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Significance
Our Calling
Is your significance tied too closely to achievements—building buildings, reaching business goals, acquiring material possessions, climbing career ladders? There’s nothing inherently wrong with these. But if you lost them, would your confidence completely crumble? If your sense of worth depends on them, what happens when you reach the top of the ladder, only to discover that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall?
The problem is that our world has a system of values that is upside down from the way God determines value. It lacks any sense of what Scripture describes as “calling,” or what Christians later termed “vocation”—a perspective that God has called and equipped people to serve Him through their work in the world. Instead, our culture encourages us to climb a work/identity ladder that is ultimately self-serving, and often self-destructive.
Climbing that ladder can be very misleading. The higher one goes, the more one’s identity, value, and security tend to depend on the nature of one’s work. But what happens if we lose our position, titles, or high-level compensation? Perhaps this explains why severe emotional problems—drug and alcohol abuse, abuse of spouse and children, divorce, even suicide—often accompany job loss. If our significance relies on our job, then it dies with our job.
God calls us to a far more stable basis for significance. He wants us to establish our identity in the fact that we are His children, created by Him to carry out good works as responsible people in His kingdom (Eph. 2:10). This is our calling or vocation from God. According to Scripture, our calling:
- is irrevocable (Rom. 11:29).
- is from God; He wants to let us share in Christ’s glory (2 Thess. 2:14).
- is a function of how God has designed us (Eph. 2:10).
- is an assurance that God will give us everything we need to serve Him, including the strength to remain faithful to Him (1 Cor. 1:7-9).
- is what we should be proclaiming as our true identity (1 Pet. 2:5, 9).
- carries us through suffering (1 Pet. 2:19-21).
- is rooted in peace, no matter what the circumstances in which we find ourselves (1 Cor. 7:15-24).
- is focused on eternal achievements, not merely temporal ones (Phil. 3:13—4:1).
Above all else, believers are called to character development, service to others, and loyalty to God. These can be accomplished wherever we live or work, whatever our occupational status or position in society. If we pursue these, we can enjoy great satisfaction and significance. No matter what happens on the job, we can join Paul in saying, “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
The Word in Life Study Bible, New Testament Edition, (Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville; 1993), p. 180
Battles and Babies Born in 1809
In 1809 the world was following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest war news. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being born.
During that year, William Gladstone was born in Liverpool, Alfred Tennyson in Somersby, Oliver Wendell Holmes in Massachusetts, Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg and Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky.
Viewing that age in a perspective the years enable us to command, we may well ask which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809.
- My Christmas Book (Zondervan)Reader’s Digest, January, 1996, p. 178
Shoe Clerk Led Moody to the Lord
Anyone here familiar with an Ed Kimball? Did he lead a significant life? Maybe not as we measure things on earth, but in heaven, incredibly significant. He was a Sunday School teacher, who in 1858 led a Boston shoe clerk to give his life to Christ. The clerk, Dwight L. Moody, became an evangelist. In England in 1879, he awakened evangelistic zeal in the heart of Frederick B. Meyer, pastor of a small church. F. B. Meyer, preaching to an American college campus, brought to Christ a student named J. Wilbur Chapman. Chapman, engaged in YMCA work, employed a former baseball player, Billy Sunday, to do evangelistic work. Billy Sunday held a revival in Charlotte, N.C. A group of local men were so enthusiastic afterward that they planned another evangelistic campaign, bringing Mordecai Hamm to town to preach. During Hamm’s revival, a young man named Billy Graham heard the Gospel and yielded his life to Christ.
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How Big Is Our God?
When Henry Norris Russell, the Princeton astronomer, had concluded a lecture on the Milky Way, a woman came to him and asked, “If our world is so little, and the universe is so great, can we believe God really pays any attention to us?” Dr. Russell replied, “That depends, madam, entirely on how big a God you believe in.”
Today in the Word, Feb., 1989, p. 12
Quote
- It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. - John Henry Jowett
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