Daily Meditation

Responding to God’s Call

Ligonier Ministries

We live in daily submission to a host of authorities who circumscribe our freedom: from parents to traffic police officers to dog catchers. All authorities are to be respected and, as the Bible declares, honored. But only one authority has the intrinsic right to bind the conscience. God alone imposes absolute obligation, and He does it by the power of His holy voice.

He calls the world into existence by divine imperative, by holy fiat. He calls the dead and rotting Lazarus to life again. He calls people who were no people “My people.” He calls us out of darkness and into light. He effectually calls us to redemption. He calls us to service.

Our vocation is so named because of its Latin root vocatio, “a calling.” The term vocational choice is a contradiction in terms to the Christian. To be sure, we do choose it and can, in fact, choose to disobey it. But prior to the choice and hovering with absolute power over it is the divine summons, the imposition to duty from which we dare not flee.

It was vocation that drove Jonah on his flight to Tarshish and caused his terrified shipmates to dump him in the sea to still the vengeful tempest. It was vocation that elicited the anguished cry from Paul, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:16). It was vocation that put a heinous cup of bitterness in the hands of Jesus.

The call of God is not always to a glamorous vocation, and its fruit in this world is often bittersweet. Yet God calls us according to our gifts and talents, and directs us to paths of the most useful service to His kingdom. How impoverished we would be if Jonah had made it to Tarshish, if Paul had refused to preach, if Jeremiah really had turned in his prophet’s card, or if Jesus had politely declined the cup.

Coram Deo

Think about it … what will be the tab of spiritual losses if you do not respond to God’s call?

Passages for Further Study

2 Corinthians 10:15–16
Romans 15:20
Philippians 1:17

Daily Meditation

Responding to God’s Call

Ligonier Ministries

We live in daily submission to a host of authorities who circumscribe our freedom: from parents to traffic police officers to dog catchers. All authorities are to be respected and, as the Bible declares, honored. But only one authority has the intrinsic right to bind the conscience. God alone imposes absolute obligation, and He does it by the power of His holy voice.

He calls the world into existence by divine imperative, by holy fiat. He calls the dead and rotting Lazarus to life again. He calls people who were no people “My people.” He calls us out of darkness and into light. He effectually calls us to redemption. He calls us to service.

Our vocation is so named because of its Latin root vocatio, “a calling.” The term vocational choice is a contradiction in terms to the Christian. To be sure, we do choose it and can, in fact, choose to disobey it. But prior to the choice and hovering with absolute power over it is the divine summons, the imposition to duty from which we dare not flee.

It was vocation that drove Jonah on his flight to Tarshish and caused his terrified shipmates to dump him in the sea to still the vengeful tempest. It was vocation that elicited the anguished cry from Paul, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:16). It was vocation that put a heinous cup of bitterness in the hands of Jesus.

The call of God is not always to a glamorous vocation, and its fruit in this world is often bittersweet. Yet God calls us according to our gifts and talents, and directs us to paths of the most useful service to His kingdom. How impoverished we would be if Jonah had made it to Tarshish, if Paul had refused to preach, if Jeremiah really had turned in his prophet’s card, or if Jesus had politely declined the cup.

Coram Deo

Think about it … what will be the tab of spiritual losses if you do not respond to God’s call?

Passages for Further Study

2 Corinthians 10:15–16
Romans 15:20
Philippians 1:17

Daily Meditation

Doing Your Duty

Ligonier Ministries

The human ear is a strange appendage. Ears come in all sizes and shapes; they are the delight of the cartoonist, who can capture caricatures easily by exaggerating their angles. The appendix and the coccyx have been dubbed “vestigial appendices” by those convinced of their relatively useless functional value. No one has ever called the ear “vestigial,” as its value is not so much cosmetic but functional. Jesus put it succinctly: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable responsibilities, among which are love, obedience, and the pursuit of vocation. These may be summed up with one four-letter word that has become a modern-day obscenity: duty. Duty involves answering a summons, responding to an obligation, and heeding a call.

Our ears are assaulted daily by a cacophony of sounds making it difficult at times to distinguish between a bona fide call and senseless noise. We get phone calls, fire calls, wake-up calls, cat calls, crank calls, house calls, bad calls (by referees), and late calls for dinner. We get calls from our bosses, our teachers, and Uncle Sam; calls to departure gates, sales calls, and nature calls.

Only one call carries the force of absolute and ultimate obligation. I may ignore my phone calls and defy even the call of Uncle Sam, fleeing to Canada while nursing a hope for future amnesty. The call of God may also be ignored or disobeyed, but never with impunity. I may marry Betty or Sally and live in Chicago or Tuscaloosa. I may build a small house or a big house, or even live in an apartment. I can drive a Cadillac or a Honda—it’s a free country. With respect to vocation, however, it is not a free universe. One absolute, nonnegotiable requirement of my life is that I be true to my vocation. This is my duty.

Coram Deo

Are you responding to the call of God? Are you being true to the vocation to which you are called?

Passages for Further Study

Hebrews 3:7–8
Hebrews 4:7

Daily Meditation

Do Not Be Discontented With Your Calling

Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.  1 Corinthians 7:20

Charles H. Spurgeon

Some persons have the foolish notion that the only way in which they can live for God is by becoming ministers, missionaries, or Bible women. Alas! how many would be shut out from any opportunity of magnifying the Most High if this were the case. Beloved, it is not office, it is earnestness; it is not position, it is grace which will enable us to glorify God.

God is most surely glorified in that cobbler's stall, where the godly worker, as he plies the awl, sings of the Saviour's love, aye, glorified far more than in many a prebendal stall where official religiousness performs its scanty duties. The name of Jesus is glorified by the poor unlearned carter as he drives his horse, and blesses his God, or speaks to his fellow labourer by the roadside, as much as by the popular divine who, throughout the country, like Boanerges, is thundering out the gospel.

God is glorified by our serving him in our proper vocations. Take care, dear reader, that you do not forsake the path of duty by leaving your occupation, and take care you do not dishonour your profession while in it. Think little of yourselves, but do not think too little of your callings.

Every lawful trade may be sanctified by the gospel to noblest ends. Turn to the Bible, and you will find the most menial forms of labour connected either with most daring deeds of faith, or with persons whose lives have been illustrious for holiness. Therefore be not discontented with your calling. Whatever God has made your position, or your work, abide in that, unless you are quite sure that he calls you to something else.

Let your first care be to glorify God to the utmost of your power where you are. Fill your present sphere to his praise, and if he needs you in another he will show it you. This evening lay aside vexatious ambition, and embrace peaceful content.

Our Disease of Discontent

The Good Life

Where can wisdom, joy, and peace be found in the monotony of daily life?  The Book of Ecclesiastes has much to teach us about what is, in effect, the daily experience of  most of our lives: the dull drudgery of existence.  But it is teaching not understood by many in the West.  It represents our particular curse.

 For most Western cultures, drudgery is a calling to be pursued by machines, not souls.  Therefore, there is a subterranean discontent, a roiling of soul, because we cannot escape the tedium of life, its repetitiveness, nor its dullness.  For so many in the West, life is one long boring monotony interspersed by seasons of desperate excitement originating from the occasional spectacle of entertainment.  The Western soul is deeply discontented.

Here is the biblical perspective on dull monotonies:

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. [Ecclesiastes 3:9-13]

What is God's gift to man?  It is that he should accept his limitations, as Clint Eastwood so sagely remarked in one of his movies,  and learn to live joyfully all his days, taking pleasure in his eating, his drinking and his toil.  All of these, our entire existence, is God's gift to man.  Seeing this, learning it, accepting it is the path of life--as we learn to worship God and His gifts in the (otherwise) mundane monotony.  When we do this, the mundane life becomes a glorious uplifting symphony of praise and worship to our Lord.

In his book, Recovering Eden, Zack Erswine takes up these themes. Speaking of our "lot" in life, he remarks:

The Times They are A-Changing

The Slow-Release Poison of Post-Modernism

The question of what changed in society to enable it to develop from mediaevalism to modern economic powerhouses is a fascinating one.  One centrally important change was in the way men thought about the world and their place in it.  Who am I?  Why am I here and alive?  What are my duties and responsibilities?

Medieval man had a set of fairly standard answers to these questions.  Modernist man had a different understanding of life and being, and answered these questions differently.  Post-modern man has a different set of answers again.  The different answers were (and are) all religious in nature. 

The change from medievalism to modernism took place amidst developments in Christian doctrine; those changes in understanding essentially produced what we call the Modern period.

Modernism itself then went through two major developmental stages.  Early modernism was essentially Christian in nature and philosophy: it answered the questions above accordingly.  Later modernism moved away from orthodox Christianity to deistic-atheism, changing its answers to reflect this.  Post-modernism's religion, for its part, is materialistic atheism.  In each of these stages or phases, the questions above have been answered differently. The outcome and results have been very different. 

Charles Taylor documents the post medieval, early modern answers to the questions, who am I? why am I here? and what are my duties and responsibilities?  A major change that moved Europe from mediaevalism to the modern age had to do with "secular" work.  Taylor's is one of the best summaries we have read:

Knowing One's Place

Recovering The Joy of Battle 

In our corporate experience there are plenty of faithful Christians who live conscience stricken.  They are sure that they are not obeying sufficiently well to satisfy the exhortations and injunctions that come upon them like a deluge every Lord's day.  The preacher has just completed an exposition of the Apostle's command, "pray without ceasing" and many poor saints depart certain that they have failed to obey that command and that they live miserable Christian lives, racked with general unfaithfulness.  So the saints perpetually mourn, with little gaiety and laughter. 

They have forgotten (or have perhaps never been taught) that most of the commands and exhortations, particularly in the New Testament, are given to the church corporate, of which the individual believer is one part--or to use a Pauline illustration, a single member of an entire body.  True, the believer must play an role--a role appropriate to their gifts and calling--so that the congregation as a whole can pray without ceasing. 

When Christians sort this out, the joyful release from false guilt can be palpable.  Theologian, John Frame provides a broader and deeper biblical argument for this reality.  He argues that each of us must prioritize God's commandments in the light of one's situation and, in particular, one's callings.