God calls
As the Lord’s prisoner, then, I beg you to live lives worthy of your high calling. (Ephesians 4:1 J.B. Phillips)
Paul is in prison in Rome. Yet he doesn’t refer to himself as a prisoner of Rome but of the Lord.
Wise man.
The prison may be Roman but the man belongs to God. And it is for this very reason, Paul’s persistent proclamation that there is a God, a heavenly Father that calls you and that all men and women belong to, that has inspired the authorities to imprison the apostle falsely, thinking that caging a messenger silences his message—or, at least, its impact. Not so, as the fact that you are reading his very words today bears witness. In his imprisonment, Paul begs the readers of his letter to, “…live lives worthy of your high calling.”
What does such an entreaty mean? What is the high calling he is referring to? How do you live a life worthy of that calling?
What is your “high calling?”
What is the high calling Paul is referring to? How do you live a life worthy of that calling? Let’s begin by tackling the first of the two questions: What is the high calling Paul is speaking of?
As in many things where God is concerned the answer is as simple as it is profound: Your high calling is to know God and become like his Son, Jesus. The truth of this is beautifully expressed in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.
Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good. God, in his foreknowledge, chose them to bear the family likeness of his Son, that he might be the eldest of a family of many brothers. He chose them long ago; when the time came he called them, he made them righteous in his sight, and then lifted them to the splendour of life as his own sons. (Rom 8:28-30 J.B. Phillips)
The highest calling of the human race is to know the God who created them, male and female, in his own image. True, there are other calls that God places upon his sons and daughters. But they are secondary.
The call as an apostle upon Paul did not precede God’s loving insistence that the man first know the One who calls every heart home to him, their Father. Nor was Paul’s apostleship to precede the Spirit’s transforming power to begin changing the man into the likeness of Christ. (It was his becoming increasingly more like Jesus that made Paul’s vocational calling as an apostle effective.) It is the same for you and me. Knowing God and becoming like Jesus is the foundational, imperative call upon which rests everything else we put our hand to.
Michael
Does calling play the definitive role in your life it should?
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