The Call: Everyone, Everywhere, Everything

I'm blogging some of my favorite quotes from The Call by Os Guinness. These come from chapter 4: Everyone, Everywhere, Everything.

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, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service.

Here are four essential strands in the biblical notion of calling that we must always hold.

First, calling has a simple and straighforward meaning. Human beings call to each other, to God, and to animals. Animals too can call.

Second, calling has another important meaning in the Old Testament. To call means to name, and to name means to call into being or to make. Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be. Thus name-calling is the fusion of being and becoming.

Third, calling gains a further characteristic meaning in the New Testament. It is almost a synonym for salvation. In this context, calling is overwhelmingly God's calling people to himself as followers of Christ. Just as God called Israel to him as his people, so Jesus called his disciples.

Fourth, calling has a vital, extended meaning in the New Testament that flowers more fully in the later history of the church. Thus in the New Testament, as Jesus calls his followers to himself, he also calls them to other things and tasks: to peace, to fellowship, to eternal life, to suffering, and to service. But deeper even than these particular things, discipleship, which implies "everyone, everywhere, and in everything," is the natural and rightful response to the lordship of Christ.

In short, calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be a "called one" and so to become "a follower of the Way."

The third and fourth strands of the meaning of calling are the basis for the vital distinction elaborated later in history between primary and secondary calling. Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him and for him. First and foremost we are called to Someone (God) not to something or to somewhere.

Our secondary calling, considering who God is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for him.

This vital distinction between primary and secondary calling carries with it two challenges - first, to hold the two together and, second, to ensure that they are kept in the right order.

The truth of calling means that for followers of Christ, "everyone, everywhere, and in everything" lives the whole of life as a response to God's call. Yet this holistic character of calling has often been distorted to become a form of dualism that elevates the spiritual at the expense of the secular. This distortion may be called the Catholic distortion, because it rose in the Catholic ear and is the majority position in the Catholic tradition.

Protestant confusion about calling has led to the Protestant distortion that is even worse. This is the form of dualism in a secular direction that not only elevates the secular at the expense of the spiritual but also cuts it off from the spiritual altogether.

If all that a believer does grows out of faith and is done for the glory of God, then all dualistic distinctions are demolished. There is no higher/lower, sacred/secular, perfect/permitted, contemplative/active, or first class/second class. Calling is the premise of Christian existence itself. Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God's (primary) calling.

"There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, 'This is mine! This belongs to me!'" Abraham Kuyper

The Call: The Haunting Question

I'm blogging some of my favorite quotes from The Call by Os Guinness. These come from chapter 3, The Haunting Question.

Part of our contemporary crisis of identity can be summed up by saying that modern people are haunted by an inescapable question of biography: Who am I?

Many of the categories people offer to explain or heal us today are too general.Who am I? Why am I alive? Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. All attempts to explain human individuality in general terms can be summed up as varieties of being "constrained to be."

A second and opposite position has equally obvious weaknesses - varies of "the courage of be." We can actually, we are told, "invent ourselves." The absurdity of this position is obvious to all but the rich, the strong, the wealthy, the young, and the fanatical. For one thing, even if we can do what we want, the question remains: What do we want? The near-omnipotence of our means of freedom doubles back to join hands with the near-emptiness of our ends. We do not have a purpose to match our technique. So ironically, we have the greatest capacity when we have the least clue what it is for.

The third perspective views individuality as a matter of being "constituted to be." From our very birth, we are told, we bear the seeds of our eventual character; we carry the script of our life stories.

Humanness is a response to God's calling. Responding to the call means rising to the challenge, but in conversation and in partnership - and in an intimate relationship between the called and the Caller.

Only when we respond to Christ and follow his call do we become our real selves and come to have personalities of our own. So when it comes to identity, modern people have things completely back to front: Professing to be unsure of God, they pretend to be sure of themselves. Followers of Christ put things the other way around: Unsure of ourselves, we are sure of God.

The Call: Seekers Sought

I'm blogging some of my favorite quotes from The Call by Os Guinness. These come from chapter 2, Seekers Sought.

"Love seeks out the seeker - not because the seeker is worthy of love but simply because love's nature is to love regardless of the worthiness or merit of the one loved.""

"First, the way of agape says, 'By all means desire, but think carefully about what you love and what you desire.' Those who follow eros are not wrong to desire happiness but wrong to think that happiness is to be found where they seek it. Incomplete in ourselves, we desire what we think is beckoning to complete us."

"Second, the way of agape parts company with the way of eros over the means of the search. We cannot find God without God. Our seeking will always fall short unless God's grace initiates the search and unless God's call draws us to him and completes the search."

"If we are to desire the highest good, the highest good must come down and draw us so that it may become a reality we desire. From this perspective, there is no merit in seeking or finding. All is grace. The secret of seeking is not in our human ascent to God, but in God's descent to us."

"We start out searching, but we end up being discovered. We think we are looking for something; we realize we are found by Someone.What brings us home is not our discovery of the way home but the call of the Father who has been waiting there for us all along, whose presence there makes home home."

The Call: The Ultimate Why

I'm blogging some of my favorite quotes from The Call by Os Guinness. These come from chapter 1, The Ultimate Why.

"Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life. Thus more ignorance, confusion - and longing - surround this topic now than at almost any time in history. The trouble is that, as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for. Some feel that they have time but not enough money; others feel that they have money but not enough time. But for most of us, in the midst of material plenty, we have spiritual poverty."

"Answering the call of our Creator is 'the ultimate why' for living, the highest source of purpose in human existence."

"Calling begins and ends such ages, and lives, of faith by placing the final aim of life beyond the world where it was meant to be. Answering the call is the way to find and fulfill the central purpose of your life."

The Call

The Call by Os Guinness is an incredible book. I read it about seven years ago and have recommended it to many people. I have said that The Call should be must reading for every young adult.

This summer Jon is living at home while he works on partner development in preparation for going on staff with The Navigators. We have decided to read the book and discuss it together. Sharon even ordered her own copy so as to not miss out on any of the fun!

I plan to blog some of the content from each chapter as we move through the book. The Call has 26 chapters so it will take a while.

Here is a quote from the Introduction:

"From this perspective, the final reality is neither chance nor an impersonal ground of being but an infinite personal God who has created us in his image and calls you into relationship with himself. Our life-purpose therefore comes from two sources at once - who we are created to be and who we are called to be.

Count the cost, consider the risks, and set out each day on a venture to multiply your gifts and opportunities and bring glory to God and add value to our world. Answering the call is the road to purpose and fulfillment in your life."