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You never know what your quiet faithfulness will do. Os Guinness’ The Call tells us a powerful story of Jane D’Esterre.[1]
She was a young mother of 2, and her husband was recently killed in a duel in England. The year was 1815.
She was beautiful, talented, smart, but filled with despair and saw no hope in her future. She stood on the banks of a river about to throw herself in to drown herself.
Yet, before she did she looked up.
Saw a young plowman about her age who was working his fields.
“Meticulous, absorbed, skilled, he displayed such a pride in his work that the newly turned furrows looked as finely executed as the paint strokes on an artist’s canvas.”
That sight changed everything…The man’s faithfulness to his vocation changed everything for the woman.
In this class we want to become more like this simple farmer: “pride in his work,” “paint strokes on an artist’s canvas.”
The Class: Faith at Work: Faith while you’re at work, and one of the key ways that our faith works.
The 5 classes:
The Big Idea: Your Vocation: God’s Call on Your Life.
We often treat VOCATION and OCCUPATION as if they’re synonymous—as if they both mean “the thing you do for money.” That might make some of you think you don’t have a vocation. The two words have really, really important differences.
An occupation IS the thing you do for money, the thing that occupies you for most of every work day.
But the word “vocation” is from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.” A “vocation” is a “calling.”
The most important calling you have is when God called you to himself:
And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. (Matt 4:21)
“The promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” (Acts 2:39)
Do you hear that—“the Lord our God calls to himself”?
This is why Paul can use soldier language to describe our lives:
Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. (2 Tim 2:3–4)
Before we get to WHAT am I called to, I need to know WHO I am called to.
Os Guinness:
Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service.
Os Guinness, The Call[2]
It doesn’t take long to realize that this call to God himself opens up into a whole set of callings.
Once I grasp WHO I’m called to I’m ready to think about WHAT I’m called to.
Since “calling” means “vocation,” these are also my vocations.
We don’t have ONE vocation but many.
My callings:
In all of these situations, there is a sense in which I was “called” to it:
You are called!
Martin Luther lived in a day when the Roman Catholic Church divided life into the sacred and the secular. It was in the sacred realm where there was talk of "calling." You were "called" into the priesthood, the sacred. But part of the Protestant Reformation was breaking down this divide and helping us see: It's all sacred. Like 1 Peter 2:5 tells us, we're part of a "spiritual priesthood" offering "spiritual sacrifices." This is the "priesthood of all believers."
In light of this idea he preaches on the idea of calling and says:
You may reply: But how if I am not called, what shall I do then? Answer: How is it possible that you are not called? You have always been in some state or station; you have always been a husband or wife, or boy or girl, or servant. Picture before you the humblest estate. Are you a husband, and you think you have not enough to do in that sphere to govern your wife, children, domestics, and property so that all may be obedient to God and you do no one any harm? Yea, if you had five heads and ten hands, even then you would be too weak for your task, so that you would never dare to think of making a pilgrimage or doing any kind of saintly work….
See, as now no one is without some commission and calling, so no one is without some kind of work, if he desires to do what is right. Everyone therefore is to take heed to continue in his calling, look to himself, faithfully do what is commanded him, and serve God and keep his commandments; then he will have so much to do that all time will be too short, all places too cramped, all resources of help too weak.
Martin Luther, sermon on John 21:19-24
In Genesis 1–2 there are profound principles established about work, principles unique among ancient religions—and principles that buck against the lies of our age.
First, humans aren’t the first workers in Genesis 1–2. God is! We see God as a worker in his act of Creation. He works, declares his handiwork “very good” (Gen 1:31) and then he rests (2:1–3), all as a model for us.
It is no accident that against numerous ancient cultures confused about the dignity and even glory of work, our God would enter the Old Testament as a Gardener and the New Testament as a Carpenter.[3]
Creation, then, is not the aftermath of a battle but the plan of a craftsman. God made the world not as a warrior digs a trench but as an artist makes a masterpiece….In the beginning…God worked. Work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something human beings were created to do but that was beneath the great God himself. No, God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration.
Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor[4]
Second, we see God assigning work to the man and the woman, a combined mandate to
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:28)
Together they were to imitate God in his creation and dominion through procreation and dominion.
God’s word in Genesis 1:28 contains a mountain of truth:
Contained here is marriage and parenting (“be fruitful and multiply”) but also a vision for expansion and development (“fill the earth and subdue it”). It is a sweeping idea. It involves governance and management and creativity and energy and initiative.
This has been called the “cultural mandate.”
Tim Keller:
[Genesis 1:28] has been called “the cultural mandate….It means civilization, not just procreation. We get the sense God does not want merely more individuals of the human species; he also wants the world to be filled with a human society….We called to “rule” the rest of creation and even to “subdue” it….God owns the world, but he has put it under our care to cultivate it….We are to be gardeners….That is the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It is rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.
Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor[5]
The importance of this idea is that it reminds us our vocations are not just small and immediate affairs that only impact our immediate neighbors, but they can also be profoundly expansive and bring life and renewal throughout an entire culture. Think of those whose vocations include the development of new medicines.
Not all of us will have vocations that have direct impacts on a culture, but we don’t want to rule this out, either!
Third, we see that in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, we’re assigned work to do:
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. (Gen 2:15).
We often think of Eden as a place of rest and no work. But it was a place of God’s perfect cycle of work and rest.
Work is not the exception to God’s ideal, it is a central part of God’s ideal.
No soul will thrive without a sense of a real calling from God and real work to perform. It is not the unemployed who feel a sense of rest and fulfillment. It is those who know who they are before God and have meaningful work they are doing.
SPIRITUAL GIFTS:
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Cor 12:4–7)
INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIFIC (AND TEMPORARY) CALLINGS
And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. (Acts 16:9–10)
Martin Luther’s idea about your and others’ vocation. We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt 6:11), but typically we’ll get money from our bank and go buy it. Farmers, bread makers, truck drivers, store clerks, and another dozen different people doing their vocation have been part of God providing us with our daily bread. God uses people to provide for people. Only rarely is it directly manna from heaven. That gets lived out in dozens of ways as we pray for healing and God uses medicine purchased from CVS. And all these people involved are recipients of the vocation of their parents.[6]
God milks the cows through the vocation of the milk maids.
Martin Luther[7]
We can see this specifically in a passage like Romans 13:1–6 where a governing official is called “God’s servant for your good.” Paul is speaking of Roman government officials. Yet, even these are being actively used by God “for your good” as if they were self-consciously “God’s servant.”
Work is how we provide for ourselves:
In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty. (Prov 14:23)
Work is how we provide for others:
But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. (1 Tim 5:8)
Luther went a step further in this practical side of vocation. He also saw it as a way we could actively love our neighbor. A home builder building quality homes for his neighbor is loving his neighbor in a tangible way. A 3rd-grade teacher is loving her neighbors by teaching their children and by preparing these future adults to think well and be competent in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Gustaf Wingren summarizing Martin Luther:
God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is. He who engages in the lowliness of his work performs God’s work, be he lad or king. To give one’s office proper care is not selfishness. Devotion to office is devotion to love, because it is by God’s own ordering that the work of the office is always dedicated to the well-being of one’s neighbor. Care for one’s office is, in its very frame of reference on earth, participation in God’s care for human beings.
Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation[8]
Gene Veith:
For the Christian, love of neighbor becomes something consciously felt, as faith becomes active in love. Though we sin in and against our vocations,…as we grow in Christ the everyday tasks set before us can be motivated and shaped by love….In the workplace, the neighbors may be the customers, who are to be loved and served. The boss is to love and serve the employees, his neighbors who are under his authority. They, in turn, are to love and serve him. Teachers love and serve their students; artists love and serve their audiences.
Gene Edward Veith, God at Work[9]
Steven Garber:
Apart from being plagued by hubris, we do not see ourselves as history might. We live among ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places. We are families and we are neighbors, we worship and we work, we laugh and we cry, we hope and we love—the stuff of life for everyone everywhere. But it is also true that whether our vocations are as butchers, bakers or candlestick makers—or people drawn into the worlds of business or law, agriculture or education, architecture or construction, journalism or international development, health care or the arts—in our own different ways we are responsible, for love’s sake, for the way the world is and ought to be. We are called to be common grace for the common good.
That is the vision of the Washington Institute, which is my work. Our credo is that vocation is integral, not incidental, to the missio Dei.
Steven Garber, Visions of Vocation[10]
God the Caller is the one whose glory we seek in all our callings—not our glory, but his. Not our kingdom, but his.
Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, 24 knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. (Col 3:23–24)
Work, like all things, is “all to the glory of God”:
So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Cor 10:31)
Tim Keller
If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught.
Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58.
Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor[11]
In light of this, be faithful in your callings:
John Calvin
The Lord bids each one of us in all life’s actions to look to his calling…. A man of obscure station will lead a private life ungrudgingly so as not to leave the rank in which he has been placed by God. Again, it will be no slight relief from cares, labors, troubles, and other burdens for a man to know that God is his guide in all these things. The magistrate will discharge his functions more willingly; the head of the household will confine himself to his duty; each man will bear and swallow the discomforts, vexations, weariness, and anxieties in his way of life, when he has been persuaded that the burden was laid upon him by God. From this will arise also a singular consolation: that no task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God’s sight.
John Calvin, Institutes (3.10.6)
What is the result of faithfulness in your callings?
Os Guinness story. The rest of the story…
She was captivated. Eventually rebuked herself for her self-pity. She would go on to become a Christian and marry Captain John Grattan Guinness, the great-great-grandfather of Os Guinness himself.
As Guinness reflects on the event with the plowman he says she was “saved from suicide and reinvigorated for life by the sight of work well done.”[12]
Amen.
Prayer
[1] Os Guinness, The Call (W Publishing, 2018), 246.
[2] Os Guiness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (W Publishing, 1998), 29.
[3] Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 37.
[4] Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 20, 21.
[5] Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 43, 44, 46.
[6] Gene Edward Veith, God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Crossway, 2002), 13–15.
[7] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol 21, 237.
[8] Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation (Wipf and Stock, 1957), 9.
[9] Gene Edward Veith, God at Work, 43–44.
[10] Steven Garber, Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good (IVP Books, 2014), 18.
[11] Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 14.
[12] Guinness, The Call, 196.
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