Who is God Calling You To?

There is an old Southern expression: if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know he didn't get there by himself. The turtle looks quite proud of where he is. He had help.

Whatever you have accomplished, whatever is on your resume, however many letters you have after your name — you had help along the way. A parent or a grandparent. A teacher, a coach, a Sunday school teacher, an older mentor in business. Somebody, or several somebodies, got you where you are.

None of us is self-made.

Today's verse asks it as three questions in a row, and the third one closes every exit: what do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not?

Paul is not attacking achievement. He is dismantling the story we tell about it — the one where the effort was ours and the advantages were background scenery. The hours you put in were real. So was the person who made those hours possible, and you did not arrange for them.

This is not a guilt exercise. It is a memory exercise, and gratitude is downstream of accurate memory.

So take five minutes and write down three names. Not famous mentors — the actual people. The teacher who stayed late. The relative who paid for something. The friend who said the hard sentence you needed.

Then pick one and tell them this week. Most people who put a turtle on a fence post never hear that it mattered.

Saul of Tarsus is a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, a Greek scholar and tough as nails, and he has made it his mission to hunt down followers of the Way — dragging them off to be arrested and in some cases put to death — because he is certain he is doing God's will.

If you were a Christian in those days and heard Saul was on his way, you did not want to hear him knocking. This was not better call Saul. This was better hope they don't be calling Saul.

He is on the road to Damascus to arrest more Christians when a light brighter than the sun knocks him off his feet, and a voice says: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? He asks who it is. I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.

Notice the direction of travel. Saul was not looking for Jesus. Jesus came looking for Saul.

Some of us can point to a moment when we decided to follow Christ. That happened to Kent at fourteen, and he is not downplaying it. But that is our experience of it, not the whole truth of it. Scripture says that apart from Christ we are not sick and we are not having a bad spiritual hair day. We are dead. Dead people do not make decisions or pray prayers — not unless the Spirit of God comes into that death and breathes life into us, the way he breathed into a lump of clay in Genesis 2.

You may have felt you came freely, and in a sense you did. But if God had not been calling, you would never have come.

Who is beyond saving, in your private opinion? Say the name. Then remember whose road this was.

God sends a man named Ananias, with an address: the street called Straight, the house of Judas, ask for a man of Tarsus. Holy GPS, Batman. Don't you wish he would do that for you? Kent doesn't trust the GPS in his car. He would trust that one.

But put yourself in Ananias's sandals. Lord, that man is public enemy number one. He has hurt too many of my people. You want me to go there?

You can imagine the prayer. Lord, here am I — send Barnabas. Here am I, Lord. I understand Silas has some time on his calendar.

Notice that Ananias is not rebuked for the objection. He states it plainly, with evidence — I have heard from many about this man — and God answers him rather than shaming him. There is room in this conversation for you to say that you are afraid of the assignment.

What there is not room for is a permanent no.

This is the only time Ananias appears in the Bible. One scene, one obedience, one address. What if he had said no? God would have found somebody else. But we would not be reading Ananias's name two thousand years later, and the man who wrote a third of the New Testament would have been welcomed into the church by a stranger instead of by someone who called him brother.

Is God nudging you toward someone you would rather not talk to? You know whether he is.

You can say no. Or you can say: here am I, send me.

The Lord's answer to Ananias is that Saul is a chosen instrument to carry his name before Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel — and then this: I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.

That is an odd sales pitch, isn't it. Come to Jesus and you will suffer a great deal. Any takers?

But there is a price to following Christ. It won't cost you anything — it is all done by his grace, and you cannot add a cent to it. It will just cost you everything, because at that point you hand him the keys.

Both halves of that are true at once, and most of our confusion comes from holding only one. Hold the first alone and you get a faith that asks nothing and changes nothing. Hold the second alone and you get a religion of earning, which is the thing Saul was already an expert in and had to be knocked off a horse to escape.

Notice also what suffering is attached to here. Not random misfortune. For the sake of my name. There is a kind of cost that comes simply from living in a broken world, and there is a kind that comes from following him into rooms you would not otherwise enter. This verse is about the second.

So be honest about the keys. What is the one area where you have decided in advance that Christ does not get a vote — the calendar, the money, the relationship, the plan you have already made?

Hand him that one today.

We are made for one another, not for isolation. It is why solitary confinement is such a severe punishment.

Kent told the church something that makes him uncomfortable to tell, because he puts a higher premium on preaching clearly than on his own comfort. Twenty-six years ago he woke on a Wednesday healthy as a horse. That night, during a one-woman Easter play at the church they had planted downtown, he began to notice numbness and tingling in his feet, and his legs starting to feel heavy. He said nothing — his ten-year-old daughter was sitting right beside him. He helped strike the set, then drove to the emergency room instead of home. By the next day he was paralyzed from the waist down; twenty-four hours later, from the chest down. A virus had left an enormous lesion on his spinal cord. Transverse myelitis.

What it left him with is a right side with decent motor control and almost no sensation, and a left side with sensation and almost no motor control. So the right side does all the work the left side will not do. It has done the heavy lifting for twenty-six years, and he will tell you the boys on the right are getting tired of carrying the freight for the guys on the left.

In case you have not connected the dots: we are the body of Christ. If you could give him back the full use of his left side, you would do it in a moment.

Today's verse says it without the illustration. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you.

The body of Christ has no spare parts and no excess members. If you are not engaging your part, we are not all we could be. We are crippled without you.

Jesus allowed his body to be broken so that we might be made whole. What part of his body are you, and when did you last use it?