Your Calling – The Disciple-Making Lifestyle

You may or may not be personally committed to fulfilling your high calling. However, your personal spiritual gifts will never be rescinded. Why? – Because God intends for His work to be faithfully carried out!

The challenges you face will never come from God. The Bible describes our hurdles saying – “…our struggle is…against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil…” (Ephesians 6:12) These words will require some quiet thinking because they are both deep and concerning. Such spiritual truth only makes sense to us when we are being led by the Holy Spirit.

Every living Christian has a high calling. For that reason, we can all expect spiritual resistance. Our enemy has no other option than to fight because he wants to minimize the damage we will cause him – through our obedience. He will therefore concentrate on our primary areas of weakness. When we stumble, he also knows that God will lift us up, brush us off, and use us again – so the battle continues!

Satan wants to see you powerless and unusable for as much of your life as possible. Look at Sampson, David, and the others whom God empowered to be His witnesses in past generations. Their battles were strong. Yet, with all our enemy could do to tempt and frustrate them – the ultimate victory was always the Lord’s!

James vividly explains our personal struggles in descriptive terms. “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin…” (James 1:13-15a)

God’s warning is expressed by the Apostle John, “all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.” (1 John 2:16)

Look closely at the factors which have already been described and consider your personal New Testament calling (see Matthew 28:19). Next, fortify yourself through prayer, Bible study, Scripture memory, and Christian fellowship. Pay special attention to your most vulnerable areas. These will be easy to recognize because they will have already been demonstrated as past areas of weakness. This is where our aggressive enemy is most likely to strike again. The Bible instructs us saying, “Submit therefore to God…resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw close to God and He will draw close to you…”(James 4:7-8)

Our lifetime calling is to make disciples and serve as the Lord’s witnesses, so cherish and protect that wonderful privilege and the Lord’s teachings. The Bible says, “Hold on to instruction, do not let it go; guard it well, for it is your life.” (Proverbs 4:13)