto of every follower of Christ moved to wonder by the mystery and grace of God’s calling: “Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.”
Everybody’s Fools
Calling entails the cost of discipleship. The deepest challenge is to renounce self and identify with Jesus in his sufferings and rejection.
In a controlling, calculating age, the world’s ideal is always to be in charge, never to be caught out—in short, to be “nobody’s fool.” On the contrary, say the fools for Christ, in a world gone mad through its own worldly wisdom, true wisdom is to “go mad for God” even at the price of being hopelessly vulnerable—to be “everybody’s fools.”
Foolbearing is essential to calling because it is the true way to count the cost of identifying with Jesus. It is the price of obeying his call, renouncing self, and taking up the cross to follow him. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words in The Cost of Discipleship in 1937.
The Gospels are unambiguously clear about the cost of discipleship—and also that Jesus’ call to discipleship is the echo of His father’s call to Him. Called to be the Messiah, Jesus knew He must suffer and be what appeared a contradiction in terms—a rejected Messiah. But He lays this necessity on the disciples too. Just as Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, only insofar as He suffers and is rejected, so the disciples of Jesus are obedient to the call of Jesus only insofar as they are prepared to pay the cost.
C. S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” That is the difference between heaven and hell.
The church has always maintained a necessary tension between a world-affirming stance and a world-denying stance. Due to its extraordinary power, the modern world has swung the balance heavily toward the former. Hardly any Christians are world-denying these days.
On every side we see Christians pursuing the rage for relevance, whether seeking the respect of the “cultured despisers” of the gospel, reaching out to the contemporary “unchurched” with a “user friendly” gospel, or just enjoying the comforts of the age.
Nothing in the Gospels is more revolutionary than Jesus’ call to respond to injury in a new way, “But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
Austin Farrer, the Oxford philosopher, once stated, “If Jesus is willing to be in us, and to let us show him to the world, it’s a small thing that we should endure being fools for Christ’s sake, and be shown up by the part we have to play.”
The Hour Has Come
Calling is an essential part of the sense of timing that characterizes a successful life.
Winston Churchill had a good sense of timing. In his case it was allied with a da Vinci-like sense of the shortness of human life and the immensity of possible human accomplishment. “Curse ruthless time!” he once said to a friend. “How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!”
Unquestionably the strongest biblical awareness of timing is in Jesus. Eleven times in a single chapter (Luke 11) Jesus referred to “generation,” six of them to “this generation.”
Like John the Baptist, Paul of Tarsus, and many ancient leaders such as Pericles, Socrates, Cicero, and Augustus Caesar, Jesus of Nazareth was undeniably motivated by a long-held, overarching purpose that He followed consistently. Like John and Paul but not the others, Jesus clearly viewed His life-purpose as a calling from God—announced at His baptism and recorded plainly by all four Gospels.
Most offensive of all to his generation, Jesus spoke and acted as if He actually embodied Israel’s God, YHWH, come down in person and in power. In Jesus, God has arrived, Israel’s king has returned to his people.
A sense of timing was central to Jesus’ sense of calling. “My hour has not yet come,” He said to His mother at the wedding in Cana when she attempted to thrust Him into the limelight prematurely. “My time is not yet at hand,” He said to His brothers when they urged Him to go up to Jerusalem to establish Himself prematurely. “The hour has come,” He later prayed to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Calling is a matter of relying on God and renouncing inadequate methods for achieving timeliness. “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself.”
Calling is a matter of readiness. “Be on your guard.” From His stories about the wise and foolish bridesmaids to His references to “the days of Noah” and His coming “like a thief in the night” to His real-life rebuke of His sleeping disciples, Jesus repeatedly urged His followers to be on the alert, waiting, watching, ready. Readiness for followers of Christ is obedience honed to the highest level of responsiveness.
Calling is a matter of resolution. “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” God calls men and women who will be committed to their life tasks with no reservations, no retreats, no regrets.
Last Call
Calling is central to the challenge and privilege of finishing well in life. Calling is the spur that keeps us journeying purposefully— and thus growing and maturing—to the very end of our lives.
As those responding to God’s call, we are followers of Christ and followers of the Way. So we are on a journey and we are truly travelers, with all the attendant costs, risks, and dangers of the journey. Never in this life can we say we have arrived. But we know why we have lost our original home and, more importantly, we know the home to which we are going.
We may retire from our jobs, but there is no retiring from our individual callings. We may cut back from our public responsibilities, but there is no cutting back from our corporate calling as the people of God.
Calling helps us to finish well because it prevents us from confusing the termination of our occupations with the termination of our vocations. If we ever limit our calling to what we do, and that task is taken away from us—we suddenly find ourselves unemployed, fired, retired, or pronounced terminally ill—then we are tempted to depression or doubt.
“When a man knows how to do something,” Pablo Picasso told a friend, “he ceases being a man when he stops doing it.” A friend once said to Winston Churchill that there was something to be said for being a retired Roman Emperor. “Why retired?” Churchill growled. “There’s nothing to be said for retiring from anything.”
Calling helps us finish well because it encourages us to leave the entire outcome of our lives to God. When the Last Call comes to each of us, may it be found that we have all answered the call, followed the way, and finished well.