Sometimes I interact with people, at CVC and elsewhere, who really want to know what God is calling them to do, in a specific season of life or with the trajectory of their whole lives.
They think that God’s call is going to look a certain way, or follow a certain formula, or come with a certain type of emotional feeling or response. They’re worried about missing this call, that perhaps it already happened long ago and they just weren’t paying attention, and so they’re still just waiting for a sign from God. They’re not sure what this call will look like, but they’re pretty sure it’s necessary before they can start living for Him in a meaningful way.
They’re so afraid of taking the wrong step that they don’t take any step at all. They think that those around them pursuing radical faithfulness to God must have already had that special and dramatic calling experience, or else those other people couldn’t be living so committedly for God’s Kingdom.
And so these people wait.
And what they fail to see, some of the time, is that the great danger to their spiritual life doesn’t lie in missing God’s calling in a certain special moment or emotional experience. They are missing the fact that every person who follows Jesus has received a call to follow Him and has been invited to step out in faithfulness as they do so wherever they are and with whatever He has given them.
Sometimes a calling into a specific expression of ministry activity comes with a moment of beautiful spiritual clarity and amazement. And when that does happen, what a gift from God it can be! But that isn’t presented as the normative experience for Christ-followers – it isn’t a necessary piece of God’s call on someone’s life.
What we find in the New Testament is a pattern of people encountering Jesus, and whatever that encounter looks like, for those who repent and follow Him their whole lives are changed in that moment – sometimes loudly and radically, sometimes quietly (but still forcefully!). And from then on, every choice those disciples – for that’s what they all are, really, every one of them – make is a choice filtered through the lens of, “How can I best glorify God with what He’s put in front of me right now?”
Because the God who is sovereign in the radical and dramatic moments is not any less sovereign in the midst of the everyday.
If you are a parent – there’s your first call to discipleship, with those in your home who are the only people you’ll ever get to disciple from day one.
If you have a job, then right there at the job you go to everyday is a mission field that the Lord has sovereignly placed you in where people desperately need someone to love them enough to tell them about Him.
If you have a place of dwelling, if you live anywhere at all, then you have a space God has given you to share gospel hospitality with all those who enter – or, if you are unable to invite people in because of family or health or any other reason, you still have a whole lot of people who live near you that God has placed you around who need Him.
The point is that some people will have a dramatic moment of calling, and that’s great for them, truly. But even if you haven’t, that doesn’t mean God is calling you to do nothing – or to sit and wait. Nobody is without a purpose in the kingdom of God.
And the great danger of misunderstanding this doesn’t really lie in doing “the wrong thing.” There’s no real wrong step forward for someone looking to honor God with what He has given them. Even if a mistake is made, mistakes of motion can be corrected as you go. If you find in your excitement and attempt at faithfulness that you have started something you can’t finish or that you have put too much on your plate, edits can be made.
But the real danger for us as Christians lies in not doing anything at all while we tell ourselves that we are “just waiting” for God’s big call on our lives. Because if we are living, moving, and breathing; God’s call on our lives lies at the intersection of what He calls good work in Scripture and what He’s sovereignly placed around us in real life.
So don’t wait for a sign from the sky, don’t wait for your faith to be big enough for you to take a leap that seems impossible right now. Just look around you, read Scripture, seek wise counsel and jump into something, and you just might find that God accomplishes through you more than you once knew how to ask or imagine.
For more reading on various facets of this topic, check out Kevin DeYoung’s great little books, Just Do Something and Crazy Busy.
