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

by Os Guinness

Luther declared that God and the angels smile when a man changes a diaper.

William Tyndale wrote that if our desire is to please God, pouring water, washing dishes, cobbling shoes, and preaching the Word “is all one.”

William Perkins claimed polishing shoes was a sanctif...

John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost: To know That which before us lies in daily life ...

Bishop Thomas Becon wrote, “Our Saviour Christ was a carpenter. His apostles were fishermen. ...

Perkins’s A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men provides a typical Reformation summary: “The action of a shepherd in keeping sheep, performed as I have said in his kind, is as good a work before God as is the action of a judge in giving se...

Calling gave to everyday work a dignity and spiritual significance under God that dethroned the primacy of leisure and contemplation.

the recovery of a holistic view of calling was powerful in culture as well as in the church, and calling was a vital element in the transition from the traditional to the modern world.

Dutch prime minister Abraham Kuyper: “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’”

Is there a way back from the disaster of the Protestant distortion? At least two things are required: the debunking of the notion of calling without a Caller and the restoring of the primacy of the primary calling.

If there is no Caller, there are no callings—only work.

Second, and more positively, we must restore the primary calling to its primary place by restoring the worship that is its setting and the dedication to Jesus that is its heart.

Oswald Chambers. “Beware of anything that competes with loyal...

he wrote. “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him. . . . The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of Go...

We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone.

We are not called first to special work but to God.

Whereas dualism cripples calling, a holistic understanding releases its power—the passion to be God’s concentrates the energy of all who answer the call.

Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

God normally calls us along the line of our giftedness, but the purpose of giftedness is stewardship and service, not selfishness.

Giftedness does not stand alone in helping us discern our callings. It lines up in response to God’s call alongside other factors, such as family heritage, our own life opportunities, God’s guidance, and our unquestioning readiness to do what he shows.

We become what we do.

Instead of, “You are what you do,” calling says: “Do what you are.”

We have nothing that was not given us.

Our gifts are ultimately God’s, and we are only “stewards”—responsible for the prudent management of property that is not our own.

our gifts are always “ours f...

The truth is not that God is finding us a place for our gifts but that God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing—and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there.

Calling insists that the answer lies in God’s knowledge of what he has created us to be and where he is calling us to go.

we are only truly “ourselves” and can only truly “do what we are” when we follow God’s call.

Giftedness that is “ours for others” is therefore not selfishness but service that is perfect freedom.

A special calling refers to those tasks and missions laid on individuals through a direct, specific, supernatural communication from God. Ordinary calling, on the other hand, is the believer’s sense of life-purpose and life-task in response to God’s primary call, “follow me,” even when there is no direct, specific, supernatural communication from God about a secondary calling.

we must remember the distinction between something being central to our calling and something being peripheral.

both people and life are richer than that, and calling is comprehensive, not partial.

First, calling subverts the deadly modern idolatry of choice. Choice in modern life is central, powerful, unquestioned, and enshrined in how we think and all we do—so much so that it cannot be undermined merely by an appeal to another choice.

Second, calling provides the story line for our lives and thus a sense of continuity and coherence in the midst of a fragmented and confusing modern world.