Calling.
Edmund P. Clowney, first president of Westminster Theological Seminary gives some basic foundations to discerning God’s calling in a short book titled, Called to the Ministry. My first (hopefully not only) book for the break.
“The tragedy of alienation is not that so many people do not know me; it is that no one knows me, for I do not know myself. The terror in modern thought does not spring from the addition of millions in mass population. It springs from the subtraction of One - the Lord my God.
True identity can never come from relations with men (mankind), for every relation is a role to be played. To multiple the roles is to fracture the facets of emptiness. To concentrate the roles seems more promising. The man with a few friends and one wife knows more personal involvement than the social butterfly. Yet such involvement cannot engage his whole person, and the man who seeks his identity in love to those nearest him falls into idolatry.
There is but one relation that can give identity to man, the relation to his Creator and Savior. God’s call gives a task that is more than a role, for it engages a man’s whole person in the service of his Lord. That call is to being as well as doing, to status as well as service.
By what name does God call you?
Clearly that question will take a lifetime to answer. Peter was given his name, but how little did he grasp its meaning! (Only as Christ stretched out this hand to him in the sea, as Christ prayed for him that his faith might not fail, as Christ looked at him in the courtyard of the high priest after Peter’s denial, as Christ sat with him by the fire of coals on the beach in Galilee after the resurrection; only in the upper room at Pentecost, in the temple, in the court of the Sanhedrin, in the house of Cornelius; only in the unfolding of his apostolic calling did Peter come to know his name.)
You learn to know yourself only as you learn to know Christ. Self-knowledge cannot be an end in itself. Paul never cries with Socrates, ‘Know thyself!’ Rather he says, ‘That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death; if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead’ (Phil. 3.10, 11). ’For to me to live is Christ’ (Phil. 1.21)”.
