God's Call And The Response Of Faith

The Hebrews letter's author guides us next to Abraham, one of the most famous of all Biblical personages. Abraham's name occurs 233 times in 220 verses in the ESV. Abram, his original name, occurs 55 times in 47 verses. Abram means exalted father. He was the founder and father of the nation of Israel, the son of Terah, born in Mesopotamia. When called by God, he left and spent the remainder of his life in the land of Canaan with his flocks (cf. Genesis 12-25). Hebrews refers to this journey. There is much to learn from the life of Abraham (father of a multitude). We have room only for a very few thoughts.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. - Hebrews 11:8-10 ESV

What is the Call of God? And how do I know that I am hearing God call me?

The Greek word is the same as ours, but with slightly different letters—kaleō. So we read that both Mary and Joseph called their son Jesus as they had been so instructed by the angelic revelation (Matt. 1:21-25.) Later Matthew tells us that Jesus was called a Nazarene in fulfillment of prophecy (Matt. 2:23). The same use of the verb is found in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount when he says that the peacemakers shall be called sons of God and those who relax even one of the least of the commandments and so teaches will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. From these and other examples we conclude that the verb refers first to giving someone a name and then with that name a description of their destiny and blessing or curse. 

So it was with Abraham. Paul writes of how he received a new name and a new destiny. In some detail in his letter to the Romans Paul says that Abraham, the prime example of a man of faith, received circumcision as a seal—not as a result—of the righteousness he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. Paul's huge point is that faith is the critical factor, not circumcision as an act of obedience. Thus Abraham was pronounced and declared righteous as a gift of God's grace (Gen. 15:6) before and without circumcision. So he is 

. . . the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised. - Rom 4:12 ESV

God does the calling, the naming and declaring. He called or declared Abraham righteous in His sight. God counted Abraham's faith as righteousness. Abraham believed the vision the LORD gave that the He would fulfill His promises to make Abraham's descendants as numerous as the stars above (Gen. 15:5). Abraham believed that the land of Canaan on which he sojourned would be the land in which those descendants would dwell. He believed all this even though he, Abraham, had no children and was already an old man. As such his name was still Ab-ram (exalted father). He was not yet named Ab-raham (father of a multitude).  But his name was indeed changed and with that name change came the promise.

Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, "Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Ab-ram, but your name shall be Ab-raham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God." - Gen 17:3-8 ESV

And the lesson for us? 

The LORD called you to faith if you believe in Jesus as the Christ and your Savior. This is the call He spoke in your baptism when He called you by name and declared you to be His child. In that call He declared you to be pure, clean and without sin. He declared you to have suffered the consequences of your sinning with His Son upon the cross of Calvary. He declared you forsaken and rejected along with Christ. He declared you dead. And then He declared you to be alive, risen with Christ. He declared that your life is already hidden with Christ in heaven. He declared that you will not die, but live and be given a new and eternal body. All this is yours when He called you His own in Baptism.

 

Consider what the Apostle writes to the Romans and to others about being baptized into Christ.

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. - Rom 6:3-5 ESV

This does not exhaust the meaning of God's Call. But let it be sufficient for today. Consider your Call and rejoice. In my next posting I'll consider the LORD's Call as God directing and guiding our lives.

Called By Christ To Be What You Alone Can Be

Brother Tim, as I continue this week's letter to you—and anyone else for that matter, both pastors and laity—I want to bring up something I said somewhere in the middle of yesterday's letter: 

In the next part of this letter I'll have more to say about what to pray for . . . 

And that brings me to some scattered thoughts for today, particularly about how I feel that we who are called to serve the church as pastors DO NOT know what to pray for. By that I mean to say that we are out of touch with much of what is going on around us, in our culture, and are NOT helping our people to confront it. Maybe that's because we afraid of the really hard questions before us—or we don't even know how to ask them. 

Let me explain by throwing out some things Os Guinness said 15 years ago about "Calling, Postmodernism, and Chastened Liberals."  

When I came to Christ in the early sixties, the central search for me—second only to the joy of knowing Christ—concerned my sense of sorrow at how marginal and pathetic much faith is in the modern world. Part of my response to that has been to look back at times in the past when faith has been dynamic and very powerful, and to examine the truths that made it so. . . 

Most of the secular alternatives to the gospel are in total disarray. The only dominant ones are negative, and as such they won't survive because they aren't satisfying.

MHR: What do you mean by the "dominant ones are negative"? 

OG: I'm referring to postmodernism. And humanism in any sixties sense, in which hardly anyone believes anymore. There are hardly any optimistic, post-Christian answers around. So we have one of the greatest apologetic opportunites we've had for five hundred years.

And yet most churches have lost their hold on apologetics. Many Christians don't even know what the term means. Those who do know what it means usually quarantine it very carefully in the seminaries on the east or west coasts. It never actually gets out to the streets to reach real people. As a result, we're missing one of the major moments of our time.

Guinness goes on to say some very important things about the Christian's calling, things that you too need to hear Tim, as you ponder your own calling. And, may I add, things that you need to teach to your people about their callings. Listen to this and then take a careful look at what he wrote. In this quote he's telling us to look beyond the empty new age ideas floating around.

OG: I think there should be an additional position—one classified as "called to be." We are not only created to be something—indeed, we are given some things at birth—but we are called to be something as well. 

It's fascinating to see this borne out in the scriptures. People who met the Lord face to face almost invariably fell flat on their faces (with a few exceptions, such as Joshua, who was too big for his boots and thus was told to take off his shoes). In most instances, such people are like Daniel and Ezekiel, who fell absolutely prostrate.

The Lord's words to them are almost always the same: "Stand up." In other words, calling not only singles us out—so that it's our name being called, and not someone else's—but it also stands us up. We arise to be what Christ alone knows us to be.

Tim, I pray that you will indeed struggle in prayer to be the man called to be, to "stand up" to be what Christ alone knows you to be. He will surely bless you.

The Cross Of Marriage

My wife and I have often shared the story of how we met and what incidents led us to become engaged and finally married. Every couple has such a story to tell. The Christian couple says with the confidence of faith, "This was the LORD's doing. He led us to one another." Or to use formal language, our marriage is a vocation, a calling. Lets look at that understanding of marriage.

We start by defining what the Bible means by a calling or a vocation. In this life on earth Christ our Lord calls us to follow Him. The old hymn says it well.

Come, follow Me, the Savior spake,
All in My way abiding;
Deny yourselves, the world forsake,
Obey My call and guiding.
Oh, bear the cross, whate’er betide,
Take My example for your guide.

We understand our calling in the light of Peter's words,

"For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps" (1 Peter 2:20-21). 

And again, Jesus words,

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 16:24-25).

There are two calls. The first is a call to faith. That happened when we were buried with Christ by baptism into death and brought forth again to life. As a result, we Christians confess,

"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). 

This is His call into the Kingdom, His call to receive the rich gift of forgiveness and life eternal. The second call is to take up our cross and follow Him. In that call we find our lives. Jesus emphasizes this again and again.

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Mat 10:39).

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Mat 11:29). 

So when Jesus calls us, man or woman, to take up our crosses and follow Him in the marriage relationship, He is calling us in very specific and concrete ways to lose our lives in the service of our spouses—for His sake. In other words, I am called by Jesus as a husband to love my wife, Sylvia, by dying to my own desires and rising again with Jesus to serve her, to forgive her, to care for her, to nourish and protect her. The same is true for each and every Christian spouse. This is what the Apostle is getting at in Ephesians 5:20-26 when he calls upon us believers to serve one another—in the name of Jesus .

Now it may seem strange to use the language of the cross when speaking about marriage. The world around us would certainly reject such an attitude. From the world we hear talk about love, love, love. The offended spouse says, "I don't love her any longer. She's not attractive to me. That's why I fell in love with this other woman. Now I want a divorce so I may marry my new found love."

"Not so," says the believer. "Jesus has called me to take up my cross and follow Him. I will serve my Savior and Lord by denying my self-centered, sinful, selfish desires for the sake of my wife whom He has given to me to serve. I will forgive her and reject the temptation to get involved with that other. I will be there for her, to guide, protect and care for her no matter what. When she offends me, I will forgive her. When she gets sick, I will nurse her. When she is happy, I will celebrate with her. When she is afraid I will protect her. When she is lonely I will come to her. And when she is sad and troubled I will comfort her. This is my calling, my cross to bear in the name of Jesus and as His servant."

The amazing and wondrous thing is that in so doing I find life. I come upon a mystery otherwise hidden from me. I discover what it means to be a whole, complete person. From Jesus I learn a new gentleness, contentment, deep joy, happiness and rest—an inner, psychic peace unknown before.

This is the cross we believing spouses bear in our marriages. And in our cross we find peace and joy!

 

Marriage Is No Garden Of Eden

So far we have examined how Christians view marriage in the light of Holy Scripture. Two purposes have emerged: 1) Mutual Love and 2) Procreation, in that order. The second is both a command and a blessing, but not the primary purpose. The Apostle Paul speaks of a third. He sees marriage as a restraint of sin. That purpose needs an explanation.


First let us emphasize again that our sexuality is not sinful. It is not sinful to be a man or a woman and to have sexual desires and appetites. The problem lies with our sinfulness and with living in a world of sinners under the control of the prince  of this dark world (Ephesians 2:1-3). These inner and outer influences distort our God-given sexual appetites. Sex, as it is called, becomes a god pursued at all costs, even at the price of breaking promises and being unfaithful to those to whom we have committed ourselves. The daily news is permeated by stories of this nature.


This is why our Creator also uses marriage to preserve our lives and to discipline us. Paul writes of this. 

"Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: "It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman." But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am.But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion"(1 Cor. 7:1-9)

Corrupted by our inherited sinful nature our sexual appetites are wild things that long to roam and ravage without restraint. They need to be domesticated, controlled and channelled in ways that bring them in line with the Creator's ordered plan. That plan, as outlined above, is that within the bonds of marriage one man and one woman remain committed and faithful to one another until parted by death. But times come when such commitments are not very attractive. In those moments the sexual passions leap against the fences that control them. They demand to be free to range without controls. They scream that we need some one to love us, because our marital partner no longer does or can. They demand to be fed and tell us that this can only be done by breaking free from the barriers. This leads to what we call adultery (ad-alter, to another), feeding the wildling in another pasture.


Marriage, as we have seen, was instituted by God. His original plan was that within the limits of a beautiful garden one man and one woman commit themselves in mutual love to one another again and again. Marriage was always to be a becoming, never a completed journey (Gen. 2:24). In that garden the two were to learn what mutual love is. They were to learn day by day and week by week what it means to be committed. Sadly we no longer live in Eden and marriage is not always the beautiful garden we sing about. It is rather a land often filled with weeds, thorns and pain, even as the Lord predicted (Genesis 3:14-19). And outside the garden we are continually pulling up those weeds, chopping down thorns and working through pain. Marriage is often not pleasant at all. We are forced to put up with that partner to whom we once made a lifelong commitment. And the drudgery and grief of caring for children seems never to end.


In those moments it is vital that we listen carefully to the Apostle's counsel in 1 Corinthians 7:17—

"Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him." 

Your partner is the Lord's gift to you. He or she is the Lord's answer to your prayers. You were called by Him into this marriage. Remember again the words, "What God has joined together let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:6). Even as He brought the two of you together, so He also promises never to forsake you. He will ever remain the unseen partner in your marriage, teaching you again and again that He forgives you and loves you. Empowered by His love you learn also to forgive, even as you are forgiven.


In that sense marriage is not merely a place to restrain wild sexual passions. It is also a place of healing and growth. In this place, despite all the thorns and pain, our Lord is teaching us how to love. Within these boundaries we discover that we are supported and encouraged, even as our sexual appetites are fed. In this earthly garden—even though it is not Eden—we become more than we ever could have been alone. We are being led toward that fullness and completion that only marriage can bring. By God's good grace we are ever discovering how to love and finding that we are loved in return.


There is more to say about this third purpose, especially as it relates to children and family, but that must wait until next time. 






  

My Vocation

Tomorrow the congregation of believers I have assisted during the past several months, the congregation to which we recently transferred membership, will gather in a voters' assembly to discuss their need for expanded pastoral care. The pastor who has served them will continue, but neither of us is able to devote our full time to this task. Yet we both sense the calling and guidance of the Holy Spirit to serve them in this manner. This leads me to a brief discussion of my vocation.

Here's a definition from Wikipedia:

The idea of vocation is central to the Christian belief that God has created each person with gifts and talents oriented toward specific purposes and a way of life. Particularly in the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, this idea of vocation is especially associated with a divine call to service to the Church and humanity through particular vocational life commitments such as marriage to a particular person, consecration as a religious, ordination to priestly ministry in the Church and even a holy life as a single person. In the broader sense, Christian vocation includes the use of ones gifts in their profession, family life, church and civic commitments for the sake of the greater common good.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a rather ponderous definition that I will not quote here. Suffice it to say the emphasis is upon what that part of the Christian community calls serving God in a religious or ecclesiastical state.

Over the centuries the temptation has been to make the vocation to serve God in the church as a pastor or church worker as somehow a higher calling than serving as a lay member of the Body of Christ. I often hear the phrase, "I'm only a layman." This was an issue in the Reformation of the church led by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. The matter is discussed in detail in many places in the official confessional writings growing out of that period, The Book of Concord.

It is given particular attention in Article XXVII of the Apology (defense) of the Augsburg Confession. Following are some relevant comments by Dr. Paul McCain on this matter.

"The insight that Luther and his fellow Reformers brought to light once more is the teaching that all of life is an opportunity to serve God, in whatever a person's place/station and calling in life is. Modern Lutherans would do well not to think that monasticism is an issue that is of no immediate application, or relevance, to the church today. There has arisen a new kind of monasticism among us: the view that a person is really only engaged in "church work" if he, or she, is a member of a church committee or taking part in some church-sponsored activity. It would be tempting to regard Sundays as our time to be "religious" while the rest of our week is in the "secular" world, regarding Sunday as the time for sacred things, while the rest of the week we must live in the profane world. This article extols the Christian virtues lived out in all of callings and stations in life: mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, employer, employee. Specifically rejected and condemned in this article is the imposition of lifelong celibacy on a person who does who truly does not have the gift of chastity. Forcing chastity on those without the gift is a horrible sin against God's good creation and led many in Luther's time to think that their standing before God depended on the degree to which they could imitate the "holy life" of the monks and nuns."

While I view the tasks that I am about to assume as a calling from God and while I further assume that serving Him in this manner is my vocation, this does not in any sense make me more religious or more deserving of His grace and mercy. This does not make me more holy. As Dr. Melanchthon says in this Article, "callings vary. . .Callings are personal, just as matters of business themselves vary with times and persons; but the example of obedience is universal."

Like you, I have other vocations as well. In all of them I am called to follow Christ. I have been called by Him to be husband to my wife, father and grandfather to my children and neighbor to the people and friends He places before me. In the instance of this Blog I follow His calling to serve you in this small manner with His Word. So we all have various callings to believe and obey. Quoting Article XXVII again, "So it is perfection for each of us with true faith to obey our own calling."