The Call Part 4

We need to remember to keep our jobs and day to day activities in the right relationship to our Call in God. Our work is not our primary call. God wants to be present in our day to day work to emphasize and develop our primary call. He will then work in our hearts as we pursue Him and work unto Him in our secondary call. President Coolidge said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.” Well that may be true for good or bad. If you built a factory for a collection of dedicated Christians, and they were working as unto God, then maybe, in a sense, President Coolidge was right. But the president could be right in a wrong way. We can allow work to take God’s place in our life and worship work as work. We can take a good thing and make it a burden that distracts and prevents our following God’s call on our life. We need lives in balance to keep work a blessing in our lives.

As Os Guinness says, “We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone” and points out “God normally calls us along the line of our giftedness, but the purpose of giftedness is stewardship and service, not selfishness.”

In following God’s call on our lives we need to recognize:

1. Our individual calling will be integrated with those around us. We can’t be selfish at this point and will need flexibility.


2. Our later specific callings to service must not erase our original calling by God to follow Him. I’ve seen pastors lose their ministries over this while God cleaned their hearts and put Himself back on the throne of their life.


3. God will use many things that are peripheral to your primary call to mold you and grow you. Don’t try to box God in what He will use in your secular job or even in service opportunities at church.


4. There is a certain mystery in our calling that remains. God gives you a lamp for your feet so you can see where your feet are and where to place the next step. Then he gives you a light to indicate the overall path. All that “between stuff” is the mystery of walking and living our lives “coram Deo”, before the face of God.

We have an opportunity to live in this world in a way that will stand out. We can live as if ideas mean something and have consequence in a world sold on relativism. We can live our lives without masks and be real in a world that poses and treats actors as idols.