Knowing Your Calling (Romans with J.D. Walt)
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.
Jesus, We belong to you.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake. And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Romans 1:1–7
What is your calling? People expend so much energy, throughout their lives, trying to figure out what exactly is their calling in life. We tend to think it is a specific career or vocation or some particular job. Many spend much of their lives feeling as though they have missed their calling. You feel stuck in a job you can do but don’t love. More challenging, you spend a lot of time wondering if God wants you to be doing something other than what you are presently doing—like maybe you are supposed to go into “the ministry.” College students live in enormous anxiety about needing to figure out what they are going to do with their lives before they graduate. I tell my own collegiate children regularly to relax—Jesus didn’t even get started until he was thirty.
I’ve got good news for all of you. You don’t need to figure out your calling. It’s already set in stone. Did you catch it in today’s text? It is right there in verse 6.
. . . you . . . are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
This is your full time vocation. It is your 100 percent job 100 percent of the time. You are called to belong to Jesus Christ. Even better, this is your identity. You are called to belong to Jesus Christ. He tells us who we are and why we are here. Every possible question and quandary in life can be answered if approached from this singular starting place. It’s why we begin in this place of consecration every single day on the Wake-Up Call—Jesus, I belong to you. Promise me that you will never, ever, ever, skip that. Yesterday’s consecration is not sufficient for today’s calling.
Our calling must include and inform our job or career but it is much larger and far more comprehensive than our work week. It’s why the whole concept of retirement is an absurdity in the kingdom of Jesus. Calling transcends retirement. Sure, you can quit your job, but you can’t retire from your calling. In fact, I call the years between the ages of sixty and eighty the “kingdom prime.” And over eighty is “kingdom super prime.”
I once heard a Mother Teresa story I will never forget. A young adult showed up at Mother Teresa’s convent to work with lepers. He was put in a back office processing documents and records. Very unhappy, the man somehow got to Mother with his grievance. He said to her, “Mother, I came here from across the world to work with lepers, and all I am doing here is paperwork. My calling is to serve lepers.” She lovingly yet sternly replied, “Son, your calling is not to serve lepers. Your calling is to belong to Jesus. Now get back to the paperwork.”
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“Roots” – Our Series For Advent
Several years ago my father became interested in genealogy. He bought an account at ancestry.com and ended up tracing our family roots back to the 17th century in Scotland and England. He enjoyed sitting down with me at the computer and looking back at our ancestors and learning as much as we could about where they lived and how they ultimately settled in America. I was struck by how their stories were a part of my story, even though I had not been aware of them.
We all come from a family line of people who were shaped by where they lived and what they did. And we can learn more fully about the story of our lives by learning about the story of their lives.
The same is true of Jesus. Author Dan Wilt of Seedbed has written a daily Advent devotional that explores how we can more profoundly understand Jesus’ heart and mission by exploring the stories of people in Jesus’ family tree. Jesus is fully God, of course, yet he is also fully human, with ancestors and a family tree that is rooted in the land of Israel and the story of how God worked in and through them.
We’ll explore how Jesus, his mother Mary, and his adopted father Joseph all come from the family vine of the great King David, the son of Jesse. We’ll use as a map the idea known as a “Jesse Tree”, which is an an approach to the preparation season of Advent, leading us toward Christmas, that encourages us to revisit stories from the Old Testament to help us gain insights into the family line of Jesus and the spiritual mandate of the child born to save the world.
I look forward to exploring Jesus’ roots during this Advent season! If you would like to read along using Dan Wilt’s daily devotional, you can order the eBook from Amazon here, or directly from Seedbed here.
Grace and peace,
Clint
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A People of Grace and Truth
One of the most noteworthy things about Jesus’ life and ministry is to note that the people who were the least like Jesus were the same people who the most attracted to him. Jesus was the perfect image of a holy and righteous God, a man who went his whole life experiencing the same temptations that we all experience, and yet he resisted every one and never sinned. You might expect people who were great sinners to be uncomfortable around Jesus, and maybe even be repelled by him. But the opposite was the case. People who were under the power of shameful sin loved to spend time with Jesus. Why?
The answer certainly isn’t because Jesus downplayed or neglected talking about the moral commands of God. When Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), not only did he teach about God’s moral commands, Jesus intensified them. He would say things like, “In the Mosaic law, you are told not to murder. But I say that if you harbor resentment and anger toward another, you’ve already committed murder in your heart.” Yet, that high moral and spiritual calling that Jesus gave continually didn’t seem to prevent people from flocking to him.
The reason is because Jesus also reached out passionately to those who fell the most short of that high moral and spiritual calling. Jesus communicated over and over again that he loved and accepted the worst of sinners. And as those sinners followed Jesus and spent time with Jesus, they were transformed from sinners into saints.
What does this tell us as the church? It tells us that our calling is to follow the same pattern. On one hand, we proclaim the high call of holiness to our community and our world. And on the other hand, we offer never-ending grace and acceptance and welcome to each and every person we encounter. Doing both faithfully can often times be messy, but it is worth it, because that balance of grace and truth will transform the world.
In Christ,
Clint
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Ash Wednesday
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