How Do I Know My Calling?
Sunday at The Bridge I preached week three of our Faith + Work series. (Check out the messages here!)
One of the questions that many believers ask throughout their lives is ‘how do I know what I’m called to do?’ For some of us, this issue becomes so frustrating that we finally give up trying to figure it out and resign ourselves to the errant idea that maybe our life has no purpose – not any that is eternally significant, anyway. We tend to wrestle with the unsolvable mystery that is “calling” and in doing so can miss some incredible things God has for us.
I think a good place to start in discovering your calling is to ask yourself these questions:
Where am I now?
It’s easy to despise the season we are in while waiting for the next one. If you’re not careful this can happen in every season of your life. If you’re single, you may be tempted to think your calling needs to wait until you’re married. If you’re married, you may be tempted to think once you have children, then you can pursue your calling. Or maybe when your kids are old enough to take care of themselves. Or maybe when they’re grown. Or when you get the job you’re ‘supposed to have’. Or the promotion you feel you deserve.
I totally reject the notion of ‘seasons of waiting.’ (Single folk hear this a lot.) I believe you are not in a season of waiting, you are in a season of purpose. Every season of our lives counts, there is purpose in every season. If you always wait for your life to start, you’ll waste your life waiting.
It’s also important to realize that the space you are in *right now* – the job, the classes, the life you’re living – your current season is not an obstacle to your real calling. It is where you are called right now. We can get really wrapped up in delusions of grandeur that we slap a sticker of holiness on and call it our destiny. But the truth is that your calling doesn’t start with a platform or a promotion – it starts in everyday faithfulness.
If the steps of a righteous person are ordered of God, that means the place you are in right now is part of your calling. Live with intention in this season you are in.
Is it about the Kingdom?
God won’t call you to something that brings glory to yourself. Here’s an embarrassing confession – in my early 20’s, I believed I was called to a big platform. I was a songwriter and was having some small-scale success, and with that came a desire for a platform. I spiritualized this desire, but the truth was, I wanted success and recognition.
Sometimes God does elevate us to a place of influence, but it’s not for our own glory. And I daresay that we should be very cautious in taking large platforms, because it’s much harder to live with a pure heart when you’re in a spotlight.
Remember that book The Prayer of Jabez that was super popular in the early 2000’s in church culture? I never liked that book, if I’m totally honest. Maybe it’s the condition of my own heart, but I have trouble praying for God to expand my territory while keeping a heart that is free of pride. So since I took this role, I’ve been praying that God would expand my faith. I’ve found that praying God will expand my faith changes the way I respond to things I may have otherwise deemed ‘success’ or ‘failure’.
Are you being obedient?
1 Samuel 15:22 reminds us that obedience is more desired of the Lord than sacrifice. It’s easy to justify disobedience by sacrifice. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a couple in our church where they told me that the husband has committed to being home between 5:30 and 6 PM every day. This is counter-cultural in France, and in order to achieve this he goes to work at 7 AM. It would be easy for him to push this boundary and justify it by calling attention to the sacrifice he makes for his family. But sacrifice is not what is needed – it’s an honoring of the commitment he made.
When Jesus called (there’s that word again) the disciples, they were faithfully working. They were fishermen, and they were fishing. They weren’t waiting around for God to speak – they weren’t waiting for something better. They were faithfully doing what had been put before them to do.
The truth is, obedience is not about the result. It’s about the process. God hasn’t called you to be rich or famous or successful as the world defines it. He’s called you to be obedient. And faithful. And the process of obedience is not one with a guaranteed result – but that’s not up to you.
The thing we always have to go back to as believers is modeling our lives after Jesus, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”
Obedience to the will of the Father came at a high cost for Jesus – as it sometimes does for us. But Jesus’s “yes” continues to give us life today. What might God do with your “yes”?
Calling can seem like a thing that is mystical and impossible to define, and therefore incredibly frustrating. But just as Jesus called the disciples, the only thing that matters in calling is your answer to the “Follow me” of Jesus.