Week at a Glance: Listen! God is Calling God Saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to God’s own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began. (2 Timothy 1:9) Day Title Daily Bible Text Focus Points Additional Bible Text References 1 Called to Luke 15:11-24 • We do not have to get our lives together before God will Isaiah 49:14-16a Be Loved (God loves us love us. Psalm 139:13-18 unconditionally.) • God loves us more than we can imagine. Romans 8:31-39 • There is nothing we can do that will make God stop loving Romans 5:6-8 us. 2 Called to John 6:1-15 • God gives good gifts. Philippians 4:4-7 Gratitude (Gratitude sees that God’s • God’s gifts are enough. Psalm 100 gifts are enough.) • Gratitude focuses on what God has given. Psalm 103 • Gratitude is not obsessed with trying to acquire more stuff. Colossians 3:12-17 3 Called to Mark 10:46-52 • Faith trusts in God’s faithfulness. Hebrews 11:1-40 Faith (An outcast welcomes • Faith recognizes God’s priorities. Mark 5:24b-34 Jesus with faith.) • Faith does not follow peer pressure. Mark 7:24-30 • Faith follows the way of Jesus. Romans 3:21-28 4 Called to Matthew 5:38-48 (The • God calls us to love our enemies as well as our friends. 1 John 4:7-21 Love Christian life is love.) • Love is not the same as weakness or failing to resist evil. Luke 10:25-37 • Praying for our enemies helps us love them. Romans 12:9-21 • Love sometimes requires creative imagination. Ephesians 4:1-6 5 Called to Luke 19:1-10 • Sharing is basic to Christian life. Proverbs 21:26 Share (In response to God’s • Sharing is a response to God’s goodness. 1 John 3:16-18 goodness, Zacchaeus • Sharing is an indication that the Spirit of God is at work. Luke 10:25-37 shares his possessions.) 2 Corinthians 8:1-15 Listen! God Is Calling / 02 Intro to the Theme / p. 1 Introduction to the Theme Listen! God Is Calling When Christians talk about having a vocation from God, we are saying that God calls us. The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, which corresponds to the English “to call.” The first thing to say about vocation is, “Thank you, God.” The fact that God talks with us—that God calls us—is a wonderful thing. We are not left alone to make sense of our lives. We are not left alone to make it through the day. The God of the universe wants to communicate with us. The Bible talks about God’s “Word” because God is a communicating God. God’s communication has its center in Jesus Christ. The Gospel of John says that Jesus is God’s Word in the flesh. God is not distant and out of our reach, a God whom we can glimpse only if we try very hard and do everything right. Rather, God is in the midst of human life and history, in the person of Jesus. God is in all of human life, even in death. Not even the nastiest, most inhumane parts of human life have the power to separate us finally from God. That is why the apostle Paul told the first-century Roman church that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Paul can say this because God is present not just as Jesus, but as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the way in which the loving Word of God, made flesh in Jesus, resonates and evokes response through all times and all places. For this reason Paul sometimes calls the Holy Spirit “the Spirit of Christ.” In one sense, the talk of “vocation” or “call” can be misleading. It can suggest that God needs to overcome a distance in order to be heard by us. However, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is our creator. This does not simply mean that a long-time- ago God invented the universe and set it in motion. At every moment God is the source of the existence of the universe, including each one of us. At every moment God is the creative source of our lives. God is very different from us. God is beyond our imagining. The Apostles’ Creed says that God is the “creator of heaven and earth.” God is beyond everything on earth and everything in heaven. That is another way of saying that God is beyond all things. The theological term for God’s “beyondness” is transcendence. We sometimes think that, since God is beyond all things, God must be far away from us. When we think God is far away, we are confusing God’s transcendence with distance. That is a mistake. God is not far from us. The great North African church teacher of the fourth and fifth centuries, Augustine of Hippo, said that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is our creator; we do not create ourselves. God loves us more than we can love ourselves. Every breath we take flows from the breath of life that God breathes into us, as Genesis 2:7 says that God breathed life into Adam. In the New Testament Paul calls the church the body of Christ. Christ is so near to us that it makes sense to speak of persons in the church as being parts of Christ’s body, like fingers and eyes and ears. The Word of God, made flesh in Jesus, is so central to our lives that Paul can speak of coming to a point where “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The theological term for God’s nearness is immanence. God is both transcendent and immanent. God is beyond all imagining and is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Jesus Listen! God Is Calling / 02 Intro to the Theme / p. 2 Christ is the flesh and blood reality of God’s nearness. That is why Matthew’s Gospel calls Jesus “Emmanuel,” a Hebrew word meaning “God is with us” (Matthew 1:23). We may think that God is far away. We may act as if God is far away. We may even want God to be far away. Wanting God to be far away, acting as if God is far away, is a basic form of sin. Thankfully, God calls us even when we want God to be far away. We may act as if God is far away, but God still seeks to communicate with us. The entire Bible witnesses to God’s communicating with us. The fourth chapter of 1 John sums up the many biblical testimonies to God’s communication when it says that “God is love.” God communicates with us; God says “I love you” to us, even when we do not want to listen. God calls us in love even when we are afraid to believe that anything so good could be true. This unconditional love is the first and most basic truth about vocation, about God’s call to us. Everything else worth saying about vocation follows from this basic truth. This week in camp we will look at five important things that Christian faith teaches about vocation, all of which derive from the great truth that God is love. Called to Be Loved Since the God who calls us is love, our most fundamental calling is to be loved. God is always the starting point. When the Apostles’ Creed says that God is “creator of heaven and earth,” it is saying that nothing on earth or in heaven can be the starting point. God is the beginning, the source. That divine source, the Bible says, is love. To imagine that we can start any way else other than as recipients of God’s love is to be unrealistic in the most basic sense. Some days in camp it may be easy to feel loved. Other campers, counselors, and staff may be loving to us. The weather may be gorgeous. The camp itself may be a place of great natural beauty. Other days it may be difficult to believe that God loves us more deeply than we can imagine. Maybe it is raining and everyone is staying inside, where the other campers or staff persons are getting on our nerves. Maybe it seems as if you have no friends at camp. Maybe you are remembering that things are not good back home. At such times it is good to remember the cross of Jesus Christ. God loves us so much that, in Christ, God was willing to die for us. Churches commonly display crosses in order to remind us all of God’s great love for us. No doubt there are crosses at different places at camp to remind everyone of God’s love. Martin Luther, Protestant reformer, thought it was a good idea to mark a cross on yourself every day with your own fingers as a way of reminding yourself how much God loves you, specifically. Called to Gratitude The second word to say about our vocation from God is that God calls us to gratitude.