The Calling
The steps of a good man are ordered from the Lord. And He Delights in his way. For the Lord upholds him with his hand.
Psalms 37:23
The mind of man plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.
Proverbs 16:9
In summary, God has given every one of us passions and desires, God wants to delight in the way we choose. This makes sense, after all, how is God supposed to use us if we are constantly unhappy, sad, or running the race half speed? God allows us to choose the path to follow, then God takes us where he wants to use us best. At the same time, this 'passion' we have in life, I surmise, could be and perhaps always becomes our 'calling.' Paul discusses this in Ephesians: "Walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called."
Ephesians 4:1
Our vocation is our calling. The verse could also be read, "Walk worthy of the calling in which we are called." We clearly have a calling, some purpose God has for our lives. Something of a burden that God has put on our lives. Right, and this is the great mystery, in effect we choose the calling and God gives us the calling at the same time! I think one way to explain this is that there are many potential paths we can pursue to find God's calling for our lives, and eventually, if we follow Christ, these paths will lead us toward God, our passion and purpose in life, and eventually the path eventually becomes so to speak, the 'road of God's calling.'
God wants to 'give us the desires of our heart'. Remember in context, he is talking to a follower of Christ and what should be our desires after coming to Christ? More money, cars, homes, fame--NO. Rather more believers, fruits of the spirit, and righteousness. Our desire should be God's desires.
Our destiny is a unification of these 'desires' and the God ordained 'calling' or 'vocation.' God then directs our steps to combine these two. When these combine, we find peace. Perhaps you might ask, what is the calling in my life? How do I find God's will for my life? The answer is sometimes the most simple, follow God, follow your heart.
The Command
Why sit we here until we die? or in American culture: Why sit here until we retire? Do you really think God intended us to live a comfortable life full of ease and spend our life working for the last 30 years? Where is that in the Bible?
Here lies the sticking point, the sharp needle, the cutting edge of Christ's words and the message of the Cross. If we are truly saved, we will want more than anything to go after Christ, and after him hard.
In Revelation, the Lukewarm church is 'spit' out of Christ's mouth. Not, comforted and told that we just 'missed the boat' or need to 'try harder next time.' There is no second chance, none, for person that fails to find their calling. Once we taste the sweet fruit of Christ's grace and repent, we are required to run after him. The Greek word faint doesn't just mean to collapse or stop, but to simply stop running. From Strongs:Faint is the Greek word eklyō and it means: “to weaken, relax, exhaust; to have one's strength relaxed.The command of scripture is to get passionate, find our calling, and go hard after Christ. We fail on any these accounts, we eklyo. Read these words by Dante:
Dante, on his imaginary journey through hell, came upon a group of lost souls who sighed and moaned continually as they whirled about aimlessly in the dusky air. Virgil, his guide, explained that these were the "wretched people," the "nearly soulless," who while they lived on earth had not moral energy enough to be either good or evil. They had earned neither praise nor blame. And with them and sharing in their punishment were those angels who would take sides neither with God nor Satan. The doom of all of the weak and irresolute crew was to be suspended forever between a hell that despised them and a heaven that would not receive their defiled presence. Not even their names were to be mentioned again in heaven or earth or hell. "Look," said the guide, "and pass on."Whatever our calling is, the command to have the moral energy to stand for up for Truth, for God, and Righteousness is apart of that. Fainting, failing to find our calling, and lack of moral courage and strength carries with it the most serious of consequences in the life to come.
So, yes pray, seek God and find your passion. But within that, God has already commanded you to go after him and in the words of the great commission, 'Go, Baptize, Disciple.'
The Challenge
We are given a short time on earth to make a difference for God. God gives us a calling, a calling that will make us happy. God gives us time, as much as we need to go after that calling. God can give you the strength, strength to carry on. Within that calling, there is a command. Every second gone is a second lost forever. Do something for God.
From A.W. Tozer and TheScriptureAlone.com
Excerpts from Of God and Men
Chapter 32.
The Report of the Watcher
Were some watcher or holy one from the bright world above to come among us for atime with the power to diagnose the spiritual ills of church people there is one entry which I am quite sure would appear on the vast majority of his reports: Definite evidence of chronic spiritual lassitude; level of moral enthusiasm extremely low.
What makes this condition especially significant is that Americans are not naturally an
unenthusiastic people. Indeed they have a world-wide reputation for being just the opposite.Visitors to our shores from other countries never cease to marvel at the vigor and energy with which we attack our problems. We live at a fever pitch, and whether we are erecting buildings, laying highways, promoting athletic events, celebrating special days or welcoming returning heroes we always do it with an exaggerated flourish. Our building will be taller, our highway broader, our athletic contest more colorful, our celebration more elaborate and more expensive than would be true anywhere else on earth. We walk faster, drive faster, earn more, spend more and run a higher blood pressure than any other people in the world.
In only one field of human interest are we slow and apathetic: that is the field of personal
religion. There for some strange reason our enthusiasm lags. Church people habitually approach the matter of their personal relation to God in a dull, half-hearted way which is altogether out of keeping with their general temperament and wholly inconsistent with the importance of the subject.
It is true that there is a lot of religious activity among us. Interchurch basketball
tournaments, religious splash parties followed by devotions, weekend camping trips with a Bible quiz around the fire, Sunday school picnics, building fund drives and ministerial breakfasts are with us in unbelievable numbers, and they are carried on with typical American gusto. It is when we enter the sacred precincts of the heart's personal religion that we suddenly lose all enthusiasm.
So we find this strange and contradictory situation: a world of noisy, headlong religious
activity carried on without moral energy or spiritual fervor. In a year's travel among the churches one scarcely finds a believer whose blood count is normal and whose temperature is up to standard. The flush and excitement of the soul in love must be sought in the New Testament or in the biographies of the saints; we look for them in vain among the professed followers of Christ in our day.
Now if there is any reality within the whole sphere of human experience that is by its very nature worthy to challenge the mind, charm the heart and bring the total life to a burning focus, it is the reality that revolves around the Person of Christ. If He is who and what the Christian message declares Him to be, then the thought of Him should be the most exciting, the most stimulating, to enter the human mind. It is not hard to understand how Paul could join wine and the Spirit in one verse: "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit" (Eph. 5:18). When the Spirit presents Christ to our inner vision it has an exhilarating effect on 78 the soul, much as wine has on the body. The Spirit-filled man may literally dwell in a state of spiritual fervor amounting to a mild and pure inebriation.
God dwells in a state of perpetual enthusiasm. He is delighted with all that is good and
lovingly concerned about all that is wrong. He pursues His labors always in a fullness of holy zeal. No wonder the Spirit came at Pentecost as the sound of a rushing mighty wind and sat in tongues of fire on every forehead. In so doing He was acting as one of the Persons of the blessed Godhead.
Whatever else happened at Pentecost, one thing that cannot be missed by the most casual
observer was the sudden upsurging of moral enthusiasm. Those first disciples burned with a steady, inward fire. They were enthusiastic to the point of complete abandon.
Dante, on his imaginary journey through hell, came upon a group of lost souls who sighed and moaned continually as they whirled about aimlessly in the dusky air. Virgil, his guide, explained that these were the "wretched people," the "nearly soulless," who while they lived on earth had not moral energy enough to be either good or evil. They had earned neither praise nor blame. And with them and sharing in their punishment were those angels who would take sides neither with God nor Satan. The doom of all of the weak and irresolute crew was to be suspended forever between a hell that despised them and a heaven that would not receive their defiled presence. Not even their names were to be mentioned again in heaven or earth or hell. "Look," said the guide, "and pass on."
Was Dante saying in his own way what our Lord had said long before to the church of
Laodicea: "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth"?
The low level of moral enthusiasm among us may have a significance far deeper than we
are willing to believe.
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