Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Plantinga: Vocation

Vocation is our life calling.  It determines how we conduct our lives each and every day.  It is Gods will being constantly fulfilled in our lives.  As Christians, each of us has one simple vocation: to honor and glorify our God.  This is demanded in the Old Testament and urged in the New Testament.  Our single most important commandment is to love the Lord our God.  Life is generally not this simple however, and there is another aspect to our vocation.  It consists of God’s personal calling in our individual lives and his plan.

Throughout Romans, Paul calls us to become “living sacrifices”.  This is very easy to say but much harder to understand.  How does one become a living sacrifice? Upon a closer look at Roans 12 we see that to be living sacrifices we must not “conform to the world around us but instead be transformed by the renewing of our minds.”  In other words, we must be set apart as Christians.  We are the salt of the earth and must preserve Christ’s passion in our own lives.  As an ongoing process Christ will transform our lives as we immerse ourselves in prayer and the Bible.  In this way we perform our “spiritual act of worship” to God and fulfill our first and most general vocation.

The second part of our vocation is very difficult for me to explain because I honestly don’t really know how it works.  I have only heard the Lord speak to me on a handful of occasions.  The more I mature as a Christian I become increasingly familiar with the Lords voice but it still seems to me less than a “still small voice” (1 kings 19:12).  This is probably because I do not consistently fulfill my first vocation, as I should.  I do not immerse myself in him and therefore I do not “have ears to hear” (Ezekiel 12:2).  In any case, the second vocation requires us to know God.  When we know God we become more in tune with his voice and consequently hear his more specific calling for our lives.

As Christians, our vocation is one of the most important things in our lives.  It functions on two levels, one general, and the specific.  The first vocation applies to all Christians and calls us to glorify our God with all our hearts minds and souls.  The specific vocation comes as a product of the general vocation.  After we immerse ourselves in the Lord we become more sensitive to his will and we will hear him more clearly.

No comments:

Post a Comment