You are Called, Part 1

I would really like to start a little bit differently, if you would pull out your notes and go to the back page. I want to start at the very end. And there are two misbeliefs there and I want to share these because these perhaps are the deepest misbeliefs that both myself and my wife has had in a season in our life.

Misbelief number one is that I am not wanted or needed by anyone. My life has no purpose or meaning, I am a victim of an unfair, uncaring world that brings me pain. Four and a half years before I met my wife, she believed that with all of her heart. Many of you know her story. She came from a very difficult home life, abandoned by an unbeliever who went someplace else with another woman that he had been seeing for a year or so, two little babies, no money, broke, and her heart broken. And she believed that.

And dangerous emotions and thoughts went through her mind that apart from those two little babies, she probably would have not stayed around, she felt so hopeless. Some of you know what that feels like. They are scary thoughts.

The second misbelief is significance and meaning come from success in life. I will be happy someday when my relationships, career, and finances reflect my success and accomplishments.

Many people get very hopeless when, after working for years and years and years and years that doesn’t happen. In my case, my upbringing actually helped in a few ways. My Marine father and workaholic tendencies, by twelve, I had very clear written goals. I was going to get a basketball scholarship, I was going to have great grades, and I would date a very pretty girl. And I graduated and I did all three.

And I sat at a party afterwards and a good friend turned to me and said, “You must be very happy.” And I had an experience that I had never had in my life, because I had already set the new set of goals. And there was like a, whoo, a wave of emptiness in my soul that I thought, No, I’m not really happy at all. I thought these things would bring it, but it didn’t.

I had, by that time, drifted away from church, questioned God, and prayed a prayer on the way home, God, if You exist, You better reveal Yourself, because life makes no sense. Why live? Life is meaningless. I the people I love will die before I die and if accomplishing things is not what life is about, then life is a crapshoot, and I think I said something a little bit stronger, which probably was not very reverent.

If you’ll open your notes to the front page now, I want to talk about those dangerous emotions and how do you deal with those dangerous emotions? It’s hard to give one emotion, and I chose a word that is vague, but I think you’ll get it. The actual dictionary definition comes close. It’s angst. Angst is a feeling of deep anxiety, but it’s not worry. It’s dread.

But angst has some emotional cousins. Thoughts start going through your mind: meaninglessness. Feeling like my life doesn’t have any value or significance. That’s where Theresa was. No value. There’s no use in me being here. Thoughts like: purposelessness. Without and aim or goal or plan. Life is pointless. It’s senseless. That was me. Why do this?

And then there are times where you just get hopeless so there is despair, despondency, and here’s the core belief. Somehow, you start thinking: It’ll never get better. A happier day, change, is never going to happen. And when you lose hope, that’s when horrendous things happen.

So, what is God’s antidote? Before you turn the page, let me ask you the question that I always ask in these series is: what, apart from Christ, do you use to medicate or sedate your sense of angst? What do you do when you feel like life is senseless? What do you do when you get discouraged and depressed? What do you when you just feel hopeless?

Do you eat? Do you work more? Do you drink? Prescription drugs? Sex? What addictive behavior? Everyone deals with it. What is yours?

Because here’s the deal. We all have stuff, but if you’ll identify yours, if you’d be willing to be honest, just privately with God, then the antidote is really going to make sense.

Turn the page. What is God’s antidote to angst, meaningless purposelessness? What do you do with those feelings when you feel absolutely insignificant and there is no hope? Number one, remember the hope of your calling. Circle the word hope. Remember the hope of your calling.

In chapter 1, verse 18, Paul prayed this. He says, “I pray that God would give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation into who He really is, a true knowledge and an experiential intimate knowledge of Him.” And then in the very next verse he says, “I also pray,” and this was a different word for know, this fact, “I pray that your eyes would be enlightened of your heart that you would know as a fact the hope of His calling.”

And what he was really praying was what we have just been learning. What’s the hope of your calling? You are chosen! You are accepted by God, no matter what anyone says. You’re adopted, you have a Father, you are redeemed, you are infinitely valuable, you have been purchased by the blood of Christ, you are sealed, you are amazingly secure by the Holy Spirit, and you are empowered. The same power that raised Christ from the dead actually dwells in you. That’s what it means to be called.

This idea of being called is a little foreign, I think, to twenty-first century Christians. And so, I gave you a definition here out of the theological dictionary. Call is one of the biblical words associated with our salvation. In other words, God has called you to Himself and you responded in faith.

In both Hebrew and Greek, call can be used in a sense of naming. And in biblical thought, to give a name to someone bestows an identity. Would you put a box around identity?

Your identity is not your work, your identity is not your looks, your identity is not your family, your identity is not your money, it’s not your zip code, it’s not what other people think. God has called you. You have an identity. Son. Daughter. Beloved. Secure.

And notice it goes on. When God is the one who bestows names, the action is almost equivalent to creation. And I gave you a passage there from Isaiah 40. It says, “Where He calls the stars out one by one.” In other words, God spoke and billions of stars and galaxies came out. Guess what, God spoke, He spoke to you and you turned in response and you said, Yes, I do fall short. I am not perfect. I need help. I need forgiven. And in the empty hands of faith you said, Lord Jesus, come into my life. And He did!

And just like He spoke creation, He spoke re-creation so that you are a new person. The old things have passed away. Now, how do you experience that? That’s what the Christian life is all about.

So, one, you remember the hope of His calling. Second is to really ponder, to reflect on the magnitude of your calling. Would you put a box around magnitude? This is just for me, I don’t think we get it. I don’t think we grasp what is really true of us, but as you do, all those issues that we face that we are challenged with, all those ways that respond that we know aren’t healthy but we keep doing, they dissipate.

In our time together, here’s what I want to do. I am going to start, a little brief review. And then from chapter 2 to the end of chapter 3, I am going to show you five specific ways that God has called you.

Here's my goal, I want you to see the magnitude of what is true of you, that you are called and I want you to get it to soak into your head and drip right down into your heart, that you will go, Oh my.

Number one, you were called into a new relationship. He chose you before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. You were called, not to religion. You didn’t get called to morality. You didn’t get called to duty. You didn’t get called to, “I am supposed to do this and supposed to do that.” You were called to a relationship. You were called into a relationship with Jesus. A person! A real person who walked on the earth. A real person who really cares about you and knows you and loves you.

On the very last night, Jesus was at a vineyard and He was preparing His disciples and He says, “No longer do I call you slaves, because a slave doesn’t know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, because all the things the Father has revealed to Me, I have made known unto you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain so that you could ask whatever you want and the Father will give it to you.”

You know what He is saying is, are you ready? Write this down. God is my friend. He called you into friendship. Not weight, duty, guilt, stuff.

Second, God calls us to a new purpose. You are His workmanship, right? You are His tapestry. You are His masterpiece. You are His unique, all the people in all the world, there is no one like you. There is no DNA like yours. But it’s not just the physical DNA. You are His masterpiece. He has created you exactly the way He wants you and He has created you to fulfill something that no one can else can do it quite like you because no one else is you.

But notice it’s not just who you are. He created you to – what does it say? Do good works, which He has prepared for you. This isn’t a last minute thing. He prepared for you from the foundations of the world, that you should literally walk in them or live in them.

Now, here’s what I want you to do. In your notes, I want you to write the word general, and then under that, I want you to write the word specific. Because you are called to a general purpose. A new purpose of good works, right? You are called to love God and to love people. Jesus, in that same moment with His disciples said, “By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and that your fruit should remain.”

Well, what’s the fruit? The fruit is your character. As you allow Christ to live His life in you and through you, you become kinder, more loving, more patient, less envious, less arrogant, more generous. You begin to think and to act and to speak more and more and more like Jesus.

His goal is to make you like Him. That’s the fruit. To love God and to love people. And that’s for everyone so that your light so shines before men, that they – what? They glorify their God in heaven. They see your good works. They see how you live.

And that’s general. That is for all of us. But He also has a specific good work for you to walk in. Imagine, if you will, this colossal, huge puzzle of the body of Christ all over the world and there is this piece of the puzzle that is you. And it’s your gifts and your passions and your background and your history and your hurts and your struggles, and even your failures. And all those things are put in to make you a unique you, and you fit and you do something in a way that helps people in a way that no one else can quite like you.

I call it your holy ambition. It’s very specific. I will tell you this: when you discover your unique purpose and you begin to give your life away and He uses you and the Spirit of God takes the grace of God through the PVC pipe of your, just, ordinary life and does something that changes people, I will tell you, there is no drug like it!

God called you to a relationship and then He called you to a new purpose. Discover it. Pursue it.

Third, He called you, you’ll never have to be alone, into a new family. Chapter 2, verses 11 through 22. It’s a new family. Now, I can’t read the whole passage, so let me give you the context.

As you’re looking at your Bibles, look at verses 11 and 12. Basically, Paul is writing to this Gentile church. And they have received the gospel; they are now followers of Jesus. But do remember, Jesus was a Jew. The Messiah. He fulfilled all those Old Testament prophecies.

And so, basically, he says, “Look you guys, you need to remember where you came from. You were formerly haters of God, alienated from God, you had no hope, no promises. You were on the outside looking in.” And then he says, “Hey, and by the way, you Jews, get a life. Do you understand what Jesus did? He broke down the dividing wall.”

In fact, if you look at your text, you’ll notice, “Peace,” “Peace,” “Peace,” “Peace,” and the word “unity.”

And so what he says is that Jesus came and broke down the wall and barrier between Jew and Gentile and He made one new thing. One new man. Then I pick it up. Follow along as I read this.

Notice what that one new thing is, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, you Gentiles, but you are fellow citizens with God’s people. You are members of God’s household,” and then notice what he goes on to say, “built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Jesus Christ Himself as the cornerstone. In Him,” Christ, “the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple.”

What is a temple? Why do people go to temples? To worship. Experience God’s presence. Jew, Gentile, one new family. “In Him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives in His Spirit.” God’s presence dwells in you as a believer individually. But God’s manifest presence, when we come together, two or more, three or more – He then dwells and manifests His power and His presence.

Now, here’s what you need to get. Jew and Gentile, because our cultures, most of us don’t have a clue, this would be like, there are hundreds and hundreds of years of not, I don’t mean they don’t like each other, I am talking hostility. If I was a Jew, I would not walk into the house of a Gentile. If a Gentile drank out of a cup, I would not touch the cup or I wouldn’t drink out of it. Jews called Gentiles dogs.

What he is saying is: Jesus, now, has taken all these people from different places and now there is unity in Him. This is like someone from Hamas and the head of the Israel State saying, “We are now family.” This is like it’s 1950 and the KKK and the NAACP, the two presidents come together and say, “We are now family.” That’s how radical it was.

Here’s what you need to get: yes, we are multi-cultural here. But we are multi-cultural where, by and large, Korean, Chinese, Indian, black, white, rich, not-so-rich, single, married, married again – yeah, we are really, really, really diverse. But what happens in churches and ours is no different, by and large, you stay in your affinity group. I hang out with these people. We all speak this language. I am with people I like.

And so, we have all these little silos of all these different people. And you like each other. And there are some exceptions. Here’s the deal: being in a big room with people from all kinds of backgrounds is not the same as being in a room where you get to know them, where you learn to love people that are different, where you learn things that are different, where you hear words and backgrounds and hurts and where we actually, you know what happens? What will happen here is what happened there.

Can you imagine: you are a Roman soldier, or you’re just a person in Judea or Galilee. And all of a sudden, these Christians, these wacko people that say this guy rose from the dead, there’s a Jew and a Gentile, a slave and a rich person, a rabbi and literally, they had the Hamas of their day. One of the disciples basically was a zealot. That’s called a revolutionary. And they are all arm-in-arm. And they are walking into a stadium singing. And that motley group of people that would hate each other apart from Jesus, singing and praising God and asking God to forgive the people that are about to kill them.

And God doesn’t want you thinking following Christ is coming to weekend services, maybe being in a group, giving a little money, and going your way. He wants you to get connected in community. He wants you to learn to love and experience the kind of things that people would say, “Gosh, aren’t you both from India, but in India, these two groups don’t get along? How does that happen?”

“Oh, aren’t you from Taiwan and you’re from mainland China and isn’t there some rub with some of that stuff?” And, “Aren’t you black and aren’t you white?” Are you ready for this? “Aren’t you a Republican and he’s a Democrat and you pray together and love each other, I’m not kidding you. I’m talking – that’s what God wants to do.

Now, you might be thinking, How would that happen? Oh, I’m glad you asked. Because I don’t want you to think, Do I really want to change? What if the problem is not the Internet? What if it’s not lapsing back into the third or fourth or fifth drink? What if it’s not anger management? What if, at the heart of it, it’s not about how much you work or why? What if it’s not about ego?

What if all those things are symptoms and if you would ever come to the point where you could grasp in your head and your heart, I am secure and loved. I don’t need people to like me. I don’t need all my circumstances to work out perfectly. I have all that I need in Him and I give my life away and as I give my life away, I do not understand in any way the mathematics of the kingdom of God. But every time I give my time, every time I give my heart, every time I am willing to serve, God chooses to multiply that back and give to me far more than I gave. That’s the call of God.