The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life
March 22, 2008 by markhsmith · Leave a Comment
Are you looking for purpose in life? For a purpose big enough to absorb every ounce of your attention, deep enough to plumb the mystery of your passion, and lasting enough to inspire you to your last breath? This book is about the reason why we are each here on earth.
Are you serious about looking for such a purpose? How many people do you know who just can’t wait to get to work on Monday because they’re so fired up about what they’re doing? Nobody? When you meet people that are that passionate about their calling, it’s contagious. Find your calling.
KEY POINTS:
- There is no call without a Caller.
- Reality reminds us that all the will in the world will not make us what we want to become.
- Calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.
OS Guiness deals with two distortions–the Catholic distortion and the Protestant distortion. The Catholic distortion is that the sacred calling is to become a priest or nun. Martin Luther shattered that myth. Luther wrote: “The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they be, do not differ on whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all works are measured before God by faith alone. The cultural implications of recovering true calling [by Luther] were explosive.
- Calling gave to everyday work a dignity and spiritual significance under God that dethroned the primacy of leisure and contemplation.
- Calling gave to humble people and ordinary task an investment of equality that shattered hierarchies and was vital impulse toward democracy.
- Calling gave to such practical things as work, thrift, and long-term planning a reinforcement that made them powerfully influential in the rise of modern capitalism.
- Calling gave to the endeavor to make Christ Lord of every part of life a fresh force that transformed not only churches but also the worldviews and cultures of the Reformation countries.
- Calling gave to the idea of “talents” a new meaning, so that they were no longer seen purely as spiritual gifts and graces but as natural and a matter of giftedness in the modern sense of the term.