“As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. {2} Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. {3} Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:1-3)
I am a preacher because I felt called to preach.
I remember clearly the first time God laid it upon my heart. It was during my senior year of high school. I was sitting in a pew on a Sunday morning at my home congregation in Alabama, listening to our guest speaker. We didn’t have a regular preacher in those days, but there were men who preached from time to time, and the speaker that morning had filled in for us quite often.
I’ll be honest with you, I was a little distracted and had trouble paying attention to his lesson. This speaker had a habit of wetting his lips every so often as he preached. Which, I guess, people do. The thing was, he did it in a way that made it look like he was sticking his tongue out at you.
Most people wet their lips by quickly running their tongue across them to add moisture.
Not this guy.
He wet his lips by sticking his tongue straight out. So all during the sermon, every so often, it was like he was he sticking his tongue out at you.
My friends and I used to count how many times he did that. There was one sermon where he did it seventy times!
I kid you not.
But it was during one of his sermons that God laid it upon my heart to preach. I sat there and kept thinking, “I ought to do that. I should become a preacher. I think God wants me to preach.” And that thought never left me.
I know it was God who laid that upon my heart. Please understand: this brother was a godly and humble man, a true servant of Christ; but it wasn’t his style and charisma that made me want to preach. I've known preachers over the years who were enamored with certain speakers and thought, "I want to be just like him!"
That's not what happened that day.
What happened was that I looked down the road and thought about my life. I wondered what my life in Christ would be like. I wondered how God might use me. And the thing that came to me again and again was that I ought to preach. I felt God wanted me to preach. I felt that way for years until finally I gave into it and started my pursuit of a Bible degree at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama.
There is no doubt in my mind that God called me to preach. And while there have been some ups and downs along the way, I have tried to live up to that calling and serve Him with all my heart.
But here's the thing — all of us have been called by God.
We tend to focus so much on the part of our text where Paul commands us to be unified in Christ that I think we forget the first part: “Live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”
Every Christian has been called by God.
We are called to find salvation in Christ (cf. Rom. 8:28-30).
We are called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus (Matt. 16:24).
We are called to serve others (1 Pet. 4:10).
We are called to share our faith (Mk. 16:15).
We are called to encourage others (1 Ths. 5:11).
We are called to live holy lives (1 Pet. 1:15-16).
I guess the question is, have we responded to God’s call? If we have, are we living up to our calling?
We may not be there yet, but it’s important that we wake up every morning and strive to be the person God has called us to be, and serve in whatever way we feel He has called us to serve.
In his book, The Call, Os Guinness wrote:
“Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.”
The great calling that every Christian receives is the call to obey God and follow Christ (cf. Acts 22:16, Rom. 10:13). But I also believe that He provides each of us with talents and opportunities to use those talents so that we might serve Him in our own way (cf. 1 Pet. 4:10-11).
For me, that was preaching.
What has the Lord called you to do in service to Him?
I love Paul’s prayer in 2 Thessalonians 1:11-12 —
“We always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of His calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by His power, {12} so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
That’s my prayer for all of us.