I suspect the answer to this is “maybe”.
If that sounds a little fuzzy, it’s because life is like
that. If God has a specific, personal will for you about things like which university
you should attend or whether plumbing would be a better career choice than
medicine, he has not revealed it in his word, the Bible, which is where you and
I would normally look for guidance.
Further, the era in which we find ourselves has
a notable shortage of legitimate prophets, and experience shows that people who
talk a lot about “feeling led” to do this or that often end up making
questionable decisions. I can understand if that leaves followers of Christ looking around for clear direction about what to do.
Paul tells the Christians in Rome that we discern the will of God by
testing it, and testing is by definition a process of trial and error. By “error” I don’t mean sin or even major mistake, but rather the difference between something that works superbly well and something that works passably.
Something like the difference between “acceptable” and “perfect”.
The Call of God
Around a year and a half ago, I took a careful look at the
subject of God’s “call” as described for us in the New Testament. If a God who loves us has preferences
about the details of our lives, it follows logically that he intends to communicate them to us. We can expect to be led or “called”.
The apostles are consistent in how they talk about God’s “call” (in Greek, kaleō or klētos). They employ these words
hundreds of times in their epistles.
Now, this part is important: their usage demonstrates that God’s call is general in nature. It applies to all believers. We may be called to some very specific things, but we are ALL called to exactly the same things. Nobody gets special
treatment.
There is a single exception to note. Twice, Paul says he was
“called
to be an apostle.” (This would be “apostle” in the Capital A sense, not
merely someone who is sent out.) But Paul’s calling was unique, miraculous and
unrepeatable. It has more in common with the Old Testament calling of kings,
priests and prophets than it has with New Testament calls to believers. In
fact, we might argue Paul’s was the last major invitation to service under the
old sort of calling.
New Testament “Calling”
So here’s what Christian “calling” looks like. Ready? Paul
tells us believers are called to the following things:
- conformity to the “image of his Son”;
- glory, to obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ;
- the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ;
- peace, the peace of God;
- the grace of Christ;
- freedom;
- one hope;
- “his own kingdom and glory”;
- holiness; and
- eternal life.
Peter supplements Paul’s list by declaring we are called:
- out of darkness into his marvelous light;
- to suffering;
- to bless; and
- to eternal glory.
Finally, John announces that believers are called to:
Every single believer on the planet is called to each and
every one of these things. I, for one, am immensely grateful. What a wonderful
Savior and what a spectacular destiny!
Cries of Protest
And yet I can almost hear the cries of protest now: “What?
That’s it? Really? Where’s my call to study at a particular university? Where’s
my call to a specific career?
Exactly. You find these sorts of personal, specific “callings”
in Christian bookstores. You find them in Christian conversations. You find
them when we feel the need to justify our choices to ourselves or our fellow
believers by invoking a mutually-respected authority. “God called,” we say. No
further discussion is needed.
Really? Who says?
You find these sorts of personal, specific “callings”
wherever superstitious believers gather (and we have lots of those around), and
you definitely find them wherever Christians have insufficient confidence in
the wisdom of their own decision-making to name their choices for what they
are: personal, subjective preferences. You find them wherever Christians use
the jargon they hear around them without questioning its origin or validity.
You do not find them in the New Testament, so far as I can see.
Explaining the “Maybe”
Which leads me back to my opening “maybe”. We cannot rule
out the slim possibility that God is doing something unusual and/or epoch-defining with
any given believer. He’s done it before: Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Samson, Samuel,
David, Hosea, Ezekiel, the apostle Paul ... the list goes on. Perhaps you
are one of these rare individuals. There are thousands of perfectly ordinary
godly men and women in scripture for every one of these, but let’s not pretend the
exceptional never happens when God is in the process of accomplishing his sovereign will: it
certainly does.
The thing is, David did not go about preparing himself for
shepherding Israel by asking his dad to send him out to work with sheep. Moses
did not leap into a reed basket and hurl himself into the Nile on the
assumption that charming his way into Pharaoh’s household would prepare him
for instigating the Exodus, nor did he contrive to set up the killing that
sent him running into the desert for forty years of training in the School of God. Joseph did not
pick out Potiphar’s house or an Egyptian jail as the best possible places to prepare himself for governing Egypt. Samuel,
unborn at the time, could not possibly have retroactively influenced his father to marry two women, one of whom would abuse and torment the other so comprehensively that Hannah would ultimately give her firstborn entirely to God as a lifetime offering of
thanks. Nobody could plan that.
Daniel did not exile himself to
Babylon or afflict Nebuchadnezzar with night visions that troubled him. Paul did not attend Stephen’s stoning and watch over a pile of murderers’ cloaks to better motivate himself for service to Christ down the road ...
Need I go on?
A Suggestion
My thought? Work on what you know God has called you to do:
work on being conformed to the likeness of his Son. That is very much within
your control.
The rest of it? I’d say don’t sweat it. You won’t need to
find that sort of “will”.
It’ll find you.
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