Vocation

"But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." ~James 1:22-25

Those who believe in Jesus Christ have a calling in this life. God has formed each one of them, from birth onward, before and after regeneration, to further His great purpose in manifesting His Son Jesus Christ as glorious. And this forming goes past death and into eternity! So what is our calling? Our calling is to seek the glory of God in all things that we do.

Before we are regenerated we hate the purpose of God, we want nothing more than the humiliation of the Lamb. But after regeneration, we have a new heart that loves that Lamb and wants this purpose of God to be realized, but we still have a sinful flesh which does its best to put down the righteous thoughts of the regenerated heart of the believer. This is why it is so important to go to church where we hear the Word, which James says is like looking in the mirror and seeing how wicked we are in our flesh. The danger is that when we see how wicked our flesh is, we ignore it. James says that instead of seeing our wickedness and then forgetting, we must see what it is that is good in the sight of God, see how we do not match up, and then strive to do what is good. In this way we are sanctified.

Having said all of this, I believe that the church must be at the very core of the Christian calling. The Christian man and woman ought to center their life around the church, because this is where they can look into the "perfect law of liberty." We ought to work to bring up our families in the fear of the Lord, which cannot be done without hearing the preaching weekly. We ought to deliver finances to support the gospel and take care of the poor in the church. Cornelius Plantinga acknowledges the importance of the church in the fifth chapter of his book Engaging God's World. "Of all the ways that we can express our citizenship in the kingdom of God, none is more obvious than becoming an active member in our local church." When we center our calling around the church, we are centering our calling around the preaching, which is Christ speaking to His people!

All this being said, it is obvious that we cannot spend our whole life sitting under a perpetual sermon, and that would be an anti-biblical approach to life. Our life ought to be rooted in the church, but we must also branch out into the world. God put us here for a reason, and that reason is so that we, as children of light, shine out in the darkness. Plantinga says we "need to avoid the despairing tendency to write the world off, to abandon it as a lost cause, and to remove ourselves to an island of like-minded Christians." It would be easy to think this way when one compares the corruption of the world to the blessings found in the church, but we must shine as the people of God! So, since our life must be rooted in the church, when we go out and live in the world, we must be a witness to the blessings that we find in that church! It would be selfish to not want to demonstrate the spiritual blessings we receive through the preaching and fellowship with believers!

In summary, this is our vocation: to hear the preaching, and to be a witness by living out of that preaching. Living out of the preaching means that we behave ourselves in accordance with God's word and are in this way sanctified, but it also means that in our daily lives we talk about the blessings we have received through the Word of Jesus Christ, and demonstrate those blessings by giving of one's self in acts of mercy just as the Father gave His Son in the ultimate act of mercy. I could go on this topic for a while, but I think that I have surpassed the 350 word minimum by about double by now, so I will end here.