This blog post is adapted from my chapel message at Covenant College on October 1, 2010.
At Covenant we talk a lot about the biblical concept of calling, referring first to God’s call on us through the gospel – his call to faith and trust and worship and obedience – and second to his call on us through the gifts and passions and opportunities which he puts within us and before us – his call to particular pathways of service and obedience through which we live out, in particular ways, his gospel call.
There are wonderful benefits in thinking about life and work in terms of God’s calling and God’s callings, among them the affirmation of the genuine value of every vocation from politics to plumbing, from pharmacy to farming, from baking to banking, from art to athletics, from mechanical engineering to ministry. Recognition of God’s manifold vocational callings helps us escape the trap of the sacred/secular distinction, according to which some paths are more “holy” than others. All such callings are from God, who has created with such complexity and variety and beauty that there’s hardly any limit to the range of types of work and service which people can take up, as worship to God for the good of the world.
Calling also helps us appreciate deeply both the extraordinary activities of some people some of the time, and the ordinary, even mundane activities of most people most of the time. Whether the work is routine or unusual, through it God’s creation is developed and nurtured and celebrated, his people served and discipled, and his Kingdom advanced. Not everyone will be a William Wilberforce; in fact, we might say that William Wilberforce wasn’t William Wilberforce for most of his life, in that he spent decades in faithful, relatively unexciting, ordinary work — not really the stuff of books and films with which later generations have honored him.
In pursuing our callings, we are declaring and demonstrating the preeminence of Jesus Christ in all things, and we are bearing witness to God’s purpose in accomplishing and demonstrating his redemption of his creation. Creating art and music, building businesses, discovering cures for diseases – all these are godly pursuits, grounded in God’s creational norms and informed by common grace understanding, and they will, as tasks pursued for God’s glory, find their consummation in eternity: They have real, lasting value, and have their appropriate place as suitable trophies of God’s abundant common grace.
Likewise, deeds of compassion, mercy, and justice – caring for the sick and suffering, defending the unborn, working to free those in unjust bondage – have such real, lasting value as well. This is good and important work — Kingdom work — and it will endure for eternity as a display of God’s abundant love and wisdom and power.
In what follows, I do not intend to take back one bit of all this true reflection on calling, nor do I want to detract one bit from the worthiness of what millions of God’s people have done, across the centuries and around the world, in pursuit of their callings as acts of genuine worship to the Lord. I don’t want to trigger a single doubt about our students’ explorations, during their college years, of the pathways of God’s vocational callings for the years ahead, nor to cast doubt on the genuine goodness of the good that by God’s grace they will do throughout their lives – as doctors and teachers, accountants and farmers, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends and church members, i.e. in all the callings which God will call and enable them to fulfill.
But in this posting, I want to remind readers of a feature of the landscape of our faith which I believe is getting slighter and slighter attention these days, even as we rightly rejoice in the callings of God. It’s a feature which can raise some discomfort among even faithful Christians, but it’s so important that, if we lose hold of it, our view of our callings can get seriously out of focus with respect to the biblical gospel.
That feature is hell, and here I want to consider how, and how much, we think about hell – and more generally how we think about the eternal destiny of every human being, even as we treasure God’s callings. Click to continue »