A Simple Calling
by David Jeremiah

Perhaps later today you'll need to stop at the grocery store for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. While waiting in the checkout line, notice the magazines and tabloids hanging from grocery racks like drooping paintings in a cheap museum. You don't need to thumb through the pages, the covers tell the story. They all have one basic message, and its communicated with every issue: Being rich and famous is the ultimate lifestyle. There's no higher calling in life than to be a celebrity.

Unfortunately, that message is sinking in. A recent survey in Great Britain asked children to name the best and worst things in the world. Their choices for the worst things were predictable: killing, wars, drunks, bullies, illness, smoking, stealing, divorce, and being fat.

But I'm alarmed at what these youngsters listed as the best things in the world. The top three answers, in order, were: being a celebrity, good looks, and being rich. The one-word answer of God was down in tenth place. The number one desire of British children is being a celebrity, and American children aren't far behind.

You and I may know better, but many people grow to adulthood thinking that celebrity and success and satisfaction are synonyms. But they're not. Take John Berryman, for example. His distinguished face with its well-trimmed beard and intellectual-looking glasses made him a beloved professor, and his innovative writing won the Pulitzer Prize. His several published volumes of poetry and prose represent a colossal achievement and gave him friends, admirers, and readers on every continent.

Yet one frozen day in 1972, Berryman walked across a bridge in Minnesota, waved to a stranger, and leaped to his death in the icy Mississippi. "At fifty-five, half famous and effective, I still feel rotten about myself," he had written.

How much better to have a simple calling in life! How much greater to understand that "this one life will soon be past; only what's done for Christ will last."

When you study the Gospel accounts of our Lord, you find a simple Man with a simple calling. He wasn't simpleminded, of course, for He was omniscient; and His task on earth was no easy thing. But Jesus could tell you in ABC terms what His life was all about. Even as a twelve-year-old, His first recorded utterance was a brilliant summarization of His life's mission: "Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?"

As He entered His itinerant preaching ministry by the blue waters of the Galilee and along the bustling sidewalks of Jerusalem, He explained His calling to all who asked. * The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost-Luke 19:10
* I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance-Matthew 9:13
* Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also, because for this purpose I have come forth-Mark 1:38
* I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me-John 6:38
* For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth-John 18:38

Can you state your mission that simply?

Our Lord's very lifestyle was simple, of course. He didn't have a house to clean or a yard to tend. His closet was on His back, and His pantry was in His knapsack. He once observed that foxes had holes and birds had nests, but He himself didn't have a place to lay His head. He slept wherever He was, and His home was wherever the Father's will took Him.

But it wasn't just His lifestyle that was simple, it was His purpose. He was single-focused on God's mission for Him and concerned about the eternal destination of all He met. He wanted to finish the work the Father had given Him. He wasn't concerned about what He was missing in the world, but about what He was gaining in eternity.

He recommends the same for you and me. In one of His classic parables, Jesus warns us to guard the simplicity of His calling on our lives. In the story of a sower, some of the seed fell on thorny ground, and prickly plants sprang up and choked the seed.

Later, when the disciples asked Him to interpret the parable, Jesus explained, "He who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful" (Matthew 13:22).

That can happen to you and me. The apostle Paul cautioned, "Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy. Let them do good, that they may be rich in good works" (1 Timothy 6:17-18). In 2 Timothy, he warned, "No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enlisted him as a soldier" (2 Timothy 2:4).

How easily our ambitions for Christ fall prey to lesser, earthly ambitions.

Several years ago, when the Winter Olympics were held in Sapporo, Japan, thousands of tourists thronged the city. Many of them commented on one of the major landmarks in Sapporo, a statue honoring American professor Dr. William S. Clark, who, in the late 1800s, helped establish Hokkaido University.

The statue is eye-catching, with the bronzed doctor pointing dramatically as if in mid-sentence, his eyes alert and passionate. Prominently engraved on the base of the statue are the English words: "Boys, Be Ambitious." That phrase, spoken by Clark just prior to his return to America, has been more or less adopted as the slogan for Sapporo. Everywhere are the words "Be Ambitious."

What most people don't know is that the city fathers of Sapporo only quote a portion of Clark's original statement. What he actually said as he left the university to return home was: "Boys, Be Ambitious for Christ!"

Somehow the "for Christ" part has been forgotten.

The same can happen to us. Oh, how busy we are! How complicated our lives can be! All the pursuits and hobbies and vacations and jobs and obligations! We can't escape them all, but we can beware the barrenness of busyness. Our trophies, degrees, and rewards will all burn to cinders at the end of the age. Those pictures of us with a famous person or with a giant fish or at an exotic locale-they're all right; but one day, they'll be forgotten in a dusty attic or moldering in a damp basement.

One soul brought into the kingdom is more eternal than all the honors of this world combined. That's why God's simple plan is to burden our hearts to become fishers of men.

When Dr. Oswald J. Smith of the People's Church in Toronto was just starting out as a student preacher, he traveled into Kentucky, preaching wherever he could. He was asked to hold a series of evangelistic services in a rural community named Hog's Hollow; but this was moonshine territory, and there was strong opposition. One night as Smith stood to preach in a lantern-lit schoolroom, shots rang out. A group of ruffians had determined to kill the meeting-and maybe the preacher. Yet somehow the young man found the courage to continue; and by the end of the meetings, forty-one souls had professed Christ as Savior.

With great joy, Oswald Smith returned to Chicago and a month later while on his knees, he wrote out a three-fold declaration: "I will think no thought, speak no word, and do no deed unworthy of a follower of Jesus Christ. I give my life for service in any part of the world, and in any capacity God wills that I should labor. I shall endeavor to do God's will from moment to moment, as He reveals it." That became his simple calling. It wasn't for wealth and fame, but it was effective and fulfilling.

Are you caught up in the complexities of this world, choked by the thorns of endless demands and needless obligations? Have you forgotten God's simple call to follow Him and be a fisher of men?

Stop! Slow down! Recover your burden! Let your life's mission be: "The will of God! Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else."

Friday, May 15, 2009