How To Live Out Your God Given Call5 min read

During my first days as a new Christian, once you had been a Christian for a while, the next question you’ll be asked is “what is your calling?”

If you were like me, the first response was usually a mix of mumbled words to give a sense of spirituality even if I really didn’t understand what I was saying. Eventually, I get to words like “I’m still praying about it” or “I think God is calling me to blah-blah“.

For most churches or fellowships at that time, you don’t get to join any team – choir, evangelism, children’s ministry, until you think you have “the call” or you think you are ‘called’ into the team you want to join. So, for most of us, we were under pressure to “get the call quickly” since that meant we were not serving God.

The language is a bit different for most churches now. Now you hear questions like “what do you think you are passionate about?”, or “what do you see as the biggest problem around you?”, “what do you think you feel like always wishing you could change in the world?”

In truth, these questions are not really bad questions – either the version 1 or version 2 form of the questions. But I just feel they create a sort of gap in everyday life. When we live our life call by these questions, we open a chasm between everyday living and living a fulfilled life.

To start with, I think the first place of your calling is where you are now. Yep, every current situation where you can engage with everyday people. We have to understand that the goal of living a fulfilled and called-out life is to engage with people.

But how do you bring a sense of spirituality into the daily engagements you have with the folks that come your way? You have to be ready to bring them answers to life from your perspective – the Christ perspective. I bet you think I have just dropped some spiritual gibberish which reads like Church Lingo 101. Don’t worry, it gets simpler from now on once you can understand Jesus’ approach.

One of the things I noticed in most of Jesus’ sermons to everyday people. He typically avoided loading it with too much scripture. He liked using everyday examples people could relate to. I think that was a way of bringing heaven’s answers into the language of the everyday guy. This was how He did most of His ministry.

I kind of noticed that He decided to drop the heavy stuff on His audience once He saw a sense of interest to learn more. I guess it was His way of painting the complete picture of what following Him would mean. (John 6:53-60, Luke 9:57-62)

Eventually, this daily approach to living life led to the big event – the crucifixion. He didn’t have to force that to happened. It happened as a culmination of everything His life had been about. Even though that was the main reason He can to live – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28)

So, let’s see if we can model living out our call following the way Jesus lived out His. First, we must try to see how we can introduce Christ principles in our everyday relationships and conversations. When we see people giving in to loss, we must bring hope, where we see fear, we must bring love. I think the peace prayer by Francis of Assisi does apt justice to reflect this:

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

When you can do this in your everyday relationships, you are very well on your way to living out your call. As you do this, you will find out more opportunities to take people deeper with the tougher stuff – Just like Jesus did.

And yes, you may get to do the big stuff where you are put up on display. But it won’t be the one thing you are living for. Rather, it will just be one of the stuff that comes along the way of living your call.

So, what do I think our call is? It’s simply to bring people closer to God and God closer to the people we meet in our everyday lives. How do we do that? By making ourselves available with God’s viewpoint and actions when the people around us need it in a way appropriate to them and the moment.

So,what do I think our call is?It’s to bring people closer to God and God closer to people we meet in our everyday lives

Do you note that not everybody that listened to Jesus joined Him? You can imagine that despite the depth of His message (or powerfully anointed word as we now call it), there were only one hundred and twenty disciples at the time of the Pentecost (Acts 1:15). At least, we have the record of a crowd of four thousand and another five thousand listening to Him at some point in his ministry. Yet most of them did not join the ride with Him.

Our call is not to live for an audience, but to live our lives benefiting the people around us for the sake of the one who has saved us. Don’t aim for the crowd, aim for consistency in being available for the people around you.

I bet you know the answer if anyone asks you if you have found what your call is.

It’s right where you are now – using all you have for the benefit of the people around you so they can praise God for all you bring to them.

I can find nothing else more exciting.