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2 Timothy 1:1-12: "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus, 2 To Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. 3 I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. 4 As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy. 5 I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. 6 For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, 7 for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. 8 Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, 9 who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, 10 and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, 11 for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, 12 which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me."

INTRODUCTION

The last couple of weeks we've looked at Paul's radical conversion, his calling by Christ to give His life away. We've attempted to see what true conversion looks like and what true conversion believes.

I promised last week that we were going to take a couple of weeks and teach on the subject of calling. The reason for this is quite simple, it is perhaps the most distorted and misunderstood doctrine in the Church today and we need to recapture the idea of calling.

This week is a bit more of a set-up so if all your questions aren't answered wait till next week and hopefully they will be. If not, then you can get your money back but you'll have to see Scott about that.

When we think of Paul's conversion it's incredible, but the passage above is the other side of his life, the other bookend where he knows he probably won't be around much longer. As you know, his letters to Timothy were his last before he was executed for what he believed. His life was consumed by what Christ had called him to and we hear this in these verses.

Paul knew what it meant to be called to a holy calling for God's purpose. He knew what it meant to be chosen by grace and picked out before time began for this calling.

The Problem

Boredom and Apathy

Boredom is the existential experience of indifference to what's around us. Some believe that boredom proves the meaninglessness of our existence. It is argued that if life possessed positive value and real content, boredom would not exist because existence would fully satisfy us. This thought is followed to argue that God must not exist since we are bored. However, I believe this phenomenon of boredom is more evidence for God's existence.

When we were created, we were made to have our existence fulfilled through the experience and knowledge of the One who made us. The issue for Eve was not that she was bored, but that she actively entertained the idea that perhaps Satan was right and God wasn't trustworthy. This question gave rise to a distrust of His word and a trust in her own reasoning apart from His spoken revelation. It wasn't that Satan was perceived to be the authority in that discussion it was that she put God and Satan's word side by side and decided that she would be the one to decide between the two. This move from fully trusting God to trusting self created the rebellious treason against our beautiful and splendid King. Sin created a severing of our close union with God and communion with one another. Our thoughts which found their home in worship and adoration of God and love toward one another became marred and twisted and instead a vacuum of despair and meaninglessness now occupied this empty space. Without the emotional stimulus and focus upon love for God, we came to despise not only Him but each other, His creation, and sadly, even ourselves.

Boredom became the desire for desires. It is a loss of self, of meaning, of purpose, of real and lasting value, and of substantial meaning.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time. Purpose is the feeling that nothing is a waste of time. But where do we find purpose in a world that cheapens purpose to nothing more than succeeding at work or sport?

Our loss of love for God is the real reason we are apathetic. As one existential psychologist, Rollo May, put it: "hate is not the opposite of love, apathy is." Where apathy is master, all men are slaves.

Defining Apathy

Apathy is another term for indifference. It is when an individual is unresponsive or indifferent to emotional, social, physical, or spiritual life.

Clinically, apathy is considered to be more serious that depression. It can be specific to an object or person, to an activity or environment. It is common with people who suffer pressure and stress. Apathy becomes the mechanism by which they detach themselves from caring. For the Christian, apathy can set in quickly when we put ourselves under the stress of works righteousness to live up to standards. This creates a sense of pressure and then failure which causes us to give up or become indifferent to the things of God. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel.

Defining Apatheism

Apatheism is practical atheism. It is where an individual is not interested in accepting or denying the claims of God's existence. In essence, one acts as if God's existence simply doesn't matter to them. The question of God becomes irrelevant. Many within the Christian community have little more than a theoretical assent to God's existence, but on a moment by moment, day by day basis they live as if He doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter.

My Apathy

There was a point in my life when I had all but given up finding any ultimate meaning or value for the rest of my days. I had come to the conclusion that the only way to find purpose was to determine myself what was important and what was meaningful. I believed there was no God or gods to consider, so it made sense that it was up to each of us to figure it out on our own. This sounded noble but left me with a great sense of despair since if the fountain of meaning was to flow from myself, I was going to be continuously parched. I could not satisfy my own thirst to know why I was here and what I was made for.

This period of my life led me to a sense of being alone, an aloneness that was deafening. So much so I wasn't comfortable on my own in my own skin. I didn't want to hear my thoughts. The questions which came when I was alone made me feel anxious and panicked. So, to numb my pain I sought after companionship. I needed friends, continuous stimulus by going out and keeping busy, and I sought sexual relationships to attempt to satisfy a yearning to be accepted, to be loved, to be noticed, and to have a sense of meaning. I was apathetic about God and was bored. Yet the more women I dated, the more friends I had, and the more clubs I went to the more lonely I became. I felt lost, outside, out of sync, and without any direction other than work and recreation which would grew tedious and monotonous.

Our Apathy

I believe my story is not much different than each of ours in many ways. Our culture is purpose-hungry but doesn't know it's starving and has no clue as to where to find bread.

Is this you? Are you looking for a purpose big enough to absorb every ounce of your attention, deep enough to draw out your passions, and lasting enough to inspire you to your last breath like our beloved brother Paul who could say, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith" (2 Tim. 4:7)?

What we're trying to discover over these next couple of weeks is the reason why each of us are here on earth. We want to explore the deepest, highest, and greatest purpose that any human has ever known. We want to find meaning which grabs us by the collar and is so profound that nothing else comes close.

Our purpose, our meaning, our calling is a deep subject. If we're trying to find deep answers to deep questions, you have to be serious about thinking this through. Platitudes, sound bite philosophy, and bumper sticker theology just won't.

There are a variety of competing answers out there. From the Eastern view, including Buddhism and Hinduism, this life and world is only an illusion. We should forget the question and forget ourselves. This isn't much help since we are hard wired to ask the question.

From the secular view, which is what I held to, there is no God or gods so the question is answered only by figuring it out ourselves. We shouldn't consult anything outside us; we don't discover, it we decide it.

Then there is the answer from the One who created all things for a purpose. This Creator is the One who gives meaning and purpose to our being. It is He who created us and calls us to be who He alone knows we need to be.

If we're interested then we'll listen to Jesus and His two words that changed the world: "Follow Me."

Dostoyevsky put it:

"The secret of a human being is not just to be able to live but to live for something definite."

Soren Kierkegaard put it:

"I want to find the idea by which I can live and die."

We want to find something, we want to choose something in our career or life that is really us and that really fits us and brings us satisfaction. This is why we spend so much time trying to find a job we'll enjoy.

But this is frustrated by the sad truth that we are the 20th of the world's great civilizations we know of through world history, yet this is the first of all those civilizations that has no consensus for what the purpose of life is.

We live in a time when we want something definite because we are so tired of our apathy, yet our culture has information overload and the competing messages only cause us to back out and stay away from thinking too deep. Our culture is driving this desire for purpose but also frustrating it because we've become apathetic to all the noise.

Individual Calling

When we look over history, calling is the ultimate answer to the question of individual purpose. The strongest source of purpose is to discover not just that we've been created to be something, but that we've been created and called. As we rise to answer that call we come to be what we would have never been without that call of our Creator.

This is only the personal way to look at it. There is also a more public way or cultural way to view calling.

Cultural Calling

Thomas Linecker isn't very well known here, but he was Henry VIII's personal doctor and physician who founded the Royal College of Physicians in London. He was a great scholar and friend of Erasmus and Thomas Moore. In the days before the reformation, the average Christian didn't have the Scriptures in their ordinary language. Towards the end of his life, Linecker was given the four gospels in Greek which he read fluently. He read them quickly and with great fascination and after he was finished he handed them back to the person who gave them to him and said, "Either these are not the gospels, or we are not Christians."

He could feel the contradictions of the Roman Church and the gospels that ultimately led to the reformation. Most people couldn't sense what he sensed.

Do we feel this same contradiction and tension in our own time? In our country, 86% of the population considers themselves to be Christian. The base numbers are overwhelming yet even with this massive acknowledgement of having a Christian background, Christians and the Church are for the most part impotent and ineffective.

Groups that are far smaller in numbers have a far greater influence and voice in our culture. Why is this? Is there something wrong with the Gospel or is there something wrong with us?

Working in ministry for any period of time can leave you grieved over how impotent and ineffectual lives are lived by those who profess to love and follow Christ. It is probably my greatest sorrow in pastoring. I can't tell you how heart breaking it is to see the splendor of what Christ had in mind for His bride only to be saddened by our lack of understanding of who we are and what we're called to.

In the book of Acts, we've been asking over and over again the question, "When the church was powerfully realizing her identity what did she possess that created such energy and effectiveness?"

The answer we keep coming back to is the Gospel and calling, the cross and God's call on our lives, a connection to Him in union and a sense of purpose. These are all ways of saying the same thing.

Calling is perhaps the most confused and forgotten doctrine that needs to be revived in our church so that the Gospel doesn't become a nice power tool that collects dust on the shelf in our garage.

This is not only of deep individual importance since in it we find our purpose and meaning in life personally, it is also of public, cultural, and history-shaping importance.

It doesn't simply stay with individuals, it moves out until cultures are shaped and every individual is affected by it.

We see this in the great leaps of history in the constitution and beginning of the Jewish movement at Sinai and at the beginning of the Christian movement with just two words, "Follow Me."

He didn't just perform miracles to be God all over the place, He called people to Himself. He said, "Follow Me," and people got out of their boats, up from their tax collecting booth and followed Him who called them. Something about His call was mysterious but compelling and they couldn't refuse it.

In the shaping of America, the first Puritans that stepped foot on the shores were gripped by something that was greater than them; it was a sense of calling.

Again and again it is not only a deep individual truth, it is public and shapes everything and shapes history. Don't we need this today?

Let's quickly define calling. I mentioned last week an Os Guinness quote. He also says this:

"By calling I mean that God calls us so decisively in Christ that everything we are, everything we have, and everything we do is invested with a direction and a dynamism because it is done in response to His summons and His call."

Let's take a look at this from a few different angles so we can begin to understand this idea of calling.

This isn't some neat little doctrinal principle that's detached from the rest of our lives. It isn't some nice little pious thing. It isn't a dismantled, dead principle. It's something living and breathing, it captures and masters us and shapes and inspires every second of our lives, and every inch of the world in which we move.

As Abraham Kuyper put it:

"There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'"

Let's look at a few themes that further explain and define calling. There are a few principles to keep in mind.

I. EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE, EVERYTHING

This is a theme that you see through the centuries.

William Wilberforce was perhaps the greatest example of calling in the last 1,000 years of the church. He worked tirelessly to abolish the slave trade in England when England was as super power in the same way that America is today.

When he was 28 he wrote in his journal a personal mission statement which governed the rest of his days. He wrote this:

"God has put before me two great objects: The abolition of the slave trade, and the reformation of manners [morals]."

By reformation of manners he meant that the moral compass of England had been broken. People no longer cared for one another, they no longer concerned themselves with the poor or broken.

It was almost 50 years later that the first great object was fully achieved. At one stage he was a member of 69 different boards. Some were Christian organizations and some were not. He was part of the world's first Bible society, he also sat on the board for the world's first society for the protection of animals from cruelty, and the world's first society for the abolition of slave trade. He was enormously consumed, incredibly persistent.

He spent himself for this calling that mastered him all his days.

Wilberforce was a near miss. He wrote to himself his mission statement at 28. When he came to Christ at 26 and experienced what he called "the great change," he immediately thought that he had to become a minister. He was a member of parliament and the best friend of the youngest Prime Minister in British history. Wilberforce was next in line to parliament. Yet, he assumed that if you were dedicated to Christ you went to the mission field or you became a minister. He was prepared to leave politics for the Church.

John Newton, the writer of the famous hymn Amazing Grace told him not to. He told him that there isn't any one field that is higher than another, but he should stay where he was until he knows what his gifts and calling are, and then do it whatever it is. He stayed in his role and prayed and then put down this goal for his life in his diary.

(Play Amazing Grace video clip- :37)

He discovered that it wasn't that any ministry is higher or lower than the other, but that each person should discover their gifts and calling and pursue it with all they had, right where they were.

Most Christians in most of Christian history have fallen for a distortion in one of two different directions.

Distortions of Calling

The Catholic Distortion

The first distortion is a kind of dualism that tells us that there is a higher calling and a lower calling. It makes the spiritual higher than the secular. We can trace it back to Eusibeus where he penned that there is the "perfect and permitted." The perfect is that which is for full time spiritual service and the permitted was plowing a field or becoming a soldier or tending sheep. There was the higher and lower, the sacred and the secular, the perfect and permitted, the spiritual and the allowable.

This is sadly the majority position within the Church today which is why phrases like "full-time ministry" are used to distinguish someone who we think is doing something profound and spiritual. This causes us to assume that unless we are doing "full-time ministry" that our work really isn't all that important, significant, or sacred. In other words, we wrongly assume that our work is secular and insignificant.

Martin Luther shattered that thinking when he wrote:

"The farmer in the field, or the farmer's wife in the farmhouse, is just as high and holy as the pastor in the pulpit preaching the word of God if they're doing it to the glory of God."

It is to each person's gift and calling which God has given them. It's everyone, everywhere, in everything! That truth for Luther was explosive. It was the priesthood of the believers which taught us that we're all priests of God because we know the true High Priest, Jesus Christ. This is why we're called a royal priesthood, and chosen generation, a holy nation.

No higher, no lower, no secular, no sacred-everything we do is important as we follow Him for His glory in each station in life we occupy with the gifts He's give us.

II. BY HIM, TO HIM, FOR HIM

God wants us consumed with His fire so that we burn for Him in this world. George Whitfield was asked how he was able to draw so many people (upwards of 30,000 at times) to come out to hear him preach in the open fields. He replied, "You don't worry about who shows up, be consumed with the fire of God and they'll come out just to watch you burn."

Moses, the great liberator and law giver, was an incredible leader of God's people. Yet, when he died he was not credited with any of that. We're told in Scripture that none has risen "like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face."

He spent 40 days and nights in the mountain, daily in the tent of presence, and when he asked to see the glory of the Lord, God graciously showed him just the vapors of His glory.

Blaise Pascal died at the age of 39. When he died his sister felt a small bump in his shirt and when she looked, there was a parchment rolled up and sewn into his shirt. It was a note to himself to remind him of a night in November in 1654 when for two hours, from 10:30 to 12:30 he had the experience that he begins to describe by the word "fire."

This is the man we know who is one of the geniuses of mathematics, one of the great French prose writers of all time, the grandfather of the modern computer and modern risk theory. What was at the heart of all he did?

It was what he called "the memorial" which was so precious to him-this experience of the fire of God so consumed him-that he sewed it up in his shirts every time he got a new one so he could keep it close to his heart for the last eight years of his life.

The Protestant Distortion

If there is a distortion in the opposite direction it is in our protestant view of work where we make what was once considered the lower work now become the higher work and our jobs and occupations become everything to us.

The genius of Calvin and Luther was that they taught that calling included our work too. Of course your work is included, but within a century of their teaching, jobs and employment became synonymous with the ultimate calling.

Work has been made sacred, calling had been made secular. It is yet again a twisted and distorted view of calling. Any sense of the presence of the Lord or the purpose of the Lord has been lost which is even worse than the first distortion. In the first distortion it at least makes the spiritual concerns higher but keeps the secular out of necessity. This one keeps the secular higher and loses the spiritual all together.

People react to that and go back to the first distortion. But we are to see God's presence in all we do.

We see this in Luke 5 when Jesus calls Peter to cast his nets into the water again. You can almost see Peter's face wrinkle as he hears Jesus. Peter doesn't mind Jesus teaching him about spiritual things all day long, he'll even listen. But Peter's the fisherman, not Jesus. He tells Jesus that he'd been fishing all night and hasn't caught a thing, now at the worst time of day to catch fish Jesus tells him to let down his nets. Peter obeys and when he went to pull up the nets they were full and began to break from the weight.

When Peter saw this we're told he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (Luke 5:8).

Peter had to learn that Jesus' Lordship extended to every sphere of human existence. Peter takes that Lordship into every part of his life.

III. THE AUDIENCE OF ONE

Live before one audience, the audience of One.

We have an audience. Even those of us who, through being conditioned that we shouldn't care what people think about us and we're to do what we want, still have some audience for whom we're attempting to live.

The question isn't if we have an audience, it's which audience are we living for. In our culture we're more conscience of an audience then ever before. This is why we see reality shows popping up like weeds. They have a reality show for great pick-up lines in a bar! Tell me that isn't proof of our depravity. We're so desperate to be noticed and to have an audience that we'll make total fools of ourselves to get an audience. We don't care, it isn't how we're seen that matters it is THAT we're seen that is everything today. Sadly, we're so lonely for real life interaction that we sit and watch these people like crack addicts.

Isn't it true when our children are growing up that we kind of laugh because they want to be so different and independent but all the while our kids are listening to the music their friends listen to and dress the way their friends dress. We're all like teenagers today. We think we're independent and individual but we're actually consumed with whether or not we're living up to our perceived standard of acceptance.

Even our leadership is poll driven. Instead of leading by strong conviction and principle our leadership today is dependent upon followers, so we poll our followers to ask what they think they should have.

There are many pastors who are haunted by the opinions of others. They are so driven by what the congregation's wants that they can't lead the way God has called them. They're fearful that everyone will leave them and since they're codependent and need an audience, they cave in and simply start teaching what people what instead of what they need. One pastor said that he realizes he's just two bad weeks away from his people leaving him for a more successful preacher if he doesn't keep up to standards.

The Puritans didn't care what other people thought, they were consumed by calling. They believed that God had called them and gifted them and that was what was most important. Were they rich or poor? Irrelevant. Where they famous? Irrelevant. Were they approved by others? Irrelevant. What mattered to them was that they lived by faith to the glory of God as He had called them.

Their bearings were set upon the direction of God's glory. It was as if they swallowed a GPS set to His glory whereas in our day it's as if we've swallowed Gallup polls. We have a restless roving antenna that is trying to pick up on radar what people are thinking or doing or wanting instead of being driven by our calling. Fashion, approval, affirmation, codependent love, applause, and audience are what drive us in our culture, especially in San Diego.

We're so sensitive to public opinion that when we're alone, there's no one there.

This audience of One trumps all other audiences.

This is how Paul could say that he isn't ashamed. He's not ashamed of what others think, he's not ashamed of the work he's done. He's not ashamed of what he's accomplished, he's not ashamed of his tears and what seems to be failure as he is about to be executed as a common criminal.

He simply says this:

Verse 12: "But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed."

He knows who he's believed and this makes all the difference in the world. To know who he's believed is to know that even if Christ is the only one who's approved him, it is far more sufficient than the collective applause of the entire world.

Paul lived for an audience of One. Do you you?

For further reading on the subject of calling I suggest reading the book The Call by Os Guinness. Much of what I'm speaking on is directly influenced by this work. Also, The Other Six Days by R. Paul Stevens, Creation Regained by Al Wolters, Heaven Is Not My Home by Paul Marshall, Heaven is a Place on Earth by Michael Wittmer. Each of these books has at least a chapter dedicated to a theology of work and is strongly suggested reading.