The greatest gift in life is life itself, we are not accidents, God wanted us to be.

The question is, How are we searching for purpose in our life, our own ultimate why for everything we do?

What do I mean by “calling”? 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 and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.

How are we searching for our purpose that is big enough to absorb every ounce of our attention, and lasting enough to inspire us until our last breath on earth?

Nothing, is more powerful, and more important than to listen to the call of God our Creator, and to realign ourself to the very purpose of life and the universe by following his call wherever it leads us in this life.

Responding to his call is the secret to making the most of life, the key to the deepest relationships, the surest road to self-knowledge and unfolding purpose, the most challenging,  and natural way to live life, and the way to make the most of the great adventure that forms our days as humans in this world.

God’s call is at the very heart of God’s good news. If we are to discover all that God’s call should mean to us, we may need to rescue it from the weight of clichés, confusion, ignorance, and uncertainties that still commonly surround calling today.

There is a great misunderstanding in how we understand God’s call because we have drastically reduced  the immensity of its significance to our individual lives alone.

When that happens, the call then becomes all about us, I, myself, and me, “because we’re worth it.” Calling certainly speaks to each of us individually, personally, and intimately, yet at the same time it is God’s call, and it is his call to a new humanity, to a new way of life, and to a role in working toward the new heaven and the new earth.

God’s call has a proven track record of shaping history and making a difference in the world that is culture-wide for societies just as it is life-long for individuals. We need to see how we each fit into the grand picture that is so much bigger than just us.

Nanjing was the proud capital of the richest and most powerful country in the world.

No one would have ever believed that China would suddenly be eclipsed and then passed and dominated by a region of the world the Chinese considered a cultural backwater, Western Europe, the rocky little outcrop at the other end of the great Asian landmass?

But that is exactly what happened. And centuries later, when the Chinese pride was restored, and China regained its superpower standing on the world stage, the Chinese asked how it was

that Europe, and later the West at large, had leapfrogged them to become the vanguard of the modern world.

In his book Civilization, historian Niall Ferguson described their inquiry in the words of a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences:

We were asked to look into what accounted for the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful.

For anyone listening in on that Chinese investigation, its conclusion was brilliant but not quite right, because it begged an important question. The Christian faith had been predominant in Europe ever since the fourth century when the Emperor Theodosius had declared Rome officially Christian. Why then did Western Europe not rise to dominance before, and why did it rise so rapidly and to such prominence in the sixteenth century?

The answer is not so much “Christianity” in general as it is the Reformation in particular. In their massive rejection of medieval corruptions and distortions, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other Reformers restored to the church not only the gospel, the authority of the Scriptures, and the importance of lay people. They restored many biblical truths that had been distorted and forgotten for a long time.

Among the powerful truths that helped to shape the rise of the modern world were the

The Reformation’s celebrated six C’s

calling (with its impact on purpose, work, and the rise of capitalism),

covenant (which led to constitutionalism and constitutional freedom),

conscience (and the rise of religious freedom and human rights),

a commitment to God’s people, the Jews (and the reversal of the horrendous anti-Semitism that stained the record of the medieval church),

coherence (so that people tried to think about anything and everything under the lordship of Jesus),

and corrigibility (the notion of semper reformanda and the principle that we are all, always, in ongoing need of renewal and reformation).

To be sure, these “gifts” of the Reformation must never be stated in a triumphalist manner, and they are not the monopoly of any branch of the church today. They need to be described and assessed with careful nuance, warts and all, and they need to be traced back to their roots in both the Old and the New Testaments.

But there is no question that these central truths of the Reformation contributed to the rise of the modern world, though with unforeseen consequences and unknown aftermaths that would surprise the Reformers themselves. And among them all, no truth has had a greater impact than the rediscovery of the biblical truth of God’s call and our calling, or vocation.

We are not simply talking about calling as purely personal, spiritual, and devotion, your individual purpose and mine. Calling is all those things, but it is far more than just a truth for you and me. God is calling us to play our part in the righting of wrongs in the world, in the renewal and restoration of the earth, and in carrying his message to the ends of the earth.

Calling therefore carries a truth that is awesome in its significance and earthshaking in its implications. Its imperative covers the whole earth, the entire course of history, and every moment of our lives. So we must not shrink it to be anything less.

This reminder of the global impact of calling through the Reformation is only one example of what is an older, deeper, and even more awesome story that goes all the way back to creation and the universal human beginnings, and then on to God’s call to Abraham and his vision of a new way.

To explore the truth of God’s call is to appreciate what is nothing less than God’s grand global project for the restoration and renewal of humanity and the earth—and our part in it. But the reminder is enough to establish the truth that God’s call makes the world an entirely different place and life a completely different project for all who listen to that call, and for all who are committed to follow the Caller until that great day when listening gives way to seeing and faith to knowing in its fullest reality.

The air of the modern world is abuzz with glittering talk of purpose that is shallow, and often empty. Everyone today is “intentional,” “on-purpose,” and “missional,” and every day, not just New Year’s Day, is now appropriate for new resolutions and new–new resolutions.

Never have so many books, seminars, and consultants offered us such simple steps and such low-hanging ways to make us all purposeful and dynamic in five or ten minutes. Armed with “mission statements,” “inspirational slogans,” and “measurable outcomes,” we can “maximize” our waking moments in fifteen-minute segments, survey our life “achievements,” and assess our “legacies.” The fatal conceit that we can figure it all out is all too plain.

Some people, it seems, gush so enthusiastically about the purpose they recommend for you that you would think it was a new discovery, and we were the first humans in history to realize the importance of thinking and planning ahead

A similar point surfaces in Luke 9:21. After Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, Luke comments, “Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone.” Why not? If he is the Messiah, why not announce it? There are different reasons for Jesus’s reticence in different parts of the Gospels, but here the plain reason is what they mean by messiah. What the crowds understand by this word is so bound up with triumphalism, sovereignty, and reign without the

cross that in some ways Peter’s confession clutters up the expectations. Jesus is more likely to acknowledge who he is without cavil when he is talking to people in the pagan, heathen side of Galilee than when he is talking amongst the Jews. The pagans don’t have the same Jewish expectations. So here, in a Jewish context, Jesus commands these disciples of his not to say a word.

Then he tries to reform their understanding of what messiah means. He says, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life” (v. 22).

This seems pretty straightforward to us, but there is no way that Jesus’s disciples understand these words at this time. Or, if they understand the words, they certainly don’t believe them. The strongest proof of this assertion is that when Jesus is finally crucified, his disciples are shattered. When he is in the tomb, they are not secretly celebrating, breaking out joyful instruments, offering adoring worship to God, and saying: “Yes! Yes! We can hardly wait till Sunday!” They still do not have any category for a crucified and risen messiah. They haven’t absorbed it.

Jesus doesn’t let it rest there. He then says to them all, in effect, “By the way, not only am I going to the cross, but if you want to be my disciple, you must go too!” That is his meaning when he says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:23). Talk about not being very seeker-sensitive! “You want to be a Christian? Great! You’ll need to be crucified.” Oh, I know we have ways of domesticating the language a wee bit today. After all, for most of us, it does not mean actually getting nailed to or hung on a cross. It means death to self-interest and rising to newness of life. Even so, Jesus uses this extreme language because he is talking about an extreme death. Death to self is always painful—yet that’s what it takes to become his disciple. While they are still thinking of triumphalism and earthly power, while they are doubtless entertaining secret thoughts about which one can be on his right hand and which one on his left in the kingdom, Jesus himself is focusing on his impending death by crucifixion. Jesus is God’s Messiah, but this Messiah will suffer, die, and rise again.

“In Ages of Faith,” Tocqueville said,  “the final aim of life is placed beyond life.” That is what calling does. “Follow me,” Jesus said two thousand years ago, and he changed the course of history. That is why calling provides the Archimedean point by which faith moves the world. That is why calling is the most comprehensive reorientation and the most profound motivation in human experience—the ultimate Why for living in all history. 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, God’s purpose for your life.

A self-confessed atheist, Matthew Parris. Parris was born in Nyasaland, now Malawi. He returned after 45 years, and came to a conclusion which, by his own admission, confounded his own atheism:

It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.… I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.…

We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world—a directness in their dealings with others—that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression.… Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers—in some ways less so—but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries.… But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians.… It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

Everyone who says that Christ is their Lord, is responsible to find their calling and how it fits into God’s call on our lives corporately as a body of believers and how that plays into the salvation of our lost neighbors.