Chapter
12 : Secure in my Calling
“
We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love
him, who have been called according to his purpose ”
(Rom
8:28 )
The next aspect of our personal security we need to think about
is that of our calling. In this chapter we'll consider the security
we have in our calling (the 2 nd half of the above verse), and then
in the next chapter we'll consider being secure in all circumstances
(the first half of the above verse)
The verse above is perhaps one of the really well known
and much quoted verses of the New Testament. Yet when it comes to the
crunch, in a crisis, many of us abandon this verse and almost abandon
our faith. Why is that? I would suggest that it's probably because:
•
we've never understood the full implications
of the verse and
•
we've never really let it become a foundation
stone in our faith and in our daily life.
So, let's try and remedy that. Again it may be that as you read
these words you are tempted to say, “Oh no! This is such basic stuff!
I don't need to read this!” Well, yes you can move on to the practical
application chapters if you want, but maybe, just maybe, I might be
saying something you need to hear. Run with me please, don't miss this
chapter out!
12.1
The Problem of being a “Long-term Christian”
I'm assuming that you who are reading this book are Christians.
At some point in your life you had an encounter with God, either in
a crisis moment or spread out over a longer period, and you became a
Christian. I want to go back beyond that time in your life, to the time
before you knew Jesus as Lord and Saviour and think about what you were
like then.
For some of us this is difficult because we knew him at such
an early age. My wife asked Jesus to be her friend when she was five
and she had a very real relationship with him throughout those childhood
years and ever since. My three children also entered into a relationship
with Jesus somewhere between the ages of five and seven, and it was
real and, thankfully, at the time of writing still is (you'll see why
I say it like that later on). I didn't encounter Jesus until I was twenty
one and so my perspective has been quite different from the rest of
my family, but I do understand if you are one of those people who feel
you've known Jesus most of your life.
Yes, for those of us who entered into a relationship with God
at an early age, it's perhaps difficult to comprehend the awfulness
of sin, because we haven't had a chance to do “any of the really bad
things in life”. That's why you may have had difficulties with my words
in chapter 11 when I said we're “not nice”! Our tendency, when we've
known the Lord for many years, is to equate sin with drunkenness, drug
abuse, violence, murder, rape, theft and so on.
Strangely, for us, our insecurity or vulnerability is in ‘being
nice', just like the rich young ruler we considered in Chapter 5. Yes,
we are ‘nice' in comparison to many really nasty and evil people, but
we still have the same tendency to be godless (living on a
daily basis with little or no reference to God, being self-centred)
and unrighteous (living on a daily basis slightly missing the mark because
we're following human rules and not God's prompting and leading). This
is still sin, but because we've held such a shallow understanding of
it, it now means we don't cling to Jesus for dear life for our salvation,
we tend to take our salvation for granted, and because of that we're
vulnerable to attack.
In the last decade of the twentieth century a number of people
were heard to say, “I believe we're in revival times”. Well apart from
some fairly rare places around the world, I'm convinced we were not
and are still not at the time of putting this on the site, and one of
my main reasons for saying that is because of our weak view of sin.
Many of us acknowledge with our intellect the facts of salvation, that
we are sinners and in need of a Saviour but that truth hardly touches
our hearts.
We come back to what I said in Chapter 11, we ARE children of
God, sons of God, yet we, left to our own devices, still have a tendency
to get it wrong. Why is that so? Because we've got such a light hearted
view of sin! In daily life you are delivered from sinning, in practical
terms , by one of three things, either:
•
you see the wonder of the relationship
you have been given with God
through Christ and simply cannot sin because you are
filled with an
appreciation of the wonder of His love for you, or
•
you have ‘seen' the awfulness of sin
and realise how terrible it is and shy
away from it, fleeing to the Cross, or
•
you see, probably from conviction that
comes with preaching or some other
application of His word, that “things must change”.
12.2
The Problem of Destiny
Let's focus back on your earlier life, before you were
a Christian. When did God take an interest in you? Was it only at that
point, was that your call, at your conversion? Did God make you get
saved or did you have a part to play in it? These are important questions
because answers to them determine how we view the other aspect of our
lives.
Many of us consider that our God only became interested
in us when we turned to Christ, a God who seems only concerned when
we've become concerned with Him. Now that is very far from the truth
of Scripture.
Others of us feel that we have been slotted into a fixed
regime by a sovereign God who keeps some people out of His kingdom and
drags others of us in. We'll consider this more in a moment and also
in the following chapter.
The verse at the beginning of the chapter speaks about
those of us “ who have been called according to his purpose ”,
so let's examine this “calling” in some detail.
Eph
1:4 For
he (God the Father) chose us in him (Christ Jesus)
before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons.
This verse is just one of those “before the beginning of
the world” verses (see Chapter 12 where I referred to the whole New
Testament list). There are really just three ways you can understand
these verses:
•
The first view says that
before the beginning of the world God decided on the general principle
or strategy that He would use, and individuals were not
in the picture at that point of His thinking. However certain things
must flow from this viewpoint:
•
This implies that He knew that
Man would fall and that a means of salvation would be necessary.
•
Now the Bible teaches that God knows
the beginning from the end and that He also knows what men
will do (e.g. 1 Sam 23:10 -13, Mt 11:20 -24), so He must know who
is going to respond and how.
•
To say that God did not know WHO would
be saved denies what the Bible teaches in so many ways and in so
many places, which makes this an untenable position to hold.
•
The second view says that
before the beginning of the world God decided exactly who would become
Christians and who would not, i.e. ‘back then' He decided those He would
‘randomly' (?) choose. This also has certain inevitable consequences:
•
This implies both the sovereignty of
God and the absence of free will in
man; God makes some people come to Him and stops
others.
•
However, the Bible is full of God giving
instructions to people, which would
seem to be nonsense statements if they HAD to obey. Again
and again
there are warnings “IF you do this… then that will happen”.
If there is no
free will these become nonsense statements, for indeed
some of these
people obeyed and others disobeyed.
•
A God who uses free will language but
them forces people to do what He
wants (including to sin) sounds a contradictory, unpleasant
tyrant!
•
If a man or woman is predetermined to
sin, then as much as we may agree
with the apostle Paul (Rom 9:20,21) that it is foolish
arguing with God, we
are still left with a nagging doubt that somehow we are
left with an unfair
God who is far from the God of love who is revealed through
Jesus Christ!
First of all, please note that these are NOT merely academic
points to be chewed over by theologians. They are real pastoral problems
that affect how people think and feel and live out their lives. Many
of us have a negative view of life or of God because we hold
one of the above views.
The second thing to note, is that if you are already set
in your views of an extreme Calvinism or Arminianism, I am not out to
change your mind - I don't have either the space or inclination to do
that (see a later chapter). My comments here are restricted and are
for those who haven't thought these things through before and will accept
a logical, pastoral and Scriptural (in my view!) approach to these things.
Right, read on….
•
A mid-way view says that
before the beginning of the world God looked into the future (being
outside of time and in eternity) and saw who would respond to the Good
News of Jesus and thus knew then who would respond. The consequences
of this view are:
•
This allows for both a sovereign God
and free will in man
•
God decreed the means of testing men's
hearts (the news of Jesus), He
speaks by His Holy Spirit to men and women, calling
them, and we
respond to that means and to His calling
•
He grants salvation to those who respond,
the right to be named as, and
enter into being, (adopted) sons of God (Jn 1:12
)
Assuming you agree with me that options 1 and 2 above have
big question marks over them, we are left with some important implications
as a result of number 3. There are two primary points about your life
that follow from this:
•
God knew, before you were born, that
you would eventually respond to
Him (which is different from Him making you live like
you did for that
godless period of your life and then making you become
a Christian.)
•
Although you did not enter into relationship
with Him until the date of your
conversion, He was watching over your life, drawing,
challenging, allowing
some things, intervening in others, stopping yet others,
i.e. acting in a
sovereign way without violating your will.
This viewpoint is confirmed by God's words to the prophet Jeremiah,
when he was at least a teenager :
Jer
1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before
you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
David also knew this when he wrote Psalm 139 and verses
13-16 say the same thing to us. Indeed these verses could be taken more
for the argument for a God who does exactly decree what WILL happen,
if it weren't for the so many verses throughout the Bible that would
become nonsense if that were so. Don't feel in any way that this diminishes
the sovereignty of God, it simply means He could fix things if He wanted
but in His love He allows us the privilege of genuine free will.
Many of us can now see, as we look back on the years before we
came to Christ, the hand of God that was hidden from us at the time,
and we marvel at the wonder that God loved us so much that He interacted
with our circumstances even while we were totally self-centred and unrighteous.
Have you ever seen this? Have you ever marvelled at this? Have you ever
thanked God that He was there doing those things? The later in life
that you came to Christ, the more times you can probably see the hidden
hand of God that was there behind the circumstances of your life, protecting,
guiding, inspiring!
12.3
But what about…?
“Ah,” some of us might say, “but you don't know what I've been
through! Do you mean to say God was there watching over me and yet He
let me go through that!” That's exactly what I am saying, but there
is another side to what you're inferring. You're suggesting that God
was unkind in letting you go through all that you went through in those
years before you knew Him, but what would you have had Him do?
I presume you value your sense of free-will, you value being
allowed to choose what you do, where you go, and so on? So did the other
people involved in your past! Would you want God to over-rule their
free will to protect you, to stop them being unpleasant, unkind,
even abusing you? How do you want God to operate this discriminatory
removal of free will? To allow you total free will but to stop others
when it comes to their interacting with you? Perhaps you would accept
Him limiting your free will a little? How much?
No, that was the price of free will, that both you and others
could be godless and unrighteous. But perhaps you say, “But I wasn't
unrighteous, I was the one abused!” So how did you handle it? Did you
tolerate it, go down under it, did you react with bad attitudes? Please
understand, I'm not trying to be unkind, just to help us face the truth.
Did you turn to God in it all, did you cry out to Him praying
day and night for deliverance, day and night for your abuser, day and
night for God's glory to be revealed in the situation? That
would have been a godly, righteous response, but we didn't do that!
Why? Because we were still self-centred, godless and the grace of God
in the form of His own Holy Spirit was not there within us, challenging,
stirring, encouraging, strengthening. No, Sin was reigning in us. We
may have been through the most unpleasant of circumstances but, let's
face it, we didn't handle those circumstances in a godly righteous manner.
No, the wonder was that God put up with all your foolishness (and mine!),
all your self-centredness, all your unrighteous thinking, unrighteous
words and unrighteous deeds, while He was waiting for you to come to
Him. He knew exactly the right time in your history when you would make
that decision. No, the staggering news is that God loved you then, even
while He was waiting, knowing there was going to come a right time,
a right place, right circumstances, when you would, like the prodigal
son, “come to your senses” (Lk 15:17). There hasn't been a moment of
your existence when God didn't love you!
What's even more staggering is that God puts up with all those people
who are never going to turn to Him. That's another part of the price
to pay for free will. Yes, death will be own-up time, but in the meantime
the unrighteous seem to get away with it so often. “ He causes his
sun to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous
and the unrighteous ” (Mt 5:45 ). The weeds grow alongside the
wheat (Mt 13:24 -30) until the end. These are the facts of living in
a Fallen World, and we need to remember these things. We'll examine
this some more in the next chapter.
12.4
The Realities of our Conversion Experience
So how did we eventually come to Him? Was it the earnest
yearning of our hearts? Did we think our way through to salvation? Was
there room for us to boast in the part we played? No, the honest answer
is that the Spirit of God spoke to us, drew us, and convicted us. Although
we have free will that doesn't stop God speaking and speaking and speaking
to us. What is it that makes one person respond and another person hold
back? I don't know. There are a number of factors involved but at the
end of the day the answer is not clear.
The point of our conversion wasn't a glorious moment for us;
it was a point of surrender. We didn't grab for the glorious gift because
we saw the wonderful wisdom of it. No, we came in awareness of what
a mess we were, a mess who needed help, a mess who needed a Saviour.
It doesn't matter if we came as a young child simply aware of our ‘need
of a friend', or later in life aware of the awful things we had done.
Ultimately it's all the same, we came aware of a need, aware of a shortfall
in us that could only be met in God. That's what our calling was about.
It was a calling to recognise and face the truth about ourselves and
then accept the truth about what God, in His love for us, had done for
us.
Rom
5:8 While we were still sinners, Christ
died for us
Yes, God's plan for our salvation through the death of Jesus
on the Cross, went ahead without any reference to us, was set down in
history for us to receive long before we were around, and even if we
had been consulted we would have been in no state to approve it, because
we were still sinners, still in our folly, still without understanding.
Could we boast that we came to God having worked out our need
and worked out the means God was using to redeem us? No, at the time
of our conversion our understanding was strictly limited. That understanding
only came when He placed His own Holy Spirit in us, and that initially
was very limited understanding.
It doesn't matter if we came as a five year old child or a twenty
five year old man or woman, it's just as Jesus said in Luke 18:17, “
anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child
will never enter it ”, or as Matthew records Jesus saying, “ unless
you change and become like little children, you will never enter the
kingdom of heaven ” (18:3). No, as the apostle Paul wrote, we have
no room to boast, it wasn't what we did but what HE did that was the
all-important thing (Rom 3:23), because He chose what was weak and foolish
- you - to show that it wasn't you but Him! (1 Cor 1:27 -31)
12.5
Some Conclusions
If you still question God's love for you, can you not see the
wonder of this all-pervading love that was there watching over you,
all through those years of your rejection of Him. But it's more wonderful
than that!
This love was there even before He formed any material thing.
It was expressed between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, communicated within
the Trinity even before Creation, aware that as soon as They made a
being in their image, a being capable of making decisions, capable of
making choices, the way would be open for wrong choices to be made,
wrong decisions to be taken, and God's will rejected. Even then They
knew a Way had to be made to redeem, to reconcile, to restore. Even
then the heart of love decided the awfulness of the Cross. Even then
they looked and observed and saw who would respond, who would come freely
without coercion, who would kneel and pray, “Forgive me, I need you”.
Even then they saw – you!
And so through time-and-space-history events moved on, the interaction
of the Sovereign God with the puny wills of sinful men, until that time
that you now know about, when in time and space you knelt, you asked,
and you received.
In all of this do you catch a sense of destiny, of your
place in the Great Plan? You only saw it from a tiny limited vantage
point of sinful anguish in time-space-history when it happened, but
God had had it in mind from outside of time, in eternity when He planned,
He knew, He saw, and He rejoiced that, despite your sin, you would become
His child.
Rejoice in this, be secure in this. You are His child and
“ He who began a good work in you will carry it to completion until
the day of Christ Jesus ” (Phil 1:6) and so nothing “ in all
creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in
Christ Jesus our Lord ” (Rom 8:39 ).
Now, again we have been dealing with profound truths and
it may be that you need to go back over this chapter and take it in
slowly. Make sure you are clear on the truths that are here, for once
you are, you will never be the same again!