The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God's Purpose For Your Life

by Os Guinness

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more powerful, more intimate, and more important than to listen to the call of God our Creator, and to realign yourself to the very purpose of life and the universe by following his call wherever your life leads.

God’s call is at the very heart of God’s good news, the best news ever.

God is calling us to play our part in the righting of wrongs in the world, in the renewal and restoration of the earth, and in carrying his message to the ends of the earth.

God’s call, by contrast, is no cliché. It is clear, powerful, substantive, and compelling.

No human book, however long, could ever do full justice to the wonder of calling. Only gratitude, worship, and lives well lived can do that.

God’s call is God’s word to each of us, powerful, precious, and deeply personal.

Thank God that the day will come when such poor words will no longer be needed, when we see God face-to-face, and a lifetime of h...

Listen to the commanding invitation of Jesus that is both a call and a charge: “Follow me.”

We desire to make a difference. We long to leave a legacy.

Henry Thoreau described as “lives of quiet desperation”;

“For the secret of man’s being is not only to live . . . but to live for something definite. Without a firm notion of what he is living for, man will not accept life and will rather destroy himself than remain on earth.”

Deep in our hearts, we all want to find and fulfill a purpose bigger than ourselves.

Kierkegaard wrote in his Journal: “The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”

The trouble is that, as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for. Some feel they have time but not enough money; others feel they have money but not enough time. But for most of us, in the midst of material plenty, we have spiritual poverty.

Answering the call of our Creator is “the ultimate why” for living, the highest source of purpose in human existence.

nothing short of God’s call can ground and fulfill the truest human desire for purpose.

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 and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.

recognizing who we aren’t is only the first step toward knowing who we are.

Escape from a false sense of life-purpose is only liberating if it leads to a true one.

“In Ages of Faith,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “the final aim of life is placed beyond life.”

“Follow me,” Jesus said two thousand years ago, and he changed the course of history.

Answering the call is the way to find and fulfill the central purpose of your life—God’s purpose for your life.

when something more than human seeking is needed if seeking is to be satisfied, then calling means that seekers themselves are sought.

Those who follow eros are not wrong to desire happiness but wrong to think that happiness is to be found where they seek it.

God alone needs nothing outside himself, because he himself is the highest and the only lasting good. So all objects we desire short of God are as finite and incomplete as we ourselves are and, therefore, disappointing if we make them the objects of ultimate desire.

The way of agape insists that, because true satisfaction and real rest can only be found in the highest and most lasting good, all seeking short of the pursuit of God brings only restlessness.

“You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God—which is another way of saying that our seeking will always fall short unless God’s grace initiates the search and unless God’s call draws us to him and completes the search.

If the chasm is to be bridged, God must bridge it. If we are to desire the highest good, the highest good must come down and draw us so that it may become a reality we desire. From this perspective there is no merit in either seeking or finding. All is grace.

The secret of seeking is not in our human ascent to God, but in ...

We start out searching, but we end up bei...

We think we are looking for something; we realize we are...

As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful Valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its graveclothes, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from the God of popular religion. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the LORD”; “I am that I am”; “I am.” People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.

The words given in Mark’s Gospel to Bartimaeus, the blind beggar who desperately sought healing from Jesus, are God’s encouragement to all who truly seek: “Take heart. He is calling you.”

truth does matter, all ideas have consequences, and it is always vital to remember the maxim, “Contrast is the mother of clarity.”

an infinite personal God who has created us in his image and calls us into relationship with himself. Our life-purpose therefore comes from two sources at once—who we are created to be and who we are called to be. Not only is this call of our Creator the source of the deepest self-discoveries and growth in life, it also gives our lives an inspiration and a dynamism that transforms them into an enterprise beyond any comparison.

Answer the call of your great Creator.

Count the cost, consider the risks, and set out each day on a venture to multiply your gifts and opportunities, bring glory to God, and add value to our world.

Answering the call is the road to purpose and fulfill...

In short, that in following God’s call, Judaism is called to be countercultural to its core—and so also are followers of Jesus.

before Abraham heard the positive word, he heard the negative. To reach the blessings, Abraham had to make the break. To enter the promised land, he had to leave Haran. To gain the three-fold benefits—children, land, and an influence on all humanity—he was called to part company decisively with three things: country, culture, and kin.

“You say: ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world, who serve wood and stone’” (Ezek. 20:32).

When Jesus calls us to follow him, all that contradicts his call, all that contradicts his Lordship over all our lives, has to go.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it simply, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

We have one Lord, and there must ...

Hartford Declaration, we are to be “against the world for the world.”

He wrote: I have had time to think and pray about my situation, and that of my nation, and to have God’s will for me clarified. I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share in the trials of this time with my people. Christians in Germany face the terrible alternatives of willing the defeat of their nation in order that civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that decision in security.

we are weak because we are worldly.

We have therefore lost the distinctiveness that makes us the salt and light Jesus called us to be. It is time to make a break, not to retreat to any monastic option, but to break from the ways of the world in order to engage the world more faithfully and effectively.

Christians have a duty to be different.