We had one of our mission partners visit this last Sunday. It’s always great to hear from a missionary about their work, the gospel, and their call to missions. But maybe you’re like me and after hearing from someone like our partner, you find yourself asking, “Am I called to that?” Or maybe you look at pastors and people in vocational ministry and you ask yourself, “Am I called to that?” Or maybe you’re in between jobs or you’re in high school and trying to figure out what the next chapter of life is going to be. Maybe you feel like you’re at a crossroads. You don’t know what is coming but you know that God is preparing you for something. How do you know what God is calling you to? And it’s not just knowing what he’s called you to that it’s important. Whatever he’s calling you to will likely have challenges inherent to that call. It’s not going to be easy. So we also need to know why we should listen to God when he calls us if we’re to be motivated to take on the challenges that face us.
So how do you know if God is calling you to do something?
Here are some helpful tips:
It’s something that God commands all Christians to do. If God commands it in his word, you don’t need to even ask yourself if God is calling you to do it— he is!
When you read your Bible, you get a sense of what God is calling you to do. It might be every time you’re opening up God’s word that you feel like you’re being confronted with something. Something seems to be calling you when you open your Bible.
Other believers keep bringing it up, unprompted. When others in your life keep saying, “You’d be really good at x,” it might be time to listen to them! God might be sending you a message through the Body of Christ.
There’s a problem in the world that you care about. That thing that you keep complaining about? That thing that really gets you mad? It might be your problem. It might be the problem in the world that God is calling you to address. It might be the thing that God is calling you to step into and bring his will into so that his will starts being done there as it is in heaven.
You want to do something. We shouldn’t ignore what our passions and desires are when discerning what God wants us to do. God very often designs us with certain gifts, certain strengths, dreams and desires so that we will step into his call for our lives. That being said, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that we often don’t want to do what God is calling us to do! The thing that God is asking us to do might be scary, uncomfortable, and even painful. But if God is calling you to it, you won’t be truly satisfied doing anything else.
The call is persistent. Sometimes, we might feel called to do something for a season, but it’s not forever. Other times, the call is persistent. God speaks to you through his word, through others, and through your passions. You can’t shake it. It’s like God speaking to Moses when he shoots down each of Moses’ excuses (see Exodus 4:1–17). He’s persistent— he won’t let Moses go.
But answering the call isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to be difficult on us emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. So why should you listen to God’s call?
Here are some important reasons:
If you don’t, it’s disobedience. Make no mistake, if God has called you to do something and you know he has, to run from the call is sin.
God wants your heart and actions aligned with his. In Exodus 3–4, we see that God is so concerned for and compassionate towards the people of Israel and their suffering that he himself says he “has come down to deliver them” (3:8). His love moves him to presence and action. Now, God wants Moses to care about his family so much that he goes down and acts for their deliverance (v. 10). God wants your heart to be aligned with his. That’s why he’s calling you. He wants you to care like he cares, move into suffering to be present with the hurting like he does, and act on their behalf like he does.
God wants you to discover who he is. In Exodus 4:1–17, Moses makes excuse after excuse as to why he shouldn’t be the one to go to Egypt to confront Pharaoh and deliver the Israelites. And at each excuse, God has a solution to the proposed problem. The people of Israel won’t listen? I’ll do miracles through your hand, then they’ll believe. You don’t speak well? I create mouths! I can teach you what to say. You don’t want to go? I’ll send Aaron to go with you. At each point of Moses’ insufficiency, God wants to show Moses that the great I AM is sufficient for him. If Moses doesn’t go on this journey with God, he won’t find out who God is. If we don’t go on the journey that God calls us to, we’ll never know by experience that God is sufficient for our every need, that he is faithful, that he is love, that he is glorious, that he is who he says he is.
God wants you to become something. When Moses makes the excuse about the people of Israel and says that they won’t believe him, God transforms Moses’ staff into a snake. Then he tells Moses to pick it up by the tail (I don’t know much about snake-wrangling but that doesn’t seem to be the safest way of doing that) and he does (4:1–5). In that moment, it wasn’t just the staff that was transformed, it was Moses. Moses became something he wasn’t a moment ago: a snake-handler. Pharaoh wore a cobra headdress as a part of his crown. God is transforming Moses into someone that can handle snakes, big and small. He’s transforming Moses into someone who looks like the seed of the Woman who would someday crush the head of the serpent underfoot (Genesis 3:15). But he will not become what he ought to be if he doesn’t pick that snake up by the tail. If we do not join God in the journey he has called us to, we will never become what we ought to be.
God loves you. When it comes down to it, Israel didn’t need Moses. Pharaoh could have argued with someone else. God could have chosen someone more qualified or more gifted. But he didn’t. And he didn’t let Moses make excuses. He even got angry with Moses when he kept trying to get out of the call. Why? Because God loved Moses! He wanted to invite Moses into the journey of a millennium because he loved him. He didn’t want to do this exodus without Moses, while he sat cut off from the people of God in the land of Midian.
You aren’t called by God because he wants a good return on investment. You aren’t called by God because the world needs more of you. You aren’t called by God because you’re a tool in God’s hand for some greater purpose. Each and every one of us is called by God into a relationship with him where we do stuff with our God because He. Loves. Us. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less.
That means that if you are called to be a stay-at-home parent, a pastor, missionary, construction worker, social worker, CEO, baseball player, sandwich maker, high school student, college student, or retired— right now— it’s because he loves you and wants to do something special with you right now. No need to be anything more than you are yet, that will come as you walk with him. No need to compare yourself to anyone else or your call to theirs. You do what you do and I do what I do because God loves us. He won’t let you go. Answer the call.
