A (0:00)

Have you discovered your calling, your vocation?

B (0:03)

Everybody is given a task to perform not only for their own well being, not only for their private profit, but for the well being of mankind. And when we're considering a vocation, we want to ask ourselves the question, how does my vocation contribute to the well being of of humanity?

A (0:32)

It's important to have a sense of purpose, isn't it? We all want to accomplish something in life, and when it comes to our work, we feel the pressure to choose the right career path. But for Christians, there's an added component. Is our work pleasing to God? And as R.C. sproul was just asking, is my vocation contributing to the well being of others? Today, on this Tuesday edition of renewing youg mind, Dr. Sproul will point out that there is a difference between merely working and working in our vocation. Before we get to today's message, I do want to remind our Texas listeners about Renewing youg Mind, live in Houston. That's right, the studio is going on the road again this year, so if you're in the area, be sure to register for this event on the evening of March 17th. Our guest teacher will be Joel Beeke, and you'll have the opportunity to gather with other Renewing youg Mind listeners for a night of teaching giveaways, Renewing youg Mind, Swag, and much more. Plus, every attendee receives a $20 voucher with the ligonier.org online store. I'd love to greet you, so be sure to Register today@renewingyourmind.org Houston and I hope to have more cities to announce soon. But when it comes to finding our calling, our vocation, Scripture provides us with guidelines to help. Here's RC Sproul to work through some of them today.

B (2:00)

How do you know that the work you're engaged in, in terms of your life's work is where God wants you to be and where you ought to be and whether you fit in that role. And we can try to answer that with magic, Ouija boards, horoscopes, and all kinds of mysterious means as that. Or we can do as the New Testament enjoins us to do, to think soberly about our gifts and our abilities. And I had been looking with you at chapter 12 of Romans beginning at verse 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. I think we've heard that phrase before by the renewing of your mind. Why that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God what we're trying to do here is to come to a clear evidence and attestation of the will of God. And we need renewed minds and the transformation of the word of God. And the context of this is that we ought not to be mimicking the secular world out of a kind of conformity to the patterns of the secular world in seeking to prove what is the will of God. And it's again in this context that Paul goes on in verse three. For I say through the grace given to me to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function. So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them. If prophecy let us prophesy in proportion to our faith or ministry, let us use it in our ministry. He who teaches in teaching, he who exhorts in exhortation, he who gives with liberality he who leads with diligence he he who shows mercy with cheerfulness. I think the first thing we need to see about this list of gifts that Paul gives here in Romans, which is not dissimilar from what he expounds in 1 Corinthians. I think the first thing we should see is that this list is not exhaustive, but it's representative. It's kind of for example, and the metaphor that he uses here for the church, as he does in 1 Corinthians, is that the church is one body, and that that one body has many members, and that there are various functions that are given to people within the church. But that not only applies within the Church, that applies within the world from the very beginning of creation when God made Adam and Eve and gave them the responsibility of dressing and tilling and keeping the ear earth, and of being fruitful and multiplying. When we see them bear children with Cain and Abel, for example, we learn that one of them raised livestock and the other one raised produce. St. Thomas Aquinas observed from this passage in Scripture that we see in the very beginning of creation a division of labor, and that everybody is given a task to perform not only for their own well being, not only for their private profit, but for the well being of mankind. And when we're considering a vocation, we want to ask ourselves the question, how does my vocation contribute to the well Being of humanity. Now, maybe I love the outdoors and I love being in the forest. And so I'd like to spend all my life as an outdoorsman and in the forest. And I may say to myself, well, I'd like to be a professional lumberjack. And we see that I have the aptitude for it and the gifts necessary to be a good lumberjack. Like the fellow who applied for the job out in the great Northwest to be a tree cutter, a lumberjack. And the foreman of the camp asked him if he had had any experience in the work of lumberjacking. And he said, yes. He said, I worked for 10 years in the Sahara forest. And the boss said, the Sahara forest? He said, the Sahara is a desert. And the applicant said, now, So, but let's look at this illustration. Does a lumberjack do a service for mankind? You know, in a real sense, we wouldn't be able to read the Bible if it weren't for lumberjacks, because they cut down the trees, the cheese are turned to pulp and so on. Pulp into paper, paper in the books and so on. So that in the whole complex of life on this planet, the tending of trees, the cutting of trees is all part of the flow of necessary goods and services that benefit mankind. And so a person doesn't have to be a preacher to contribute to the kingdom of God. A lumberjack can do that as well. A taxi driver gives a service to people, people who wait on tables, not only in the church, but in the world, serve the general welfare of the human race. Now, a few years ago, I saw a television program where a man had been interviewed who had established a lucrative business in prostitution with a famous house of prostitution in the state of Nevada. And they interviewed this man, and they asked him, to what do you owe your success and your prosperity? And he answered without flinching, through the providence of God, God has blessed my business. Because I made a bargain with God before I entered into this enterprise. And I said, God, if you will bless my business and cause it to prosper, then I will donate such and such a percentage of my profits back to the church. And he had the audacity to say on national television that God was blessing his business, but he had entered into a vocation that God prohibits. And not only was he being disobedient at that point with his life, but he was doubling the sin, adding injury to insult by slandering the deity as being the one who called him to this enterprise. So when we're considering vocations, when we're considering career paths, the first thing we have to ask is, is this particular function something that God allows number one and number two, is it something that really contributes to the general good of people? And I think those questions are extremely important when we're asking the question, what is the will of God for my life? Now that man thought that he was answering the question, what is the will of God for my life? And he said, the will of God for my life is to establish a house of prostitution. Now where did he get that idea? He didn't get it from thinking soberly or from thinking biblically. He was confusing his own desire, his own internal motivation with the will of God. That's a very easy thing to do. And so we have to look at those enterprises that serve the general welfare. And again, what Paul is saying here in Romans is as the church is a body, there are many different functions. And all of the functions have to be performed for the ministry of the church to be effective. Now here's the problem that we have in the church here. I am ordained to the teaching ministry. My initial call was to teach in a Christian college in a Presbyterian school. And the presbytery ordained me as a teaching minister. I didn't have a call to be a pastor in a local church, but they ordained me to that call because they recognized that there was a legitimate function in the church for full time teaching. They drew that inference from the Scriptures. Now my whole life focuses on the emphasis within the church of the importance of teaching. And I am very much concerned that Christians in the church be diligently studying the Scriptures and be deeply concerned about sound doctrine. Now other people in the church come up to me and say, well, R.C. i don't care about doctrine. I don't think we need teaching. The real task of the church is to do the work of evangelism. And the only thing that really matters is, is preaching the gospel to win souls who were lost and bring them into the church in the first place. Because the Bible puts a priority to evangelism. I say, well, wait a minute, what do you do with them after you evangelize them? Doesn't Jesus say in the Great Commission to go into all the earth to make disciples? That means students. And so I have a tendency to think the most important enterprise in the church is, is the teaching enterprise of the church. And the people who are gifted for evangelism and are giving themselves heart and soul to evangelism have a tendency to do what? To think that the only important task of the church is evangelism, or you have Other people who are engaged in ministries of mercy. They're feeding the hungry, they're clothing the naked. They're working in the inner city with street people and so on. And they come back and say, oh, you guys are living in the realm of abstraction. All you're doing is teaching and preaching while people were starving and while people were homeless and so on. The real task of the church is to take care of the hungry and so on. And this goes on endlessly because we have a tendency to think more highly of ourselves than we ought and more highly of our positions and. And our vocations than we ought. And we get to be like the Pharisees of the New Testament who love the front seats and all of the honor in the synagogue. Whereas Paul is saying no, that there is a function for everybody in the church. And all of these functions are necessary for the church to perform her mission. Now, there's a flip side to that. I have talked to preachers who believe that every Christian in every church is responsible to be an evangelist. And I said, I don't believe that. I think every Christian is responsible to be able to bear witness to their own faith and to give testimony to their own faith. But to be a practicing evangelist? No. I said, what every Christian is responsible for in the church is that the task of evangelism be accomplished. I used to lead over 200 lay people in a church who were engaged in an evangelism team. We went out every week and did evangelism. I trained them in this sort of thing. And it was remarkable. Some of the side benefits of that experience. First of all, some of the people came to me after we had been doing this for several months. One woman I can remember particularly, who was obviously far and away the most effective evangelist we had in this group of 200 or so. And she was crying in joy. And she said to me, R.C. i've been in the church for 20 some years. I've sung in the choir. She said, I worked in the church office. I taught Sunday school. And I tried all these different things to help in the ministry of the church. And I felt like I failed miserably at each one of them. And now, thanks to this program, I have found my gift. And she loved doing evangelism. Other people were engaged in it for six months. And I remember talking to another person who came up to me and said, RC I live in mortal fear. Every time we go out and do evangelism, every time we talk to people, I feel tongue tied. I feel completely inept and inadequate I've been trying this for six months, and it's just not working. But I've noticed that when we go out on these evangelism calls that I found all kinds of people who are unemployed. What would you think if I started a group within our church and we call it Unemployment Anonymous, and that we take as our mission to go to work trying to help these people that we encounter who are unemployed to find jobs that should do it? And she started that, and that became a vital arm of ministry in the church. She was far more gifted in administration than she was in evangelism. And what does the Apostle Paul say? Some are administrators. Some even have the gift of giving. The biggest way they can help the church is to finance the church. I remember talking to a man who was a multimillionaire who had given generously to many Christian organizations. And he came to me one day and he said, RC he says, I've been thinking about leaving my job and going into the ministry, becoming a pastor. What do you think? I said, well, you're going to have to make a sober analysis of your gifts and go through all these hoops and all that business that I've already talked to. And I said, and you're going to have to search out the will of God on this. It may be God's call on your life to be a pastor. I don't know, but I can tell you this. He said, what? I sure hope it isn't. He said, why not? I said, do you know how few people I've met in my life who have the gift of giving like you do? And I said, and you go in the pastor, we're going to have to raise your support instead of seeing what you have been able to do to help finance the ministry of the gospel all over the nation. Well, he decided not to go into the ministry. And he continued, he gets his ministry by actively involved in finding how to allocate resources in the most effective way to advance the cause of Christ. That's a ministry. And Paul recognizes that here and without those people, ministry doesn't get done. It's that simple. Without the administrators, ministry is in chaos. And as I said, these gifts are not exhaustive. There are more things that go on in the life of the church than just these gifts that Paul enumerates in Romans. And again, we can extend this beyond the church into the world where that everybody has a role to play. Now, in conclusion, one of the key points that we seem to have missed in the Bible, that Paul iterates here and Reiterates in the Corinthian correspondence, the New Testament teaches that every believer not only is indwelt by the Holy Ghost, but is gifted by the Holy Ghost for service. Every Christian has some gift given to them by the Holy Ghost, and we are accountable to Christ for how we exercise our gifts. This is what Paul's saying here. If you have the gift of teaching what, whoever has that gift, let him teach. Whoever has the gift of preaching, let him preach. Whoever has the gift of administrator, let him administer. And then he said, we are all baptized in one Spirit, and God gives to each a measure of faith and of gifts. And I think one of the tasks of the clergy is to help the laity within the church discover what their gifts are so that they're not endlessly frustrated by having a heart that is willing to serve, but they don't know how. So often, here's what we do to the poor lay person sitting in the pew. We get up in the church and we get up in the pulpits on Sunday morning and we say to the people, there are problems out there and you need to go out and do something. Well, what kind of direction is that? Go out and do something. People want to know, what can I do? How can I help? Give me the opportunity to serve and help me to discern what my gifts and abilities are. The church does that. We go through all kinds of processes of testing and oversight to prepare people for pulpit ministry. Why don't we have the same things operating when it comes to other gifts and other services? Now, what I want to do in our next session is to talk about this not so much in the life of the church, but in the normal daily activity of the so called secular world. How do I discover what my calling is? Whether it's to be a lumberjack or a waitress or a doctor or a lawyer or an Indian chief. Are there practical things that we can do to help us discern the abilities and the inclinations that God has given to us that we may best serve Him. I have been through experiences with people who have been dismissed from their jobs, either for budget cuts or let go from their jobs because they were deemed incompetent or they had a bad attitude or whatever. And that's always trauma. That is a terrible trauma for somebody to lose their job. And I would say the hardest thing for any manager in America is to fire somebody. There are very few people that are so callous that they enjoy causing a person to lose their employment. And so often we do that because we realize it's the responsible thing to do. Paul had to fire John Mark because John Mark, when he accompanied Paul and Barnabas on the missionary journeys, was following everything up and he was not really in the right place. And so Paul fired him. And what happened? He goes home, probably harboring resentment against Paul and thinking that he's been unjustly treated. And so in his spare time, he decides to find some meaningful employment and sits down and writes the Gospel of Mark. That was his vocation. That was his gift. We don't do people a favor by keeping them in jobs for which they are not gifted. Have you ever lost your job or do you worry about losing your job? I think we all do to a certain extent because our livelihood so often depends upon our employment and nobody that I know of enjoys being unemployed. But when that happens, we need to ask the question, where is the providence of God in all of this? What is God saying to me at this juncture in my life? Maybe what, humanly speaking is an injustice and wasn't fair, was God's mercy to give me an opportunity to serve him where I will be more fulfilled and more effective because there will be a better fit between who I am and what my job is. What I'm going to be looking at in our next session is how our gifts and talents fit our jobs. There's probably not one person in a thousand whose gifts and talents perfectly fit the job description of their employment. How do we deal with that? We'll look at that in our next session.