Several years ago I was helping my daughter enter some of her student’s grades into her online grade book. She gave me her password, which is 4Christ.
Kim was not having an easy time in her first year of teaching English in a public high school. But when she has a chance to think about it, she gains new strength and motivation by remembering that she is there 4Christ. This is his calling for her. Os Guinness writes,
“Answering the call of our Creator is “the ultimate why” for living, the highest source of purpose in human existence…Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.” The Call
In my view the greatest challenge to Christian men in the twenty-first century is not resisting the pull of Internet porn, fighting the time pressures of their jobs, or struggling to meet the complicated emotional needs of their wives. Rather, it is resisting the driven life-style of our age and shaping our outward daily lives according to Christ’s inner call. Gordon MacDonald points out,
“Our public worlds are filled with a seeming infinity of demands upon our time, our loyalties, our money, and our energies. And because these public worlds of ours are so visible, so real, we have to struggle to ignore all their seductions and demands. They scream for our attention and action.” Ordering Your Private World
We mindlessly surrender our energy and our time to the demands of the outward world, going this direction one moment, bouncing in another direction the next. Our existence resembles the life of a pin ball more than that of a king, made in the image of God to exercise dominion over our lives and commune with our heavenly father.
Jesus rejected the driven life-style. Despite a full schedule, Jesus often sought the quiet of the wilderness to listen to the voice of his father. If Jesus, a sinless man, needed such time to commune with his father, how much more do we?
Maybe it’s time to get up a little earlier, turn off talk radio while you’re driving, take a walk at lunch, be more intentional about turning your thoughts to the Lord as you shower or fall asleep, or steal some extra time on Sunday to focus on his calling.
You and I were NOT chosen by God before the creation of the world to live like pin balls. In every sphere of our lives, we have the chance to live or not live in response to his calling.
You are called to your workplace 4Christ, called to your neighborhood 4Christ, called to love your wife (or to singleness) 4Christ, called to holiness 4Christ.
But if we don’t carve out space in our schedule for turning down the volume of the shrill demands from the outward world, we will one day look back and see that our lives were shaped by our driven life-style instead of the quiet call of our Redeemer.
