Primal Dream (4)
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. Romans 8:28 NASB
Called – Are you called? Don’t brush the question aside as if it were rhetorical. Do you feel called? Or do you just assert the theological tenet as an abstract truth? There is a difference. Those who are called know it. They are driven by purpose. Oh, they might have periods of desperate wondering, but the mere fact that they feel desperate is a sign that they are called. People who are not called don’t even care.
So, are you called? Even if at this moment you’re bouncing around or feeling off track or whatever, are you driven toward some goal (perhaps as yet not entirely clear)? Do you need to be moving toward something? Or are you just comfortable with what you believe? “Called” implies the necessity to respond. But according to Paul, this necessity to respond isn’t for everyone.
Paul adds a phrase that specifies this particular kind of calling. It is kata prothesin kletois (“according to purpose called”). Actually, the verb, kletos, comes at the end of the thought. “According to purpose” is the critical distinction. In other words, this is not a description of your calling in life. It’s not an answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This calling is specifically about what God is doing. It’s a call to be involved with Him. Put your career planning on the shelf. Ask yourself how you are cooperating with God.
Wait! Does that seem like an unanswerable question? Does it sound like you have to know the final outcome before you can cooperate with the divine planner? Fortunately, God hasn’t left us guessing. He has given us some very clear guidance about cooperation. Just do what God does. Show compassion. Be gracious. Don’t get angry. Practice hesed. Do the truth. Forgive. Oversee the lives of others. Exodus 34:6-7. Simple.
Of course, if you wish you can expand the idea of “according to His purpose” to the entire Torah, but I don’t think that’s really necessary. If you do what God does according to Exodus 34:6-7, you’ll become human. You’ll be modeling God’s character. The results will follow. After all, at least part of the final purpose is for us to become what God intended in the creation, that is, to finally be human. To be conformed to the image of the one really human person who lived among us. To be called to be exactly what we really are supposed to be.
Won’t that be a great day!
Topical Index: called, kletos, response, Exodus 34:6-7, Romans 8:28
Really enjoying this season on TW. Called- yes, to what is the question. Is it to a life of obedience to the Spirit and Torah. Well yes of course. Is it to service and sacrifice and loving my brethren:of course. Where do my preferences, my desires , my heart count in all of this? Do they matter? The love of my life Kathryn (the great as some call her) put it this way a few years back. “Well I have gotten really good at laying down my life, sacrificing, being a martyr, but that is not what this season seems about. I’m not so good at standing up-this part of living I don’t get.” Annie Lennox sings on Diva “Dying is easy it’s living that scares me to death”. Yah getting alive is not so easy, and religion is not going to help here at all. It will take all your “heart, soul, mind and strength” to get fully alive.St. Irenaeus says “the glory of God is man fully alive”. That brings God glory? I thought we where supposed to die to ourselves?. Dylan sings “most people don’t live or die most people just float”. So ” to be exactly what we are supposed to be” is not so easy because it changes after you get it down and takes a lot of being presently attentive. But that is why I guess it’s really about a relationship with the creator and not a program; life is not just process and results. But if it where about process and results I would say process is more important than results. The rub is its not really about either it seems now to me its more about how you are being in the midst of it all. That’s my two cents for the day. I love that we have gotten more down to earth around here but then let’s not miss the deeper places of the word for it helps define the path should the lights go out and we need to go by braille; its then the word is the only way…Shalom
The answer to my youthful Cartesian-like question, “what do I know for sure” was easy. Self employment. At what? Who knows, who cares. Just do it and I did. I was “called to it”. But my answer to the bigger more mature question of “moving towards what” was a mystery that took 50+ years to answer and is only now becoming clear and it has nothing to do with employment. It is fulfillment in the totality of the question of life, why? Why me, why now, why here?
The “how” question somehow always got answered and it always had an unseen unknown component to it as if directed by someone, something beyond myself. The ethics and morals of self-employment issues came naturally and I always was comfortable with what I did and how I did it. Parental rub-off and RCC education I assume had something to do with it but……..? And yet it all worked out. Why?
I am still looking for the really comfortable answer to that question and I find bits and pieces to it each day right here. Thank you Skip and all other questers for providing them every great day!
CALLED – outcome / response subject to your will – choice – all of Israel … righteous – the guests at the wedding.
CHOSEN – outcome subject to YHWH’s will – no choice – Jonah … holy – the bride
There’s no vacation from being called as part of His creation.
You don’t retire from being immersed with the Ruach and fire.
You can’t quite striving, if you plan on arriving.
The end is His rest, so you just do your best.
“To be conformed to the image of the one really human person who lived among us.” What does that mean? He said “if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men to me” (Jn 12:32) The great Magnet. He drew us with His suffering. We are called to suffer with Him. This no flesh will agree with, so we leave our flesh behind to follow Him.
What does it mean to suffer with Him? Well, what did He do for me when He did? He put Himself in my place; He “became sin” for me; He took on Himself my consequences. Try doing that for somebody else! He became my advocate before the Throne. Try being an advocate for others; try it for your worst enemy! It’s hard! He sweetens my prayers with the incense of His own sweetness. Try translating the garbled agony or unconsciousness of those around you into a prayer as if they were praying for themselves accurately. Then, try to speak for them to others around them; try speaking for them to them, too. Put their misery into sympathetic understanding and put their hopelessness into encouraging faith for them until they can do it for themselves.
As our Example harmonized with creation, so we should, too. Try being a part of the ecology around you; you will quickly find that there are no seams between us and the life around and within us. Take care of nature, and nature will take care of you. Become an advocate for life – all life, as if it were your own; for, as custodians of this planet, I believe we were created in such a way that all our choices affect all our planet, for good or ill, and are reflected back to us as either life or death. Paul describes it as being “a savor of life unto life, or death unto death”. Our choices either kill or heal all else. We either fracture and repel, or connect and attract.
Let us love God supremely first, for that points our magnet in the right direction, and allows the love of God to flow through us, His Body. Let us be little magnets through His attraction. Let others see Him in us; through us, instead of us. May I decrease, and He increase, until I am “hid in Christ”. May He open my heart to love as He loves, and let Him pour His love (righteousness) through me unhindered. Amein!
Laurita, Thank you (again), as always your clarity of vision and purposeful prose brings me closer to Him and helps me to make some sembelence of sense of my kaleidoscope of colliding and colluding thoughts and cognitive dissonance. Your words of advise to “try translating the garbled agony or unconsciousness of those around you into a prayer as if they were praying for themselves accurately. Then, try to speak for them to others around them; try speaking for them to them, too. Put their misery into sympathetic understanding and put their hopelessness into encouraging faith for them until they can do it for themselves” were profound. I pray that I may learn to profitably use the many hard and harsh experiences that I have struggled with through my whole life as a result of the 2 TBI’s which I suffered at the tender ages of 5 and 11. I hope someday to be able to midwive (forget gender) the birthing of sons and daughters of the King. In particular those, like me, whose emotionally abused souls know no hope or recourse but solitude or suicide. To help an anguished soul in the birth of becoming human is to confirm you are on the path of becoming fully human yourself. You, Laurita, are solidly on that path. Perhaps only when I am able to help others whose identity has been deprived, depraved and decimated, whose pain is unbearable, whose hope has been hijacked will my life long suffering be as much value to me as it is to Him who allowed it. So thank you sister for showing me how to create future good memories from my painful past.
Dear Michael, words are really not enough sometimes. My life is truly different because of you (yep, Arnella, you too). The more I think of you two, and pray for you, the more profound it gets. You (both) have become the epitome of courage to me. Most people have no idea what courage consists of; they think it is something that is full of muscle and glory and only has to last about as long as it takes for the choppers to arrive. To those who truly could write the book on it, I am suspicious that it is much more like just “holding on one minute longer”. No glory, no muscle, no fanfare; just seeming failure on a continual basis, over and over and over again, where most folks go their careless way, ‘succeeding’ without even trying or noticing what simply lies outside the grasp or ken (good old Scottish word) even, of those who are the truly brave.
The more I think of what your life has had to have been like, the more speechless I get. You know the gifts of the Spirit? “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance”? People wonder how you grow such things. Well, when I look at the lives of people who exhibit them, I get the impression that they are kinda like diamonds: you put any old tree that has died and rotted under enough pressure and heat…. It takes sheer love to exist in places most folks just give up after they realize the choppers ain’t coming. What we don’t seem to get is that it takes YHVH’s love – not ours – to keep drawing the next breath. And the next. (All praise to Him for the breath in you!) Your life must give Him so much joy because it has been so expensive! Life itself consists of longsuffering when the suffering ain’t short, and somebody had to have been exercising a whole lot of faith in you for you to even be here, too. These are called fruits of the Spirit – not fruits of the human – for a reason; they are manufactured and manifested by Him, not us; for His glory, not ours.
I have an old forge in my lower barn, and my youngest son spends a good deal of time banging out his frustrations in metal. He is learning to temper his creations, and I have realized that tempering takes a lot of temperature extremes in the correct order. I am suspicious that temperance could be about being tempered in the cosmic forge. If so, you could be Damascus steel and not even know it! Meekness (for humans, anyway) comes about by getting the wind knocked out of your sails on a continual enough basis. Check for you. You get that one without even trying!
Gentleness is impossible for weak people; they are not gentle, merely unable. Gentleness is about NOT beating the crap out of everything around you even though you are primed to do so and it could sure use a whupping. It takes a lot of gentleness to survive an average day in an un-average life. What is goodness? Isn’t it the life of God lived in us? Well, for folks who have no life to speak of that they can point to as their ‘own’ (because that stuff just got trashed), it has to have been Somebody Else’s life they are running on! The whole point of goodness is not that it is ours, but His, anyway. For those who have never been cursed with the illusive ‘opportunity’ (um, that would be that ‘normal’ life we all think exists somewhere, somehow, in ‘others’) to fool themselves into thinking they somehow are accomplishing ‘goodness’, it is easy to see that it must be Somebody Else’s goodness their life is running on.
Well, that leaves peace. What exactly is shalom? It is where we quit fighting YHVH, ourselves, and others. Peace is the ultimate goal, of course. The rest of those fruits come from beyond us, and peace is no exception. It is at the end of our ropes; dangling at the end of all we thought life was all about, that we enjoy the unique opportunity to cash it all in in exchange for peace. After we are completely convinced there is no worth whatsoever in our lives, however, are we able to do that, it seems. Here is where you REALLY have it over on the rest of us, Michael; you cannot possibly suffer from the same level of illusion the rest of us travel on, for it clearly does not work in your world. That should make it easy to hand it over on a continual basis (which is everybody’s assignment, by the way). What is so hard for those who have it so easy should be easy for you who have it so hard. Peace can be had at any point of surrender, any time. When you are surrounded with brick walls, surrender is written in stone for you. No fair!
I find myself full of awe at your awful life, and I wonder a lot how you have managed to be here at all. I think ‘full of wonder’ counts as a “wonderful life”, too, doesn’t it? I think you could parse for us, parsec by parsec, what the fruits have had to have looked like for you to have been able to live. In the process of just telling us about your survival you can help us who find it so hard to lay down our lives so that we can start living a real one. Laying it down takes it all. Brother, Somebody has done it all for you! All you have to do now is show up for your paycheck – um, I do mean the payback you enjoy when you wake up and realize that all the world around you ever really truly needed from you was just you. Come on out; we are waiting!
All the above goes for Arnella, too, and she gets a chapter in my book for sure, but this one is long enough this time. (I have had it written in my heart, though, sister!) I love both of you.
Laurita, this is the best, most meaningful Valentines Day card readers can wake up to today. You have once again wrapped us all up in warm fuzzy blanket of love and appreciation for what it means to be a complete human being. Thanks Michael for triggering this response. Y’all make a worthy reason for us to wake up for each day.
Shalom.
We all get it at the same time, George! I get it when you do. Thanks for getting it because then I can, too. And the biggest thanks, of course, to Michael; all he has to do, apparently, is to breathe even somewhat honestly to bless the whole rest of the mess of us, Three whoops for Michael! Now we are all richer (you, too, of course).
Am I called, am I fulling the role of becoming a part of Kingdom of Priests. As an ordained Messianic Rabbi, trained in Messianic Studies my answer to this call has been in the form of running a small bible study group. Yet I find myself in a situation currently, unemployed, and unsure of the next step in regards to being called. Do I start a Messianic Congregation or continue to build up my bible study group? I don’t expect to find the answer here but find it quite a God-incidence that the subject has come up. What is a nice Jewish boy like me going to do? Pray!
Well said Skip. And very good replies now the further question is what was the first response to this line of questioning. Job said God talks to us in two ways we just do not take cognisance of the message as the psychologist say this is our restless mind unfulfilled desires or concerns. Dream and night visions how do we listen to these.
I, for one, don’t desire any “dreams and night visions”. As Skip has pointed out very well, these rare people tend to get burned up in that particular assignment. If I do get them, I hope they are private and that I don’t get the burden of relating them to others. People always tend to stone the true messengers (and, conversely, laud the ones that stroke their vanity). Most of us are going to be happier with other assignments, I think!
For me, the interesting part of certain ones being “called” must mean that (most?) others are deliberately left out and “not called”. How do we reconcile this? Not only does this go diametrically against our Greek thinking of all having Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity but also against the Hebrew’s cherished free will. How can just anyone freely choose to be included in God’s plans if God has not called him? Or, can we override God’s will and choose to be chosen? Or, is everyone called, and this phrase is hyperbole?
Are we not ALL “called” just by being born human with choices that we must make each and every day, not just once and forever? God loves diversity so we are each uniquely “called” by name. I am not you and you are not me but we are both nothing without each other and it is up to us both to find the image of God in us every day with our choices of how we meet each other in the marketplace.
So it is not in the calling that we are chosen, it is in our responses to the call that we are chosen.
Point on, George! We choose HIM. It will take me an eternity to fully grasp even the rudiments of what that must mean from either His standpoint or ours.
You are saying EVERYONE in the world is called.
Let me note there are the equivalent of 2,700 cities of one million people each, just in China and India alone! And we recently discussed the culture of squalor and unbelief many of these people live in. So, you are saying each of them has this same personal calling from God that we have, except that they are just choosing not to respond?
Perhaps I am mistaken, but this is not how I am reading Skip. He said that this calling is not “rhetorical” and not “abstract”. The Called “are driven by purpose . . . People who are not called don’t even care.”
As a person who also wishes everything was fair in the world, I don’t like it any more than you, but God IS playing favourites. He always has BUT NOT always will. There will come a time of reckoning when we who are exceptionally blessed will have to make an accounting of ourselves, and those who have been kept in the darkness, shall see the light for the first time. Then they shall be called to learn Torah, (and perhaps it will be the Chosen’s job to teach them), but it ain’t happening now.
God does NOT play favorites, Dan: He says He doesn’t – He is “no respecter of persons”. Perhaps I would have written “People who are not HEARING the call don’t even care”. He says He calls us all: He stands at everyone’s door and knocks. The ones who invite Him in are the ones who choose Him; He has already chosen us all by the death of His Son, which we are told was for all of us (except only some of us are taking Him up on it). Anything else would be accusing God, and there is nothing He has not done that we can accuse Him of.
But I don’t understand the ‘new chance’ stuff that has been going around lately; I guess I am just way out of the loop, but the way I read Scripture, we are called NOW to “learn Torah” because “now is the accept(ing) time; now is the day of salvation”, is it not? The ones who waited around until the rain started were too late for the Ark. If folks are just waiting around until somebody else takes their responsibility for them and forces them to do right, which love NEVER DOES, I am afraid that they are going to be waiting until it is too late again. People are always looking for an excuse why they don’t have to make a move TODAY, but today is all we ever have.
This is a good example of the dialectic stuff I see a lot of today that can confuse folks. On one hand, we have to try to believe that God is not fair – that He plays favorites and there is nothing we can do about it; if He says we are out of the loop, then too bad. If you buy that bridge (not saying you have; I believe you are asking because you can’t see how this fits) then there is another one for sale that says that our choices don’t matter in the opposite way, either; we are going to be forced to be good whether we want to or not. There, again, is nothing we can do about it.
This, to put it bluntly, is all snake language; force is contrary to all the principles of love, period. Force defines the serpent, not God. I don’t think God ever forces us in OR out of His kingdom; if He does, He sure did go to a whole lot of effort to deceive us into thinking we have a choice!
Just a short reply to a complex dilemma. I have not completely bought either “bridge” but I do see two of them in the Scriptures AND in real everyday life, and I can’t harmonize them, so I am half way across both. As indecisive as that may be, that is where I am. For example, the following story leaves me wondering.
In Matt 15 Jesus Himself tells us He came to save ONLY the lost sheep of Israel, (not the goats of the world), and proceeded to call the Canaanite women a dog and only gave in to her when she worshipped and begged Him to heal her daughter. And even while conceding her belief, nothing was said of her salvation.
Go figure.
He preached exclusively to Israel His entire ministry. It was only when Stephen was stoned and they were hounded out of Judea that the apostles were given a brand new commission: the Gentiles. Not until Peter’s vision did they even entertain the idea, and it was not until Israel rejected the message that they were recommissioned. This was not because the Gentiles were an afterthought or rejects, but because there was an order of operations to observe.
He called the Canaanite woman a ‘dog’ because dogs were unclean animals, and so represented Gentiles; it was a common epithet. I also think He called her that to test His disciples to see how prejudiced they were, but also to see how prejudiced she was, too. What He really thought about either, I think He kept to Himself. The fields of the nations around them, represented by the Samaritans, were ripened for a later harvest, when the disciples would be able to take them definitive proof, along with proper authority, for them to convert to. There was a huge harvest right after the Ascension. The woman was free to convert at any time, of course, but she would have to make the move, not Him. It took most people a while.
If Israel had not rejected their Saviour, they would have been an entire vector to the rest of the world; which was their original commission, after all, in the land of Canaan. The spread of the gospel would have looked a whole lot different if Israel had wanted in on it. God cannot work with us further than we are willing and able to meet Him; He does not forge out ahead of the sheep. Also, we should not fall for the exclusive, Israel-only stuff just because they did.
The usual train of thought, that Israel rejected the Messiah, might just be Christian rewriting of history. Paul never preached to Gentiles except the one occasion in Greece. He always went to the synagogue where there was a mix of believers from all backgrounds. The early followers of Yeshua, before and after the resurrection, were primarily Jews, not Gentiles. It took the Bar Kochba revolt and a lot of political circumstances including Akiva to drive the wedge, and even then, not completely. The Church rewrote the history to serve its purposes. Read The Ways That Never Parted and The Origins of Antisemitism before you draw this conclusion that Israel failed.
It might be wise to look at this fight about whether or not the Jews and Christians split during the apostles’ lifetime as another dialectic; in other words, each side is deliberately avoiding some of the facts. Yes, the Christians were persecuted the most by the Judean Jews, but no, they did not quit the practice of preaching in the synagogues. Yes, Paul received a specific commission to take the gospel to the Gentiles in his second vision in the temple at Jerusalem, as did Peter, but no, they did not quit using the vector of the Jewish believers as the means to accomplish this. Yes, Paul taught that many elements of the ceremonial law did not apply to Gentiles, but no, he did not “do away” with the Torah. Yes, the effort to include both classes, Jew and Gentile, continued until Bar Kochba, but it can be said with certainty that the Gentile converts far outnumbered the Jewish ones by the time of the Apostle’s deaths. There is no way Jose that Jews had EVER in their history racked up such a tally of heathen converts, except perhaps when they left Egypt with the “mixed multitude”. It was with confidence that at the end of his life he could write to the Colossians that the good news had been “preached to every creature which is under heaven”. That is not a statement of Jewish exclusivity! These guys had been busy!
I wrote about this in Jesus Said to Her. There is irony and the exemplification of ethnic prejudice in this account of the woman, for the benefit of the disciples. Don’t overlook that.
Thank you! That was truly comforting! Before even reading the rest, with all of my questions, searching and doubt/anxiety – I Knew the answer! If He is there, If He is Who He (Scripture) says He is, then I Know the answer! And all that, I believe He Knows my answer – So, Very Comforting. Thank you. (And all of that is the whole reason for the emotional anxiety.)
Good advice. I would have to add to the comment of being who we were created to be which I expect could be easily misunderstood. Very few of us are able to be who we were created to be. Being the people we were created to be has been in a state of being altered and has been slowly but consistently since around the mid 50’s. All we can do is work hard and know that He knows and is working that out somehow. We can’t be silent when we learn the truth regarding any false practice or teaching in any area of our lives. It’s no fun being rejected or ridiculed in the process but things just aren’t the way they were supposed to be.