Not called out of but into ordinary life

What are your hopes and dreams?  What do you long to do?  My hunch is that as you think through those things you like me tend to think and dream big.  We like to think grand, to paint a vision that makes others gasp and fires our hearts.  But I wonder if we have absorbed that idea from the world rather than the Bible.

One of my struggles is seeing the everyday as my calling.  Surely God called me to be part of something  bigger and grander?  A rapidly growing church, hundreds coming to Christ and wanting to hungrily devour and devote themselves to living out God's word.  A ministry of growing influence if not nationally then at least regionally or locally.  But as I read the gospel I see Jesus engage in local ministry with global significance, but focused on the local.  Jesus ministry is also lived out in ordinary life.  Jesus spent years as a carpenter before he engaged in 3 years of ministry and those were not wasted years.  And yet we so often treat the ordinary as if it is a hindrance to our real calling.

God calls me as much to playing with my boys and helping them do their homework - which I'm finding increasingly hard - as he does to preach.  God calls me to hold my wife's hand and listen to her pour out her heart just as much as he does to the dying saint on the verge of going home.  Paul in Thessalonians can say that they knew not just his message but his way of life when he had lived among them, ordinary every day life was his calling to.

I wonder if part of the problem is our approach to studying Acts, we focus on the Peter's and Paul's rather than on the Cornelius' and Dorcas'.  Ordinary people who were heroes of the faith where God had placed them.  In fact as you read Acts through that lens you suddenly see the army people who lived out their call to the ordinary for Christ, these are the people Paul leaves to do the long term reaching of an area through ordinary transformed living after he has planted a church.  That is most of us!

But somehow the thought of presenting that as our church vision doesn't seem so captivating.  As a church we aim to live for Jesus in our ordinary everyday lives because that is what he has called us to.  Just doesn't have punch does it?  Or is it just that we have swallowed a worldly idea of vision, which always has to claim or aim bigger and better.

I'm not saying we have small dreams we don't we aim to see everyone complete and mature in Christ, grasping and living out of the confidence of being in him and understanding the full scope of his love and rescue.  That is not a small vision but it will take place in ordinary life, though it will turn it upside down.

Being called

Having begun thinking about Acts 13 yesterday its hard to just turn off from it as it is such an important passage in the book and the history of the church. It is the point at which the mission to be Jesus' witnesses to the ends of the earth really takes off. In Chapter 10 and 11 we see the beginnings of the Gentile mission as Peter goes to Cornelius and a church is started in Antioch, but it is really as Barnabas and Saul are set apart that the new chapter opens.

S/Paul has of course already had his calling back in chapter 9 at his conversion, but here in chapter 13 it is clear that the "Holy Spirit said "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them."" Interestingly it is in the context of the church (v2) worshipping and fasting - presumably that means that the church as a whole were seeking God's guidance. Not content merely just to chug along but willing to go where God would have them go when God would have them go, and to send who God woudl have them send.

I guess we are all tempted to say guidance would be so much easier if I could just have a voice from heaven that said go. But the interesting thing is that though we are told the Holy Spirit said set them apart even here we are not told how he said it.

Paul and Barnabas are gospel minded people sent by a gospel minded God to where their are gospel needy people. If we are gospel minded, alert for those in need of the gospel, then God will show us when and where. It may not be a clear voice, it may just be a gospel opportunity that excites us, it may be that it is a risk that takes us out of our comfort zone for the gospel, it may be that it is something that we have the gifts and abilities to do. All of those are ways that God guides us.

A friend of mine used to have a No Fear T-shirt and it had this slogan on the back "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space!" Am I living on the edge when it comes to the gospel, on the front line every day where the fighting is fiercest but God is most glorified because Christ is most obviously my treasure.