The Call to Service (Part 1)

The call to service. So let me put this on the table and then let’s think about it together. So calling is, once we’ve looked at call to salvation, call of vision, call to station, call to service, this gracious act of God by which he directs certain disciples to make disciples in certain ways, at certain times, among certain people, in certain locations, through certain vocations. So calls to service, contrary especially the first calling, and second, for that matter, may be fluid, may be operating at varying levels and open to varying assignments from God.

How Do We Know We Are Called To Service?

What must be constant in our lives though is faithfulness to God’s call to service no matter what the cost until God calls us to different service. So calls to service. How do we know how God’s calling us? These calls are discerned, not just individually, but as members of the church, on mission in the world through spirit led, word driven prayer, saturated examination of our desires, gifts, abilities, opportunities.

So just kind of with that on the table, let’s unpack it. This gracious act of God by which he directs disciples to make disciples because that’s a given. We’re called to mission, all of us. So it’s not whether or not he is leading us to make disciples, he’s leading us all to make disciples. The question is, how? In a certain way, in a certain time among a certain people in a certain location. That’s exactly what we read in Acts. Acts chapter 13, 16, 20. God’s saying, “Paul, I want you to make disciples and out outside of Antioch. Now you’ve been in Antioch, I want you to go somewhere else.” He goes on missionary journey. And then he starts on the second missionary journey. He starts going this direction, says, “No, I don’t want you to go there. I don’t want you to go there. I want you to go here. I want you to go to Macedonia. I want you to make disciples there.”

So this is where that’s fluid. It’s changing as Paul is being obedient in Christ to mission, being faithful in the station he is in now, serving in different ways at different times. And so this is where it looks different in all of our lives. So I mentioned even calling through certain vocation. You may not know that we actually get the word vocation from vocatio which is the Latin word for calling.

So vocation is a picture of calling. And you start thinking about the way scripture talks about our work and different ways and the value of working in different ways. I think about even in the book of Acts. Acts chapter 16, verse 14 and 15, we see this picture of Lydia, the seller of purple goods. We see Acts chapter 18, Aquila and Priscilla who are tent makers. You look in Romans chapter 16, verse three through 15, you see a list of 26 different people, most of whom had all kinds of different jobs. So it’s different vocations, and this is so important. This is something, just a bit of confession.

From my time pastoring, I think I implicitly, I didn’t mean to, but implicitly almost when it came to mission, I did not affirm the grace of God and wisdom of God in the way He calls different people to different tasks and different types of work. All of which, every single bit of which is valuable before Him and equally honoring to Him, so that someone working and this accounting job working in a cubicle and crunching numbers all day long and somebody who’s a missionary on the other side of the world are both bringing glory to God in the exact same way.

Trust God In Your Calling

 Being obedient to His calling in their lives, trusting that the Lord has called them to those places. I think we have this tendency. So again, I would never have said this, but I think we almost had this tendency of to value certain types of work over other types of work, and in that way value certain types of calling over other types of calling.

We just kind of implicitly say, “Well, I’m not called to do something really significant in the kingdom. I’m called to do this over here. I’m not called to be a missionary. I’m just called to have a job back in the US. And that’s kind of a lesser calling in some way. So it’s not a special, it’s not a significant.” But here’s the deal. That is a lie. It’s a lie. It’s totally not found in scripture. So when I started thinking about, “Wait a second, what if everybody in the world was a pastor or a missionary?” Sure we know how to teach the Bible and shepherd the church and go into other countries, but we wouldn’t know how to do anything else, right? Well, think about it too. If we were all salesmen and saleswomen, we wouldn’t have any products to sell in the first place.

If we were all police officers, we’d all be safe, but we’d also be hungry. If we were all lawyers, well, we’d all be in trouble. So it’s a good thing that God calls people to different vocations in different ways. We need each other, every single one of us. In much the same way that the body of Christ has different parts, all of which are important. God has created us all to work in different ways in the world, all of which are important. I was reading one author on a theology of work, and I read this and I thought, “What a great picture of how important all of our jobs are.”

The author wrote, “Look at the chair you’re lounging in. Could you have made it for yourself? How would you get, say, the wood? Go and fell a tree? But only after first making the tools for that and putting together some kind of vehicle to haul the wood and constructing a mill to do the lumber and roads to drive on from place to place. In short, it would take you a lifetime or two to make one chair. If we worked, not 40, but 140 hours per week, we couldn’t make for ourselves one from scratch, even a fraction of all the goods and services that we now call our own. Our paycheck turns out to buy us the use of far more than we could possibly make for ourselves in the time it takes us to earn the check. Work yields far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in.”

Vocation Is Part Of God’s Design

Going on to say, “Imagine that everyone quits working right now. What happens? Civilized life quickly melts away. Food vanishes from the shelves, grass dries up at the pumps, streets are no longer patrolled and fires burn themselves out. Communication and transportation services end, utilities go dead. Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfire, sleeping in caves, clothed in raw animal hides. The difference between a wilderness and culture is simply work.”

So see it, all vocation has significance in God’s design. And this is huge for us as Christians in the church, that we make sure we do not set up some false dichotomy, some artificial distinction between some whose work is more noble than others.

 So pastors more noble than bankers or missionaries more noble than telemarketers. William Tindale said, “If we look externally, there is difference between washing dishes and preaching the word of God, but as touching to please God, there’s no difference at all. That’s a biblical view of work and there’s no difference when done to the honor of the Lord between preaching and washing the dishes.” He said, “Do you really believe that by the preaching and washing dishes are just as important to the glory of God?” Absolutely. I believe that. You take something like house cleaning and you imagine what if it wasn’t done?

Before long, there’d be germs all over the house, viruses, infections, threatening to make you sick. That could eventually kill you. That’s fundamentally important. So one writer concludes, “Simple physical labor is God’s work no less than the formulation of theological truth.” That’s that’s huge. And this is part where about 500 years after the Reformation, now this is part of the reformation.

Why? Martin Luther was so passionate about all work, not just church or missionary work, being equally pleasing and honoring to God. It all went for Luther back to his recovery of the gospel, the reality that we’re justified by grace alone through faith alone and Christ alone. Because you think about it, if our work, especially our religious work, earn us particular favor before God, then it only makes sense that the clergy or the popes and the priests, they do the most noble work, they have the most favor before God.

We Are Part Of the Priesthood

Everybody else is second class in that sense. But Luther realized, “No, no, no. If we accept salvation before God based solely on faith in the finished work of Christ, then there’s no work we can do to increase our status before God.” So Luther wrote, “It’s pure invention that Pope bishops, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate while princes, lords, artisans and farmers are called the temporal estate.

This is indeed a piece of deceit and hypocrisy, yet no indeed need to be intimidated by it. And that for this reason, all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate and there’s no difference among them except that of vocation. We are all consecrated priests. You’re all a royal priesthood.” Second Peter 2:9. He continued, “A cobbler, a smith, a farmer, each has the work and office of his trade and they’re all alike consecrated priests. And everyone by means of his own worker office must benefit and serve every other.”

There’s so much more we can talk about here. The reason I just kind of drill down a little bit here is because I want to make sure when we think about calling that we don’t just think about calling in terms of somebody being called to be a pastor. Somebody called to be a missionary. So yes, that, but just as significant as God’s calling to work in this way or that way. All vocation is a picture of God calling us to glorify himself through a particular vocation. And that work done to his glory brings him great honor regardless of where we are. And so this is his sovereignty. He calls, he leads and guides us in different ways, but our responsibility is to follow his calling and to glorify him, to serve him in the place where he has called us.

And that call to salvation and call to mission is intended to play out in our lives in all kinds of different ways. So I think about, I don’t know obviously what some of your jobs might be, but I think about those of you who are doing consulting, you’re doing banking, you’re teaching, you’re working in this office, or you’re traveling to these places through your job, whatever it might be, working in your home, in this way or that way. So to realize, God, as long as you are there, God has called you to that place, assuming that your work is not immoral in and of itself.

You Are Called to Service

So that would be the only exception I would put out the table with this. But God’s called you that place of service. And so in Colossians 3:23 and 24, way one Corinthians 10 verse 31, serve the Lord Christ. You’re working for the king. You are doing all that you do for the glory of God. So glorify him and whatever he calls us to, let’s live out our identity in Christ and our call to mission. Let’s look for opportunities through this workplace to make disciples who are making disciples and all of that while being faithful in our families and faithful in the stations that he’s called us to as members of the church, citizens in a community.