The Comfort of Being Called

[Part 2 of the blog adaptation of yesterday’s message at The District Church: “Promise.” You can read Part 1 here.]

The more I live, the more I experience, the more I reflect on life and Scripture, the more I spend time with God and participate in his mission, the more I realize that at the very core of our being, at the very depths of our soul, we were made to find our satisfaction and our end—our home and our comfort—in God, the One who made us, the One who loves us, the One who saved us, and the One who calls us to something greater—something, in fact, that we were made for: to be in right relationship with God and working with God to help make the world right again. There is so much more to life than what the world tells us.

Every day, I have to remind myself that God calls me his child, that through Jesus’ sacrifice for my sins and for the sin of the world, and through his resurrection and vindication by God, the Father was able to adopt me into his family and call me his own, that I am loved by God—by God. This is such a different kind of comfort than the world offers; this is the comfort of being called. This comfort is true: it doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of life, it doesn’t pretend that you’re something you’re not or that life is something other than it is; but it also doesn’t pretend that God is not who God is—mighty and majestic, high and holy, intimate and immanent, constant and close.

Here. Now. In this place. With us.

I have to remind myself of that every day, because every day I am faced with voices that would say otherwise, that would call me in other directions, that would pull me from my mission, that say you have to be successful in order to be loved; you have to make yourself attractive in order to be loved; you have to get this job or this education or live in this place or drive this kind of car or own this kind of phone in order to be loved, in order to be accepted. And every day, God says, “No. I love you as you are. I have always loved you and I will always love you. There is nothing you can do to make me love you any less or any more—that is how much I love you, how much I accept you, and how much I am pleased with you, my child.”

Some of you need to hear this: to hear that the grace and love of God are greater than anything you’re facing, anything you’ve done, anything that’s been done to you, any addiction you’re struggling with, any doubts you’re wrestling with. You need to hear that God promises power to his people—the power of his Holy Spirit, a power that enables us to know God’s love—and, as Paul writes to the church in Rome, “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). You need to know this love that will empower you—and not just empower you but so overwhelm you with its truth that you will be unable to do anything else but be a witness—and testify. And in this, you will know both a calling out of the comfort of the world—that is a false comfort, a veneer of comfort, indeed no comfort at all in reality—and you will know the true comfort of being called by God.

Bob Dylan, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, said:

Everybody has a calling, don’t they? Some have a high calling, some have a low calling. Everybody is called but few are chosen. There’s a lot of distraction for people, so you might not never find the real thing. A lot of people don’t.

It’s really easy to get distracted from the call of God.

• The call of the Father that says, “You are my beloved child,” gets drowned out by the voices that tell you that you’re not good enough or good-looking enough, you’re not successful enough, you’re just not enough—and so you keep trying to change yourself to please the wrong audience.
• The call of Jesus that cries out, “Come to me all you who are weary and I will give you rest,” gets drowned out by the distractions of a world that rewards busyness and activity and earning your way in the world—and so you work harder and try harder and wear yourself out trying to change the world in your own strength.
• The call of Jesus—the mission of God—that says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” gets lost in the advertisements that sell comfort and convenience as the highest goal, and the voices that trumpet safety and security as the measure for success.

And so you stay on your couch, you watch another episode of TV, you don’t get to know your neighbors, you don’t take the time to learn that language so you can go to that country—or even a next-door neighborhood, you distance yourself from risk, you make your life about pleasure, about yourself, about what you feel like.

I confess, I do these things too.

And let me tell you, when we do this, when we let ourselves get distracted from God’s call, from God’s mission, we miss out on a life that could be so much fuller than it is, a life so much more stable (and not stable in a boring way, but stable in its foundations), a life in which we are truly alive.

Bob Dylan’s right: there is a lot of distraction for people—and we inhabit a world full of people that are so distracted that they haven’t found their calling: not even their calling in the sense of “God is calling your name; God desires a relationship with you; God is seeking you; Jesus loves you,” let alone their calling in the sense of “This is what I was made for; this is what I was made to do, who I was made to be.”

And maybe that’s you, too. Maybe you’ve been trying to figure out what your calling is, what God wants you to do with your life, who God wants you to be; and it isn’t becoming any clearer. God’s taking a long time to answer and you’re getting worried that you may have missed his reply!

In one sense, I can’t help you: I can’t tell you for certain what that thing is that God would have you do. God has made each of us unique and uniquely gifted to bring our contribution to the body of Christ and to be that part, to play that role, in the work of the kingdom of God. It took me until I was almost twenty-eight years old and only after I’d actually started in full-time pastoral ministry here at The District Church that I knew for sure that this was it—and it came after a lot of twists and turns and trying to make the best decision I could, trying to listen as best I could, trying to discern—with others as well as on my own—where and how God might be leading me. But when I did realize my more specific calling, when I did figure out what God had crafted me for, I also realized that God had been molding me all along—on the journey, in the process.

And I realized that everyone has a calling in another sense: everyone has the calling to play a role in accomplishing this mission, to be—as Jesus said—“my witnesses”: the calling of following Jesus, of being like Jesus, of telling others about Jesus, of inviting others along on the ride and to the relationship, of living in such a way that the world is put to rights. And that—you can do that wherever you are; you don’t have to wait around for that. And you know, I think it’s in following that broad calling to be Christ’s witnesses that we may well discover the more specific calling that God has prepared for us.

I want to point out a couple additional things from Acts 1 to bear in mind as we consider this mission. First, verses 10-11:

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

It’s as if they’re saying, “Jesus just told you what to do: ‘Go back to Jerusalem, wait for my Spirit, go be my witnesses.’ Why are you still standing around?” John Stott commented,

There was something fundamentally anomalous about their gazing up into the sky when they had been commissioned to go to the ends of the earth. … Their calling was to be witnesses not stargazers.

Sometimes we can do that too; sometimes we look up to heaven as if God hasn’t said anything at all and we’re just waiting for him to say something before we do anything. Tell me what to do, God!

And God says, “I have. I have given you a mission: be my witnesses. Testify, in your words and in your deeds and by your life, the good news of Jesus Christ, the good news of redemption, the good news of restoration, the good news of grace and mercy and love and justice.”

The last thing I want to point out is from the end of the chapter, when the apostles are choosing a replacement for Judas. Out of the hundred and twenty who are there, they narrow it down to a shortlist of two: Joseph and Matthias. Matthias gets chosen. There’s no suggestion that he had a better heart or that Joseph was less worthy, or that God favored or disfavored one or the other. One was simply chosen to be an apostle and the other was not. And you know, we don’t hear anything more about either of these two in Scripture—we don’t know what happens to them. And the point is, as N.T. Wright puts it:

Part of Christian obedience, right from the beginning, was the call to play (apparently) great parts without pride and (apparently) small parts without shame. There are, of course, no passengers in the kingdom of God, and actually no ‘great’ and ‘small’ parts either. The different tasks and roles to which God assigns us are his business, not ours.

So it comes down to this: if we are Christians—followers of Jesus Christ—we have been given a mission to be Jesus’ witnesses, to testify to what we know, to what we believe, to the evidence we’ve found, and to be credible in telling and living out those truths. It is a mission that may seem impossible at times, and it will call us out of our comfort zones, out of what we know or what we think we know, out of the false comfort of the world and its distractions. But it is also a mission that we are not expected to accomplish on our own. Indeed, on our own, it is an impossible mission; but Jesus promises us power, the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of God, the life-saving, world-changing, soul-awakening power. And as we enter into that mission, as we walk in the power of that Spirit, we will discover the true comfort of being called: called by name, called sons and daughters of God, called friends of God, called to join God in the adventure, in the story, that he is involved in.

And so your mission, should you choose to accept it, is this:

Receive the power of the Spirit of God; be Jesus’ witnesses wherever he calls you and whatever he calls you to, shaking off the chains of what this world calls comfort; get out of your comfort zone and discover the true comfort of being called by God.