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

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 Devotional

Get On With Your Tentmaking

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN, who had asked whether he should continue with his postgraduate work in history or study theology: On the danger of combining one’s vocation with one’s spiritual interest.

C. S. Lewis

5 January 1951

We must ask three questions about the probable effect of your research subject to something more theological.

(1.) Would it be better for your immediate enjoyment? Answer, probably but not certainly, Yes.

(2.) Would it be better for your academic career? Answer, probably No. You would have to make up in haste a lot of knowledge which could not be very easily digested in the time.

(3.) Would it be better for your soul? I don’t know. I think there is a great deal to be said for having one’s deepest spiritual interest distinct from one’s ordinary duty as a student or professional man.

St. Paul’s job was tent-making. When the two coincide I should have thought there was a danger lest the natural interest in one’s job and the pleasures of gratified ambition might be mistaken for spiritual progress and spiritual consolation: and I think clergymen sometimes fall into this trap.

Contrariwise, there is the danger that what is boring or repellent in the job may alienate one from the spiritual life. And finally someone has said ‘None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterised with holy things’: sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job. You now want truth for her own sake: how will it be when the same truth is also needed for an effective footnote in your thesis? In fact, the change might do good or harm.

I’ve always been glad myself that Theology is not the thing I earn my living by. On the whole, I’d advise you to get on with your tent-making. The performance of a duty will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology would do. Mind, I’m not certain: but that is the view I incline to.

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:

Christian Activists

Hard Work the Highest Service

The general medieval world-view was deeply suspicious of economic motives.  Lucre was, after all, filthy.  Therefore, it had to be limited, controlled, and governed.  All economic activity had to be carried on for the public good; profits must be restricted to sustenance payments.  Clearly, the medieval world had a problem with the Parable of the Talents. 

These generalisations hold generally true.  But there were exceptions.  Gradually, as Western economies developed, the exceptions became more common, more widespread.  Medieval theology, and the economic theories it produced, were broken apart by economic realities.  Theological understanding did not catch up until the Reformation--and then, only gradually.

John Calvin argued that laws against usury were entirely inconsistent.  They simply did not make sense.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 05

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread. —II Thessalonians 3:12

Devotional:
The Lord commands every one of us, in all the actions of life, to regard his vocation. For he knows with what great unrest the human mind is inflamed, with what desultory levity it is hurried hither and thither, and how insatiable is its ambition to grasp different things at once.

Therefore, to prevent universal confusion being produced by our folly and temerity, he has appointed to all their particular duties in different spheres of life. And that no one might rashly transgress the limits prescribed, he has styled such spheres of life vocations or callings.

Every individual's line of life, therefore, is, as it were, a post assigned him by the Lord, that he may not wander about in uncertainty all his days.

The Cultivated Man

Learning from Paul not Plotinus

The great theologian, Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) once wrote:

Culture in the broadest sense is the purpose for which God created man after His image . . . [which] includes not only the most ancient callings of . . . hunting and fishing, agriculture and stock raising, but also trade and commerce and science and art.

We are accustomed to think of culture as that which is distinct from science, and which refers to music, literature and fine art.   The Biblical framework is much, much broader when it comes to culture.  From the dictionaries, it appears that the word "culture" first came into English in the mid-15th century from Old French, from Latin cultūra  a cultivating, from colere  to till.

The Sacredness of the Ordinary

Hidden Away

In the novel Gilead, the aging minister, John Ames professes how as the years have passed he has more and more come to see the creation as a wonder--an awe inducing realm of which he is a part.  As he has grown older, he has come to love his own body more and more, confessing it to be fearfully and wonderfully made by God.

Such earthiness has always been a hallmark of Christian orthodoxy.  To believe in "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth" necessarily requires we hold the creation in reverence and respect, delight and awe.

God's Masks and God's Speech

Living Holy Lives

Martin Luther had a profoundly biblical understanding of the creation.  He also had a profound understanding of the immanence of God in all He has made.  God is working in and through all things.  All things.  So declares the Bible (Romans 11:33-36).  So believed Martin Luther. 

One implication was that Luther had a deep respect for one's circumstances in life.  They were a living Bible of natural revelation.  Our circumstances, he said, were comprehensively ordained and ordered by God.  They were God's "masks".  Behind each and every circumstance was the Person of God Himself.

Ageless Wisdom

God Feeding Babies

Luther's understanding of calling and vocation is startling and radical to modern ears, influenced by secularism.  But it is true to Scripture itself.  Consider the following account from Gustaf Wingren on Luther's understanding of divine providence and the multiple offices of every human in carrying out His providence:

God creates the babes in the mother's body--man being only an instrument in God's hand--and then he sustains them with his gifts, brought to the children through the labors of  father and mother in their parental office.  "Even though a father is an instrument of procreation, God himself is the source and author of life."

God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is.  He who engages in the lowliness of his work performs God's work, be he lad or king.  To give one's office proper care is not selfishness.  Devotion to office is devotion to love, because it is by God's own ordering that the work of the office is always dedicated to the well-being of one's neighbour.  Care for one's office is, in its very frame of reference on earth, participation in God's own care for human beings. [Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. by Carl C. Rasmussen (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1957), p.9.] 

From this flow some scintillating truths.  Firstly, human work, agency, and labour is not co-labouring with God in the sense that we do something and God does something, each contributing to the whole.  Rather, God is the entire complete and whole actor; we are His servants, God working in and through us.  

Secondly, because when a mother feeds her child, God is feeding the child, and because when the soldier defends his neighbours, God is defending the neighbours, likewise all work, all human agency must be regarded as God providing and God working.  All of life, then, is holy.  All lawful work, and offices, and responsibilities are holy.  The distinction between sacred and secular evaporates.