The High Calling of all Believers

What is your calling? What has God called you to do?

In Christian circles we like to talk about calling. We hold it up as something important. We make it into something that we can use to put people on a pedestal.

In the process, we leave many Christian feeling less than because they don't feel like they have a calling from God on their lives. They fell unworthy as believers because they think God didn't see them as good enough and gifted enough to be called to something specific.

We also set people up for failure with the way we talk about calling. When someone says they feel like they're called to something, we often put a list of expectations from them, of what that calling should look like. We put them in a box of our own making of what that calling should look like. And it's usually not God's ideas.

What if calling is something so much simpler than all we make it out to be? What if we could be certain what the calling of every believer was?

"Our call is not to 'fix' everyone else, please everyone else, or live up to everyone else's expectations of us. Our call is simply to wholeheartedly love Christ; then He will direct our steps." (Sheila Walsh, All That Really Matters)

When we look at the call of God on our lives this way, it changes things. We don't have to wonder if we're called to it. We don't have to feel stuck in a box. It frees us to really live the life God intends for us to live.

The call of all believers is to love God first. It's as simple and as difficult as that.

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was in Matthew 22, He answered with these words: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." (vs. 37) Jesus teaches us that the most important thing for us to do is love God. He goes on to say that the second is loving your neighbour as yourself.

When we choose to love God first and love Him with everything we are and everything we have, He shows us what comes next. He will show us how to love our neighbour and who that neighbour is.

We can be sure that we are loving God first, He will show us what to do next. That part looks different for all of us and may look like what other people expect of us. We may not always know clearly what it is, but we can be confident of what our first call is as believers - to love God.