©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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06/13/04 |
My True Calling |
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6/13/04 Discovering My True Calling In Life
As this series on my life’s greatest surprises gets longer and longer
I have found myself feeling increasingly obligated
to offer some explanation to those of you who are new with us
for what we are doing
and why.
Our time together is so very limited,
and it is so valuable,
I would certainly never want to waste it
with topics that do not contribute to our growth in our walk with the King.
As most of you know,
we usually spend our time on Sunday mornings
studying our way verse-by-verse through one of the books in the Bible.
But for the past five months now
we have taken a break from our study of the book of Ephesians
so that I can share with you
what I have been calling my life’s greatest surprises -
those areas in my Christian life
that I now realize I completely misunderstood
when I first entered the family of God back in fall of 1966.
At first I had intended to just take two or three weeks
to briefly touch on those things
that have made it onto my personal list of surprises.
But as I began working my way through the list
I realized that what I was actually doing
was putting into words
what I have come to recognize as the most important truths about life with our Creator
that I have discovered up to this point.
And the responses I’ve received from some of you during the past few weeks
have convinced me it is time well spent.
We will return to our study of Ephesians once again in the near future,
but I have a few more surprises I want to share with you first.
And the one I’d like to start with this morning
is my gradual discovery
of the true nature of my calling in life.
Now, I really don’t want to scare you off with that word “calling”,
nor do I want you to think
that it is something that is limited to preachers
and a handful of really intense Christians
who are forever talking in terms of “ministries”,
and “outreaches”
and “discerning the leading of the Lord”.
In truth, when we correctly understand the concept,
all we’re talking about
is understanding our purpose for being here.
I know, of course,
that once this concept gets into the world of religion,
weird things happen to it,
and in the hands of unscrupulous leaders
it can even become one more tool for manipulation and control
as people are coerced into doing all sorts of things God never equipped them for
just so the religious machine can keep working smoothly.
But, even though this “calling” concept
is sometimes abused within the religious community,
still each of us knows instinctively that our lives do matter,
that our being here has some purpose.
Several months ago I was in a conversation with a good friend of mine
who is now in his mid twenties.
He is still very much in training for whatever lies ahead,
but in our conversation he made a comment
that I think reflects well
what every one of us sense within us
but most of us never put into words.
He said, “For years now I’ve felt like there’s a special reason for me being here,
something I’m suppose to accomplish
that only I can do.”
He was absolutely right,
and the same thing can be said of every person in this room.
During that time in my own life
when I was churning through this whole business
of trying to understand my true calling
I came across a statement made by Paul
in his last letter to his friend, Timothy.
In 2 Timothy 4:7 he said,
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith;
That second phrase, “I have finished the course...”, hit me so hard
because it told me
that somehow Paul had figured out what he was here for
and that he could look back on his life
and say with absolutely certainty
that he had fulfilled the calling given to him by God.
I knew enough even then
to know that those men and women whose lives are recorded in the Bible
were no different than we are,
and that their lives have been offered to us
as an example of what we can expect in our relationship with our God.
And if Paul could figure out his calling,
and know with certainty that he had fulfilled it,
I should be able to do exactly the same thing.
And here, once again,
my progress in gaining a correct understanding of my true calling
was complicated by at least three major forces-
the messages being communicated to me by the religious world in which I lived,
my own natural male compulsion
to prove my worth on the basis of what I do,
and my misunderstanding of the purpose of the gifts given to us by God.
The message of the religious community was, of course, clear -
my calling as God’s child was to do for Him,
to give back to Him in response to His gift of salvation to me.
The specifics of just exactly what it was I was suppose to give
varied considerably
depending upon which group I was associated with at any given time,
but the basic message was always the same -
success in the fulfillment of my calling
could be measured on the basis of what I was doing for God.
It all seemed so natural, so logical and reasonable at the time.
I remember spending one whole summer during my college years
working with a youth missions organization
that had refined this calling concept to a science.
Every day, five days a week, for the whole summer
I traveled with a group of fellow students
and I went door-to-door carrying a little black suitcase full of tracks,
handing them out and trying to gain access to people’s homes
so that I could then “witness” to them.
At the end of each day
we reported back to our leader
with the statistics on how many tracts we’d given out
and how many people we’d “led to the Lord”.
At the end of the summer
we then turned a detailed record into the organization’s headquarters
of how many tracts we’d given out,
how many people we’d prayed with,
how many evangelistic street meetings we’d held,
and how many times each team member had spoken publicly for the Lord.
I can still remember seeing that sheet before it was turned in,
and noticing that I had spoken publicly more times than any other team member,
and feeling really good about how well I was doing in fulfilling my calling.
Then, added to this religious concept of my calling,
there was my strong natural male compulsion
to prove myself to my selected target audience
on the basis of my performance.
I made just a passing reference to this a couple of weeks ago,
but this is such a universal aspect of maleness,
and it can have a powerful impact on our approach to Christianity
unless we realize what’s going on.
This dynamic is not really complicated.
We all enter this world with spirits separated from God,
in rebellion against Him,
with an inner determination to run our own lives apart from His intervention.
This separation from our Creator causes no end of problems in our lives,
but at the head of that list
is the fact that, apart from Him and His voice,
we don’t know who we are,
or what we’re doing here,
or why we have value,
or what our purpose in life is.
And typically,
what we do is to try to answer those questions for ourselves
by selectively listening to and watching how those around us respond to the things we do.
And we males
are especially vulnerable to this technique for proving our worth or our value.
What we do first of all
is to select for ourselves a target audience.
This is the person
or group of people to whom we delegate the right
to tell us who we are.
It may be our colleagues at work.
It may be those we fish or hunt with.
It may be those we golf with or play tennis with.
It may be our fellow model airplane enthusiasts.
It may be our fellow gang members
or our fellow sniper whose sole goal in life is to see how many innocent people he can kill.
But once we’ve selected our target audience,
we then try to perform for them
in a way that will cause them to affirm us
and to tell us through their responses that we have value.
And when this whole thing gets into the world of religion
something exceptionally ugly happens with it.
When our target audience becomes our fellow Christians,
and we are seeking to validate ourselves
through their response to our level of Christian performance,
strange things begin to happen.
Bible knowledge,
rather than feeding our spirits,
becomes ammunition with which we validate ourselves
either through impressing others with how much we know,
or through using our knowledge to blow others out of the water in doctrinal debates.
Prayer,
and “witnessing”,
and church involvement,
and our involvement in other people’s lives,
rather than being natural expressions of the life of Christ within us,
become tools with which we prove our worth
and validate ourselves.
Once I became aware of this whole area,
it helped me to understand
why my conversations with others
would sometimes produce in me such radically different inner responses.
If what they were sharing
came as the result of the life of God’s Spirit within them
as He gave them eyes to see
some truth they’d never seen before
their discoveries just naturally fed both our spirits.
If, on the other hand,
they were using Bible knowledge to try to impress me,
even though what they were saying might have been true,
it had a nasty odor about it
because it didn’t feed our spirits,
or draw us closer to the Lord,
and it certainly didn’t strengthen our love for one another.
It was just an ugly little game
in which they waved around their little discovery about God
hoping I would be impressed with their wisdom,
or insightfulness,
or intelligence.
But, when I was still trying to work through my own understanding
of what my real calling in life was,
this desire to validate myself through what I did
complicated things even more
because most of my life
my own personal “target audience”
has been made up of my fellow Christians.
They are the ones
whose opinions of me matter most.
And there is just simply no easier place in all the world to play ego games
and create a performance-based image of success
than in the world of religion.
And then the final ingredient in my own life
that complicated my ability to understand my true calling
was my own misunderstanding of the purpose for which the Spirit of God gives us the gifts He has given us.
I knew fairly early in my Christian life
that I had been given a teaching gift.
It wasn’t long before I found myself looking at a passage of Scripture
and seeing principles,
and outlines,
and truths,
and just simply knowing what the passage was saying
and how it was to be applied to my life and the lives of others.
And given the messages I was given from the Christian community around me,
and my own natural human desire to validate myself through what I did,
it wasn’t surprising that my early conclusions about finding and fulfilling my calling in life
all centered around when and where and how I used my teaching gift,
and how those who heard me responded to what I did.
It wasn’t until I finally began to understand the true nature of my calling,
and then realized that my teaching ability
was not a gift that God had given to me for my benefit,
but rather a gift He sought to give through me to others for their benefit
that this whole teaching thing began to fit into its proper place in my life.
EPH 4:11-12 And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ...
Not for the ego gratification of the gifted,
but for the equipping of the saints,
not for the sake of those who teach,
but for the sake of those who are taught.
So then what is my true calling in life?
What is yours?
What is it we are really here for?
And how can we approach life in a way that will allow us
at the end of our lives
to say along with the Apostle Paul,
2TI 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith...?
For me the answer began to seep through into my thinking
in little bits and pieces.
Mostly it was through passages of Scripture
that would suddenly take on a significance far beyond anything I’d known before.
One of the first for me in this process
was Paul’s comment to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 11:3.
But I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his
craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of
devotion to Christ.
When I first really heard what Paul was saying in that statement
it called to my confused little spirit
as few things had done before.
Here I was churning my way through this huge inner muddle,
trying to figure out what I was suppose to DO,
surrounded by all sorts of conflicting internal and external voices,
all promising to lead me into my true calling in life.
And the more I tried to combine them,
or choose between them,
the more confusing and frustrating it became.
And then there they were -
those wonderful,
simple,
clear,
understandable words.
... the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.
I could do that!
That wasn’t complicated.
That wasn’t confusing.
That didn’t tie my spirit in knots
or leave me wondering if I’d done enough,
or if I’d done the right thing,
or gone the right place.
There was nothing there that even remotely resembled
my having to evaluate
whether or not my “ministry” was truly “successful” or “effective”.
And I saw it other places as well.
PHI 3:8, 10 More than that, I count all things to be loss
in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, ... that I may
know Him...
... the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.
... that I may know Him...
And I began to see some other statements as well,
statements that seemed to be talking about my purpose in life,
my calling as God’s child,
but statements that had nothing to do
with doing certain projects
or accomplishing certain tasks.
They were all about the way I related to the people around me,
and they seemed to be huge in the value systems of those who were speaking.
JOH 13:34-35 "A new commandment I give to you, that
you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one
another."
JOH 15:12,17 "This is My commandment, that you love
one another, just as I have loved you. This I command you, that you love one
another.”
ROM 13:8 Owe
nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has
fulfilled the law.
1PE 1:22 Since you have in obedience to the truth
purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one
another from the heart...
1PE 4:8 Above all, keep fervent in your love for one
another, because love covers a multitude of sins.
1JO 3:11 For this is the message which you have heard
from the beginning, that we should love one another...
And then I found both of these handed to me by my Lord in a single statement,
and when I saw the statement for what it was,
I found, too, my understanding of my true calling in life.
It was spoken by Christ in response to a question asked Him.
MAT 22:36 "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"
But when He responded
He did not give just one commandment,
He gave
two.
MAT 22:37 And He said to him, "'You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind.'
MAT 22:38 "This is the great and foremost
commandment.
MAT 22:39 "The second is like it, 'You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.'
Now, I know what we typically do with these “commandment” statements in Scripture.
We tuck them away in our minds
as being Biblical prerequisites to our finding and fulfilling our true calling in life.
We view them sort of like a doctor views medical school.
He or she needs to get through medical school
as a prerequisite for practicing medicine.
But somewhere along the way in my frantic pursuit of my calling as God’s child
something finally clicked into place in my thinking
and I realized that these two -
learning how to love my God,
and learning how to love those He has placed around me,
these two are not the prerequisites for my calling,
they ARE my calling.
They are what I am here for.
And having gone through all of this this morning,
I don’t want to leave it
until I’ve done what I can to make it as practical as possible.
Another one of the surprises
that I included on my list when I was writing it up
was my surprise at the true source of happiness and fulfillment in life.
Well, the true source of real happiness and fulfillment in life
is found in the degree to which we fulfill this calling of learning how to love our God,
and learning how to love those He has placed around us.
And what I just said there
is not some sort of religious platitude,
it is simple, practical truth about the true nature of life.
And to help you understand clearly what I’m saying here,
I want you to take what I just said
and set it next to whatever it is in your mind right now
that you have convinced yourself you really must have,
or do,
or be in order to find fulfillment in life.
There is something there in that mental slot within all of us.
When you finally get out of school...
when you finally get into a house...
when you finally get married...
when you finally have children...
when you finally get the children out of the house...
when you get that job you’ve been wanting...
when you win that election...
when you go on that vacation...
when you get that manuscript published...
when you retire...
when you...when you...when you...
I’m not suggesting that any of those goals are necessarily wrong,
or bad.
All I’m saying
is that the real reason we were placed on this earth by our God,
and the only thing that has the ability
to bring true, deep fulfillment and satisfaction in life
is when we can look at ourselves honestly
and know we are learning more and more of what it means to live in a love union with our Lord,
and that we are allowing Him to show us how
to love those people He has entrusted into our care.
Do you really want to impact the world in which you live?
Do you want to know that your being here has changed things for the better.
Do you want to know that you have fulfilled your true calling in life?
Then reach out in love to another human being
and watch how your love affects their life.
Watch how it brings them healing,
and purpose,
and hope as nothing else could ever do.
Everything else we do
is just trivia and games.