| Service of Commissioning of Tracey Hunt 7th March 2010
Jeremiah 1:1-10
Andrew Lim
We are specially privileged this morning to be able to participate
with Tracey as part of the sending church
as she make their way to Thailand
to share with the Thai people the reality and love of God
She has been called by God / and she is answering that call
The idea of God calling people out / to do His work
is the subject I want to address this morning
Just what do people mean / when / like Tracey
they say they have heard the “call” of God?
There are a couple of ways we may understand this idea of God’s calling
Before I proceed there is a myth I want to explode
There is a fallacious way of thinking about our lives’ vocation/calling
For many centuries now
there is a myth that has persisted and refuses to die
Its the view that if / like Tracey or me / you serve God
in what is called a “full time” capacity / you / have a higher calling
than the engineer / nurse / storekeeper or truck-driver
Its a heretical idea that came from the 1st century theologian Eusebius
It’s a kind of dualism that promoted the idea
that the spiritual is higher than the secular
full-time ministry more honorable secular work
Martin Luther rightly opposed this idea
Luther made the point that everyone everywhere
doing whatever work that glorifies God / has a true calling
there is no higher or lower / no sacred or secular
no full-time or part-time
Luther would rightly insist / that the farmer working in his field
if he's doing his work faithfully to God’s glory
has a calling from the Lord
that is just as high and holy as a pastor in the pulpit
The farmer behind the plough has just as high a calling
as the pastor behind the pulpit
I want to make one crucial point here
We need to remember that your job / your paid job
is not necessarily the heart of your calling
Let me put it this way
Normally when we meet someone for the first time in a social setting
Soon after you been introduced your name / it doesn’t take very long
before the other person ask the inevitable question:
“And what do you do?”
And the answer is often something we’ve expected
“I’m a truck driver / accountant / nurse / teacher
Did you notice something there?
Whether you’re conscious of it / or not
your job has come to define you/ and give you your identity
And we “become” what we do - I “AM” a truck driver
But this should not be the case
We must be people who are identified / by our calling
not by the job we happen to do / to earn a living
You are not what you do / Rather / do what we are
John Coltrane / was one of the world most accomplished saxophonist
In the early 1950s Coltrane nearly died of a drug overdose
He pulled out of it / quit drugs and drinking and came to faith in God
His faith in God led him to play
some of the best jazz / the world has ever heard
His most famous piece / is A Love Supreme
In that piece / Coltrane offered to God his very soul
It is an ardent / earnest thirty-two minute jazz prayer
of an outpouring of thanksgiving to God / for His blessing
One evening Coltrane performed
an utterly extraordinary rendition of A Love Supreme
- he played with every ounce of skill / and honesty
- the performance was sublime
- someone said “poignantly beautiful”
And soon as it was over / Coltrane stepped off the stage
put down his saxophone
and his drummer heard him whisper two words: Nunc dimittis
That is the Latin words
for the opening line of the ancient prayer of Simeon in Luke 2:29
“Lord now let Your servant depart in peace”
Its a humble request for divine permission to depart from this earth
People who know Coltrane / took his words seriously
Coltrane felt he could never play the piece more perfectly
He felt He was ready to go / he felt he had touched heaven
He felt that he had fulfilled his life’s calling
It was as if / everything that preceded that / was just a rehearsal
and if his life culminated / and ended at that point
he would have died a happy man
for he would have lived for a purpose
The great Christian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins
had a delightful little poem of about fourteen lines
about kingfishers and dragonflies
In it / he spoke on their behalf / when he wrote:
“As kingfishers catch fire
dragonflies draw flames
What I do is me: for that I came”
You are not what you do / Rather / do what we are
Your job need not define you as a person
Jacques Ellul / the famous French Christian lawyer and theologian
used to say that though he is a famous lawyer and professor
that / does not define him
He defined himself / as one who worked / in his free time
among the delinquent boys of Bordeaux
Paul made tents for a living
But making tents / was never the heart of Paul’s calling
George Foreman / is the flamboyant heavyweight champion of the world
Curiously / he is also a Baptist preacher
He once said this: “Preaching is my calling
Boxing / for me is only moonlighting
in the same way Paul made tents”
You are bigger than what you do
There is an unfortunate note I’ve to add right here
And that’s this / that in our fallen world
not everyone of us can find a job that fits our passion and gifting
People in the West are more fortunate on this score
In a modern / open and mobile community
you could more probably pick a job that fits your calling
But in most parts of the world / people / including children of God
will simply have to do whatever work they can find
just to be able to put food on the table
Realistically / for many people their work is drudgery
neither a gift / nor a calling
But still the point is this / you can redeem your job and turn it into a calling
Madeleine L’Engle / the American writer / who’s written
such wonderful books as A Wrinkle In Time / Walking On Water
tells the story of a woman who ran one of the elevators
at Columbia University / when it was an all male bastion
It was a menial job / but she made something out of it
Those students who rushed into the elevator
had to say “good morning” and “good evening”
If their clothes weren't straight / she straightened them
You know something
When she died / the church couldn't hold the people
This woman / took her dreary menial job into her hands
and turned it out into her calling
Yes! You may not have a job that is true to your gifting and calling
But that is not the end
If you do whatever you are doing
and doing it purposely for the audience of One
by giving it dignity
you can turn something dreary and menial
into a calling
All right / Now I’ve taken all that time / simply to make clear / that
* there is no such distinction
as sacred or secular / full-time or part-time
* you are not what you do necessarily
your paid job is not necessarily your calling
but you can redeem it doing it for the audience of One
* the core of your giftedness is often the core of your calling
Having said that / I want now to take some time
to talk about those people / whom God calls to serve Him directly
In the Old Testament / no one could assume the role of God’s spokesperson
without first receiving His call
See Num. 12:1-2, 16:1-31; 1 Kin. 13:33-34; Isa. 6:8, 48:16, 61:1; Jer. 1:4-10; Ezek. 2:3, 3:1
Isaiah felt the call of God / so did Jeremiah and Ezekiel
In fact in one instance / God expressed His anger by saying
“I did not send these prophets / but they ran
I did not speak to them / but they prophesied” / Jer. 23:21
Calling is not a matter of choosing
Often those who were called have been quite reluctant to go
Jeremiah tried to shake it off / Jonah ran the other direction
Amos protested saying “I am no prophet neither the son of a prophet
but the Lord took me from following the flock
and commissioned me to preach His word”
Neither did Jeremiah choose to be a prophet / But God told him:
“Before I formed you in the womb / I knew you
Before you were born I set you apart
I appointed you as a prophet” – Jer 1:5
The great British preacher / Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said:
“A preacher is not a Christian / who decides to preach
It is God who sends out preachers”
Preachers do not choose to be preachers
any more than caterpillars choose to be butterflies
You can no more send yourself into a foreign land to be a missionary
any more than you can send yourself to China
as an official ambassador fr NZ
- you’ve got to be commissioned
A preacher / a missionary is a person
called and commissioned by God
It was this / that led Andrew Blackwood / a professor of preaching
to lament the fact that it was so very hard
teaching young seminarians
who were called to the seminary
not by God / but by a doting aunt
The call of God / is not only necessary / for sending you into the ministry
Nothing is more essential for keeping you there
Being a missionary or a pastor can be one of the loneliest “job” around
and there are days when you want to quit
In some of my own periods of dryness in the ministry
when nothing I do / will yield any fruit
what has kept me going has been that deep assurance
that this is what I was born to do
Regardless of the blessings God grants to your service
there will be days so dark
if it hadn’t been for the bedrock of assurance of your call
you will walk away from the church and possibly not turn back
It is my call / It keeps me from derailing / and keeps me on track in life
It keeps me from getting distraught and going insane
when discouragement sets in
and if I may add / it keeps me from puffing up with pride
when I sometimes do some things well
When missionaries and preachers
do not have this unshakable sense of a divine call
there will not be this staying power / when things don’t stack up
We have an example in the prophet Jeremiah
Jeremiah encountered some things that will make the strongest man cry
He saw the Egyptians / and then the Babylonians plunder his land
and carrying helpless people away in exile
He was betrayed by politicians / He was made a laughing stock
He was put in the stocks / cast into a miry pit / abandoned
Is it any wonder why he was called “the weeping prophet”
he lamented much and wrote the Book of Lamentations
This man’s ministry covered a period of forty-two years
In all those forty-two years
He did not see any conversion / no one turned to God
no one showed any signs of repentance
he didn’t see any sign that his nation would turn around
he never received any encouragement
In fact / he never lived to see his people come back to God
He died in a foreign land / unknown and unsung
And yet / he went on doing that for forty-two years
Now you try doing that for six months!!
Did he think of quitting? / You bet he did
He argued with God / he blamed God
He cursed the man who brought news to his father / when he was born
that a son has been born
But the fact remains / He did not quit
Why? / Because he knew he was assuredly called by God
From our text / in Jeremiah 1
v.5a / “Before I formed you in the womb / I knew you”
v.5b / “before you were born / I consecrated you”
v.5c / “I appointed you a prophet to the nations”
v.9 / “Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth
and the Lord said to me:
‘Behold I have put my words in your mouth’
v.10 / “See / I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms
to pluck up and to break down to destroy and to overthrow
to build and to plant”
Jeremiah stood stout / through all the storms
because he knew / he was called by God
Calling is supremely crucial to the ministry
Alright you say / if a person has got to be called by God
to preach His Word / or go out into the mission field
how does one know if he was called of God
Exactly how does a call begin?
There are other tracks I can take to answer that question
but let me / just for this morning / highlight this one
And it is this
A call of God sometimes begins with an inkling / even a fascination
about a road we sense / we’re being asked to take
and over time / the impression grows deeper into your heart
Some people first become aware of their call
when they read a passage of the Bible
and felt the heavy hand of God on them
Many have heard the call of God / as they listen to a sermon
and felt a great sense of summons
and they quietly say in your heart
“Someday I should very much like to do what I see him doing”
When I was about seventeen and growing up and most impressionable
and quite dreamy / if I may add
I had the wonderful opportunity of sitting
each Sunday evening / year after year
at the feet / of two very fine ministers of God
One was an old Englishman
with a ruddy face and a raspy sandy voice
I can still hear it today
The other a younger man from Tasmania
And as I watched these two men preach
I would often be spellbound / as if mesmerised
and I would dream / of doing what they did
and felt in my own heart
that I should very much love to do what they are doing
I thought / if what they did / they did it for God
then I should very much want to be doing those things for God
I even thought / if those books / were what they wanted for their shelves
then those are the books / I should want to have / on my shelves
* You wouldn’t believe it /there were books I found on their shelves
that I actually saved / to buy
Here’s one of them / dated 29th April 1967 / that’s 43 years ago
I was then 20
Looking back now / little did I know / that what I was created to be
was stirred / by what I saw
in the sermons they preach / the books they read
and the lives they led
So a call of God may begin with something as simple as a fascination
an aspiration / a longing in your heart
to work for God / as you watched others work for God
Let me ask you straight this morning:
“Is there in your heart / a growing desire
to hand your life / over to God / to be more used by Him?”
If there is / even if it’s a flicker of the tinniest flame / an aspiration
then that / could well be / the small voice of God
beginning His call on your life
The Bible actually confirms / that a call can begin with an aspiration
I Tim. 3:1 “If a person aspires to be a pastor
it is a fine work / he desires to do”
Now / I want to take the rest of this time
in this special service / as an opportunity
to challenge you to search your heart to see
if God might not be calling you / to give away your life to Him
to serve Him in the ministry
The one single greatest question we can ask / and need to ask is this:
Why am I in this world?
What am I really to do / with this short life I’ve got
Until you discover / the meaning and purpose / for your existence
you’ll merely be pulling in air
One very successful man wrote these words:
“As you know / I have been very fortunate in my career
and I’ve made a lot of money / far more than I ever dreamed of
far more than I could ever spend / far more than my family needs
To be honest one of my motives for making so much money was simple
- to have the money to hire people to do what I don’t like doing
But there is one thing
I’ve never been able to hire any anyone to do for me
- find my own sense of purpose and fulfilment”
Then he added these words:
“I’d give anything / to discover that”
You might have thought he was half-joking
until you saw a tear roll down his tanned cheek
Whether he was aware of it or not
what he was looking for / was a calling
People may have wealth / power / position and knowledge
but until they discover the purpose for their existence
they will remain empty and starved
It was Walker Percy who says:
“You can get all A’s / and still flunk life”
Os Guinness says:
“We have too much to live with / and too little to live for”
Let me put it this way
Have you ever wake up to a feeling of longing for “something more”?
Many people have experienced a time
when they realised that that what they have strived to achieve
has turned out to be hugely unfulfilling / it is not big enough
When you’re young / what you desire
is a rich personal life and a reasonably rewarding career
And it will be all right for a while
you have money / standing / recognition
and you’ll be quite happy
And the question of whether what you’re doing
really fits with who you really are / what you are really called to do
doesn’t seem to bother you
And so for a couple of decades / everything would seem well
But / as Os Guinness puts it / as you approach your forties or fifties
you begin to hear / around the bend in the river
the sound of the rapids
that’s the rapids of ancient death
and you realize you haven’t got all the time in the world
you sense your mortality
And all of a sudden it becomes important
that you do /only that which you are really meant to do
In such a time people come to see that their chosen career
isn’t really what they have been wired to do
it doesn’t match their calling or gifting
and they would say something like
“I can't see myself doing this the rest of my life”
God has created each of us rather uniquely
There are paths God has charted out for us
There are things God intend for us to do and that / would be your calling
I am convicted / that finally when all is said and done
IT IS ONLY WHEN I ANSWER THE CALL OF GOD FOR MY LIFE
WILL I EVER FIND / THE PUPOSE FOR MY EXISTENCE
God is calling people
And your sole purpose in life / is to answer God’s call to follow Him
and unless and until you surrender to this call
you will remain aimless and unfulfilled
no matter how successful you are
in the world’s sense of success
It is so tragic to take this one little life we have
and fritter it away in trivial pursuits
but the pull for each one of us to succumb to that can be so powerful
because of the time we live in
In such a culture such as ours
it is easy to lose track of why God put us down here
Advertisers spend billions of dollars / trying to sell you a shallow dream
Don’t get sucked into it
Don’t waste the one life you have
on that lie / on all that froth and bubble
- that isn't what life is all about
You were created for something far larger than you are dreaming about
there are things you can do
that will enable you ultimately to count for something for God
Remember this: You have one life / Not two / One – that’s all
You have one life / and you have only one shot in this life
You were made to live for God and His glory / Don’t waste it
Ask God to help you catch a vision
that is bigger than the one you are dreaming of
Life is far too precious to be wasted on trivia
We often live as though we have all the time in the world
The truth is / we don’t
You open the curtains in the morning and there’s mist on the hills
By lunchtime it has evaporated / gone
The Bible tells us
that life is like that vanishing vapour / most transient
Psalm 39:5 / “You have made our days like a handbreadth”
- a handbreadth is just six to nine inches
that / in the eyes of God / is the duration of our lives
Psalm 90 tells us
that we’re not expect to live more than about 80 years at best
82 maybe / 90 if they are very fortunate / not much more than that
Now / what if God should give you / only half of it?
If you and I had eyes to see it
people are falling into the grave like mayflies
Life comes and goes with great rapid speed
Some of us in our fifties / sixties
we’re already able to sniff eternity in the air
Whether you are 18 or 60 / you should think seriously
about what you can do with the life you have
And we get only this one shot at life / not two
The time to have any traction at all in your life / is now / today
There will come a day when you will no longer be able
to lead a soul to Christ / as you now can
There will come a day when you will not be able to pray
in the same intensity and passion as you now can
There will come a day / when you will not be able
to read / and digest / and meditate and study the Word of God
There will come a day / when any desire / for virtually anything
will be gone forever / never to return / not for a minute
The time to live for God is now / today / this day!
Don't buy into that empty dream / that satisfies for a few decades
but one which could never make an indelible mark for God
As Christians the measure of a good life isn’t really how long we’ve lived
how many toys we’ve accumulated
but how well we’ve fulfilled / the purpose God gives to us
When you come to the end of your life / only one thing will matter
It is this: Have I accomplish God’s purpose for me?
That’s all / nothing else counts
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