Calling -- Whose Call Will You Answer?
Since school is starting (or already has started), I wanted to begin a new series on calling and what it means to be called. Before we can really get into the meat and potatoes of calling, I felt it important to first describe the different callings at work in all of our lives.
In 1903, a man named Jack London published a book titled The Call of the Wild. This book went on to become a great success, and is rightly considered one of the greatest books ever written by an American author.
In the book, a dog named Buck is stolen from a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley in California. He is taken to Yukon, Canada to pull a sled during the gold rush. While in the Yukon he begins to revert to a wild state -- by the end of the book, he’s no longer the calm, domesticated dog he was in California but becomes the leader of a wolf pack in the Yukon, fully wild.
Buck was originally a domesticated pet -- fully content with his place in life. He belonged to his master, and he was OK with that. Buck’s master in California made the rules.
When he was stolen, he was beaten and mistreated -- sometimes starved, sometimes overfed to the point where he couldn’t run or pull a sled anymore. His life became chaotic. The only rules that applied to his life now were hurt or be hurt and never disobey the humans. His main focus shifted from obeying his master to looking out for himself.
About two-thirds of the way through the book, Buck is rescued by a man named Thornton. Thornton loved Buck, and treated him well. Buck no longer had to worry about protecting himself -- he had a good, loving master again! For the first time, Buck knew what love was -- because he could compare how Thornton treated him with how his previous masters treated him. The book says, “Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.” But the call of the wild was too strong. Buck made friends with a wild wolf, and began spending more and more time with the wolfpack. One day Buck returned to the camp where he lived with Thornton to discover his master was killed by Indians. Buck snapped, killed the Indians, and ran off to join the wolfpack, completely removing any last traces of civilization in his life.
Buck’s life is more than just a story about a dog -- it’s a parallel to our own lives. Like Buck, we are thrown into a world of violence and heartache, and it often feels like our master is far away, never to be seen or heard from again. But then something changes -- we start going to church, or we make friends with a strong Christian person -- and for the first time, we really understand love. We get saved, we rest in the love and peace of our Savior -- but the call of the world is strong. What makes us different than Buck is that when our Master was killed, He came back! That means the choice becomes ours -- do we answer the call of our Savior, or the call of the world?
In order to answer that question, we need to first understand what these calls really are. What is the call of the world? How is it different than the call of our Savior? Let’s look a little deeper...
The call of the world says to SURVIVE. Protect yourself first, and live at all costs. Kill or be killed. Everything we do requires a fight of some sort -- fighting for food, or money, or respect, or fame. Fighting to continue living the quality of life that we feel we are owed. The call of the world promises self-glorification, but at the cost of a life-long, never-ending struggle.
The call of our Savior, on the other hand, says the exact opposite. Survival is important, don’t get me wrong. Paul says in Philippians 1:21-24, “For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better. 22But if I live, I can do more fruitful work for Christ. So I really don’t know which is better. 23I’m torn between two desires: I long to go and be with Christ, which would be far better for me. 24But for your sakes, it is better that I continue to live.” Here, Paul is telling the members of the church at Philippi that even though he would much rather be in Heaven (and who wouldn’t?), he is more concerned with their lives than his own. Already, this is different than the call of the world -- instead of “looking out for Number One”, he’s concerned with the welfare of everyone around him. He’s truly loving his neighbor.
One way to think of this is that Paul was dying to himself. His own concerns became much less important than those of the people he cared about. In fact, the Bible says repeatedly that we must all die to ourselves, in order to live for Jesus. In Matthew 16:24-25 Jesus says, “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. 25If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.’” Galatians 2:20 puts it like this: “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” So what does this all mean? It means that the call of our Savior is turning the call of the world upside down. We no longer need to concentrate on our own needs and desires, but can spend that energy working for the betterment of God’s Kingdom.
The call of the world says to enact REVENGE. If someone does something to hurt you, you need to hurt them back before they hurt you again. If you do it right, you’ll hurt them to the point where they will never want to or even be able to hurt you again.
You can see this all over the place -- revenge movies account for more than three billion dollars in revenue since 1980. Films like Gladiator, 007: Quantum of Solace, Django Unchained, and Kill Bill 1 & 2 ensure that the idea of revenge is firmly ingrained in our minds as something acceptable and expected. Even stories that are not “about revenge” have this as a major plot point. The movie Ender’s Game has a scene where Ender gets in a fight -- in the book, he actually kills his opponent, but in the movie he just severely injures him. When confronted about this, Ender responds simply, “Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too, so they'd leave me alone.”
In the eyes of the world, this makes sense. Ender was just protecting himself, right? He was just ensuring his own safety. What’s so bad about that?
Like survival, the call of our Savior goes completely opposite the call of the world. Instead of promising revenge, the Bible says never to take revenge. Never. Romans 12:19-21, “Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, ‘I will take revenge; I will pay them back,’ says the LORD. 20Instead, ‘If your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their heads.’ 21Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.”
That is what Buck the dog failed to do. He allowed revenge on the Indians to take over his life, giving in completely to the call of the world. It was an easy decision for Buck to make, though, because he spent so much time listening to the call of the world tell him to survive at all costs. He got in dogfights and killed other dogs. When he finally was rescued, he couldn’t stop going back to the world. He remembered what it was like, and longed to go back.
We’re the same way. When we get saved, we remember the sins we did. We remember how we felt before, how much fun we had when we didn’t have any rules. We long to go back, even though we know that it’s a terrible idea and will likely lead to our own death.
This is not a new problem, though -- even Paul dealt with this issue. Paul, the same man who wrote much of the New Testament, who is considered one of the fathers of the faith and one of the first missionaries to Gentiles -- struggled with the desire to go back, to answer the call of the world. He says so in the book of Romans, chapter 7, verses 18-19, 18 And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. 19 I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.
Paul was saying that even though he knew that sin was wrong, he couldn’t help doing it anyway! The book of Proverbs, chapter 26 verse 11 puts it a different way: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his foolishness.” In the Bible, the word “fool” can also be translated as “wicked person”. It makes perfect sense -- Paul says that “nothing good” lives in him. In Romans 3:23, Paul emphasizes that “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” All, which means all of us. We’ve all sinned, so we’re all wicked people. If we’re all wicked people, then we’re all fools, and we all return to our sin again and again and again.
This sounds like Buck wanting to go back into the forest with the wolves, even though he finally found a loving master. He finally had a good life, but simply could not stop himself from going back to his old life.
So what are we supposed to do, then? If even Paul struggled with sinning when he didn’t want to; if we all are doomed to repeat our sin, what hope is there for us?
Psalms 39:7 says, “And so, Lord, where do I put my hope? My only hope is in you.”
Our hope is in Jesus! That’s the difference between all of us and Buck the dog -- when Buck’s loving master died, he was gone for good. Buck couldn’t handle the loss, so he snapped and became a fully wild dog. Buck didn’t have hope.
Because our hope is in Jesus, though, we don’t have to worry about being “wild” -- our Master also died 2000 years ago on the cross; but He came back three days later, and still lives today! That is where our hope lies -- our Master defeated death.
We all have to hear the call of the world and the call of our Savior. It’s up to us, though, how much we listen, and how much attention we pay to each call.
The call of our Savior changes the focus from us, to everyone around us. Instead of concentrating on survival, we can relax knowing that our souls -- the very essence of what makes us, us -- can never die. The call of the world requires selfishness, but the call of our Savior requires selflessness. The call of the world promises a life of struggle and eventually, death; the call of our Savior promises a life of service and eternal life!
Next week I’m going to discuss in more practical terms what it means to answer the call of our Savior, and how that can be simultaneously the hardest and most rewarding decision of your life. Until then, I pray that you all have a blessed week as you start the next year of school.
