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

by Os Guinness

It is time for individual Christians, Christian families, and churches at large to ask the Lord whether we have made the break from the social forces in our surrounding “country, culture, and kin” (also known as “the world”). That break is what the call of God requires. There is no other way.

The Bible is a story with a thousand stories within it, and this fact is rich in its significance.

Abraham’s entire life was his response to the call of God, and as such, he is the prototype of God’s new humanity and God’s new way for humanity.

Time after time, Abraham heard the call of God, and he responded, immediately, obediently, and unerringly.

“We will do everything the LORD has said” (Ex. 19:8).

Created in the image and likeness of God, we are free and able to respond freely. We are responseable, responsible, and we never rise higher in our human freedom than when we listen to our Creator and choose to answer his call as responsible human beings.

the life of faith in answer to the call of God is a matter of being guided only by a Voice.

listening to God’s Word, rather than obeying visually triggered desires, lies at the heart of our faithfulness in following God’s call.

Those who follow God’s call listen for his voice and to his voice.

the life of faith in answer to the call of God is a call to love.

The truth is that the depth and beauty of the New Testament picture of love is the extension and fulfillment of the Old, and love is at the heart of God’s new way from the beginning to the end.

The heart of the life of faith in answer to the call of God is a call to a relationship, and a relationship of love.

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (6:4–5).

Exodus is the grand master story of Western freedom.

the life of faith in answer to the call of God is a call to a walk and a way of life.

God’s call is not just about you or me, and our little worlds and our fleeting generation. It speaks to each of us as individuals, but it is about a whole new people and a whole new way of life, of which our lives are only a tiny particle and our generation a mere pulse beat.

As Havel says, “Responsibility does establish identity, but we are not responsible because of our identity; instead we have an identity because we are responsible.”

There is no calling unless there is a Caller.

The notion of calling, or vocation, is vital to each of us because it touches on the modern search for a basis for individual identity and an understanding of humanness itself.

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied.

Unquestionably, the most dangerous but alluring version of “the courage to be” comes from Friedrich Nietzche and his disciples. “God is dead,” they assert, so meaning is not revealed. Nor can we read it off the pages of the universe, as advocates of the “fiction” of natural law believe. Instead, we start from the abyss of a world without meaning and, by sheer willpower, create our own meaning out of nothing.

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We do not have a purpose to match our technique. So, ironically, we have the greatest capacity when we have the least clue what it is for.

Humanness is a response to God’s calling.

Responding to the call means rising to the challenge, but in conversation and in partnership—and in an intimate relationship between the called and the Caller.

Following his call, we become what we are constituted to be by creation. We also become what we are not yet, and can only become by re-creation as called people.

C. S. Lewis pointed out, “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.”

Only when we respond to Christ and follow his call do we become our real selves and come to have personalities of our own.

So when it comes to identity, modern people have things completely back to front: professing to be unsure of God, they pretend to be sure of themselves.

“It’s hoped and believed,” Newton wrote, “that the Lord has raised you up for the good of the nation.”

“My walk,” he wrote in his journal in 1788, “is a public one. My business is in the world; and I must mix in the assemblies of men, or quit the post which Providence seems to have assigned me.”

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.

First, calling has a simple and straightforward meaning.

To call means to name, and to name means to call into being or to make.

Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.

To be a disciple of Jesus is to be a “called one” and so to become “a follower of the Way.”

Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. First and foremost we are called to Someone (God), not to something (such as motherhood, politics, or teaching) or to somewhere (such as the inner city or Outer Mongolia).

Our secondary calling, considering who God is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for him.

They are “callings” rather than the “calling.”

They are our personal answer to God’s address, our response to God’s summons.

Secondary callings matter, but only because the primary ca...

This vital distinction between primary and secondary calling carries with it two challenges—first, to hold the two together and, second, to ensure that they are kept in the right order.

if we understand calling, we must make sure that first things remain first and the primary calling always comes before the secondary calling.

But we must also make sure that the primary calling leads without fail to...

The truth of calling means that for followers of Christ, “everyone, everywhere, and in everything” lives the whole of life as a response to God’s call.

Ponder, for example, the fallacy of the contemporary Protestant term full-time Christian service—as if those not working for churches or Christian organizations are only part-time in the service of Christ.

Monasticism reinforced the secularization it originally set out to resist.

for most people in Christendom in medieval times, the term calling was reserved for priests, monks, and nuns. Everyone else just had “work.”

Luther wrote: “The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all works are measured before God by faith alone. . . . Indeed, the menial housework of a manservant or maidservant is often more acceptable to God than all the fastings and other works of a monk or priest, because the monk or priest lacks faith.”

Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God’s (primary) calling.