Good morning again, and welcome to Church of the Advent.
My name's Jeff, I'm one of the pastors here,
and I hope that you are thawing out from your journey
to church this morning on this cold day.
If you have a Bible or a phone,
I would invite you to turn to 1 Corinthians 7,
starting in verse eight.
It's always good to have our Bibles open
as we listen to somebody preach a sermon,
but especially this morning,
I think Paul's argument here in this chapter
I think is especially nuanced and careful and detailed,
and I think it's helpful if you have your Bible open
to follow along.
Here in 1 Corinthians 7,
Paul has a lot to say here about calling, about calling.
I think many people who use the word calling today
are often thinking about it or referring to it
through a secular lens.
They often talk about it in terms of finding their passion.
Maybe you've heard somebody say along the way in your life,
you need to find your passion.
You need to find a work or a job that you're passionate about.
This is about a sense of self-actualization,
how a certain kind of work or an opportunity
is supposed to give us a sense of fulfillment in life
and to help us grow as a person.
And a lot of people in our modern culture
spend a lot of time and money
orienting their lives around this.
They spend a lot of time and effort
to get into the right schools,
to work at the right institutions,
to network at the right meetings,
all trying to find their passion
through their career or through their work.
Still, some other people, I think,
think through calling primarily
primarily through a religious lens.
So to have a calling from God
means that you are involved in ministry.
You're a missionary, you're a pastor,
you're a priest or a deacon.
But how should we think about calling
and how do we figure not only what our calling is,
but how to make a change,
how to make a move in our different callings that we have?
Should I stay in this job?
Should I find a new one?
Should I move to a new city?
Who should I date?
Should I marry this person that I'm dating?
Should I even get married?
Should I stay married?
I think a lot of us from time to time
have asked questions like these
and people in the Corinthian church
in the first century
were actually asking similar questions.
Many of them were new Christians.
They had believed the gospel
when Paul had come and preached Christ to them.
But as new believers,
many of them had questions
about how their newfound faith
impacted the various situations in their lives,
their marriages, their singleness,
their jobs, their social positions.
And in chapter seven,
Paul is taking time in his letter
to answer some of these questions directly.
And we know this from verse one,
where he says,
he begins the section by saying,
now for the matters that you wrote about.
And so he's answering
some specific questions that they had.
And in this section here in chapter seven,
we learn a few things about calling.
We learn what calling is,
how to discern our calling,
and the freedom that calling brings.
What calling is,
how to discern our calling,
and the freedom that calling brings.
So first of all,
let's look at what calling is,
how Paul defines calling here.
Both the secular view,
find your passion,
and the religious view,
callings about ministry,
have the same problem.
The problem is that they suffer from elitism.
They exclude the vast majority of people.
The secular view excludes people
who don't have the resources,
or the opportunities,
or the networks
to do what they are passionate about for a living,
to do what they're passionate about for a job.
A lot of people
work jobs or careers
that they don't feel passionate about.
A lot of people work jobs
they don't feel called to.
The religious view, on the other hand,
excludes people who work as electricians,
and business owners,
and teachers, and engineers.
If calling is for missionaries and clergy,
then what about everybody else?
So both of these views suffer from the same problem,
but the way that Paul talks about calling here
in this chapter includes everybody.
It includes all of us who profess faith in Christ.
No matter their social situation,
or their job status,
it includes everybody.
And I want you to see how he uses the word calling
in two distinct ways.
Two inseparable, but distinct ways.
First, he uses calling
to talk about God's calling people
to salvation in him.
We see this in verse 18,
where he says,
was anybody circumcised when they were called?
This is about the calling from God
that comes in conversion
and salvation through Jesus Christ.
But he uses it a second way,
then in verses 17 and 24,
when he talks about the situations
and the circumstances
that God has called us to.
So calling is both about salvation and conversion,
and it's also about the situations in our lives.
And this is why theologians over the centuries
have talked about primary and secondary callings.
Primary and secondary callings.
And again, these are distinct and yet inseparable.
In our primary calling,
God calls us to salvation
through repentance in Jesus,
faith and repentance in Jesus through the gospel.
And through union with him,
through faith in him,
he calls us to be in a relationship with him
where we're transformed more and more
to love God and love our neighbors.
That's our primary calling.
And this is,
when you see the word calling in scripture,
this is primarily what it's referring to.
Let me give you a couple examples.
In Ephesians 1.18,
Paul is praying for the Ephesians.
And he says,
I pray that you would have the eyes of your hearts enlightened,
that you may know the hope to which he has called you.
That you may know the hope to which he has called you.
Calling here is about the hope of eternal life
that comes with salvation.
Let me give you one more example.
2 Peter 1, verse 3.
His divine power has granted to us all things
that pertain to life and godliness
through the knowledge of him who called us
to his own glory and excellence.
So calling here is about transformation.
It's about growing in holiness to be more like Jesus.
So that's our primary calling.
And our secondary calling flows from that.
In our secondary calling,
God assigns us situations and circumstances
to live out our primary calling.
And specifically,
to live out our secondary calling,
he gives us gifts.
He gives us roles.
He gives us relationships.
He gives us gifts like hospitality,
or teaching,
or administration,
or writing,
or mercy,
or prayer.
He gives us relationships like family,
like spouses,
like friendships,
neighbors,
roommates,
coworkers.
And he gives us roles to play,
like parents,
or spouses,
or software developers,
or neighbors,
or police officers.
That's our secondary calling.
But in both our primary calling
and our secondary calling,
it's important to see
that it is God who does the calling.
It's not a line of work,
a job,
or career.
It's not an inner subjective voice inside of us
telling us to find our passion.
It's about God.
God is the one who is doing the calling.
And therefore,
calling is not about finding our passion.
It's not about finding our dream job.
And it's also not just for pastors
or missionaries.
Calling is about God.
It starts and it ends with God.
It's about the God who calls us
and invites us to salvation in him
through fellowship with his son
by the power of the spirit.
And it is about the God who assigns us
gifts and situations
and relationships and roles
to live out that new life
that he has given us.
So that's how Paul defines calling.
That's how Paul,
how he talks about our primary
and our secondary calling.
But that raises a question for us
that's very practical for us,
that in our secondary callings,
in the places God has assigned us,
how do we discern God's leading?
How do we discern God's call in those places?
And specifically,
how do we know
when it's right to make a change?
How do we know when it's right
to make a move in our circumstances?
How do we know
whether to persevere
in a hard job situation
or to move on?
What if we want to get married
and have kids,
but our hopes are,
our hopes for that are growing dim?
How do we know how to discern
what our secondary calling is?
And that's what I want to look at secondly.
Three times in this passage,
Paul repeats a principle
that he applies to various situations.
And I want you to,
he repeats it three times.
Verse 17,
only let each person lead the life
that the Lord has assigned him
and to which God has called him.
He says relatively the same thing in verse 20.
Each one should remain
in the condition in which he was called.
And then he basically repeats
the same thing again in verse 24.
What he's saying is,
stay where you are,
remain where you are
because God has assigned you
that situation.
Now, this isn't some kind of radical fatalism
about God's will for our lives.
There are exceptions.
There are good reasons
to change our circumstances.
And Paul gives this principle.
He says,
the general rule is stay.
The general principle is to remain
unless,
because.
Stay,
unless,
because.
And I want you to see this
here in these three different situations.
So in verses six through nine,
Paul is addressing single people
and he's gonna tell them,
stay,
unless,
because.
There were some people who were single
who were wondering,
now that I'm a Christian,
should I get married?
Uh,
this is a legitimate question.
After all,
marriage is a picture of the gospel.
It's a picture of Christ in the church.
And so some of them were probably wondering,
is marriage in a better way to serve God?
Is it a better way,
a higher way to serve God's calling in my life?
And Paul says to people who are unmarried,
some who have never been married,
some who are widows.
And he says,
stay where you are.
Unless,
unless there's a good reason to get married,
unless you find somebody to marry,
or as he says in verse nine,
if you're living in sexual sin already
and you can't control your desires,
getting married is better than being single
and continuing to live in sin.
So stay single,
unless there's a good reason not to,
because.
Because,
he says,
singleness is just as much a gift from God
as marriage is.
He talks about this in verses eight through nine
and then later in chapter seven.
So stay,
unless,
because.
Let's look at the second situation.
In verses 10 through 16,
Paul is addressing people
who were married to an unbeliever.
And they had a,
they also had a question about their situation.
Some people who were,
who had become Christians through Paul's preaching
had spouses who did not become Christians also.
They were unbelievers.
And so their question was,
now that I'm a Christian,
should I divorce my spouse who's not a believer?
And Paul tells them,
stay,
unless,
because.
Stay in your marriage,
unless there's a good reason to divorce.
And he,
in verse 15,
he listens abandonment of the marriage
by the other person as a good reason for divorce.
Stay in your marriage,
unless there's a good reason,
because,
in verses 16 and 17,
that God may use your marriage
to draw your spouse to faith.
Also,
your kids have a special covenant status.
They are holy,
because you're a believer.
Stay in your marriage,
unless there's a good reason not to,
because God might use your marriage
to impact your spouse.
Let's look at the third and final situation.
In the third situation,
Paul is addressing bond servants or slaves.
And he tells them,
remain as a slave,
unless you can gain your freedom,
because if you belong to Jesus,
you're really free.
You don't ultimately belong to your master,
but you belong to God.
Now,
we have to do a brief aside here,
because Paul is addressing slaves.
Anytime we see slavery in Scripture,
we have to address this.
It's important to say
that Paul here is not addressing,
he's not condoning slavery
as an institution,
especially the kind of slavery
that happened throughout American history.
We know from history
that the kind of slavery
that happened in the Greco-Roman world
in the first century
was a lot closer
on the spectrum
to indentured servitude.
Slaves in Paul's day
enjoyed a relatively decent social status.
They could hold prestigious jobs
and own money and property,
and many could even buy their freedom.
And that is exactly
what Paul encourages
these people to do
if they're able to.
But more significant
than the historical context
is the theology
that he lays down here
in verses 22 and 23.
And he tells slaves
that because you're in Jesus Christ,
that you are actually free.
That your fundamental identity
is that you are free.
And that people who are free
in the eyes of the world
become slaves to Jesus Christ.
And he's giving them
this counterintuitive paradox
because he says,
all of you,
whether in the eyes of the world
you're a slave or free,
you are all equally called by Jesus
and you are all equally
under his authority.
Now there's probably a lot more
that we could say
about why Scripture
doesn't condone slavery,
but it's important
to at least say
that it's passages like this
that would eventually sow seeds
for the abolition of the slave trade
in places like America
and England centuries later.
So what do we see in this section?
We see that Paul says
to single people,
and to married people,
and to slaves,
stay where you are
unless,
because.
And the whole point
of what Paul is trying to communicate
is that when it comes
to following God
and living out
our secondary calling,
is that in general
we shouldn't worry
or be anxious
about our situation.
Because our situation,
our circumstances,
don't sanctify us.
Our circumstances
don't make us more holy.
Our certain walks of life
don't allow us
to serve God
more faithfully
than others.
Our marital status,
our job situation,
where we live,
it's not that these things
are unimportant,
it's that they're irrelevant
when it comes to serving God
faithfully.
Being married
is not superior
to being single.
Being a pastor
is not superior
to being a layperson.
Having an advanced degree
is not superior
to having a high school education.
Being a CEO
is not superior
to being an entry-level employee.
And therefore,
when we're discerning
various decisions
about our secondary calling,
when we're asking questions like,
should we move cities?
Should I change my job?
Should I change
my marital status?
We should have a strong bias.
Our first inclination
should be to stay
where we are.
To bloom where God
has planted us.
To serve God wholeheartedly
in whatever situation
that we find ourselves in.
To not be overly anxious
or concerned
about our circumstances.
Why?
Because we believe
in a sovereign God
who in his infinitely wise providence
calls people to himself
and assigns to them
places and roles
and gifts
and responsibilities.
The gifts that we have,
the relationships that we have,
the places that we live,
all come to us
through the sovereign
providence of God.
Just as God's primary calling
on your life
through salvation
in Jesus Christ
is not a random accident,
so it is with his secondary calling
on the circumstances
of your life.
They come from the hand
of a sovereign God.
Does this mean
we should never
change our situation?
No.
That is clear
from this text.
There are good reasons
to take a new job
or move.
There are good reasons
to get married.
The principle is
stay
unless.
Now,
I fully admit that
this probably sounds
pretty challenging
to many of us.
It sounds challenging
to me
because we live
in a modern culture
where staying put
is hard.
We want to be free
to change our situation
whenever we want
and as often
as we want.
But what I want
to invite you
to see
is that
what may
initially sound
restrictive
or limiting
or constraining
to our modern ears
is actually meant
to bring us freedom.
It's actually meant
to bring us rest.
It's actually meant
to bring us joy
and that's what
I want to look at next.
I want to look at
the freedom
that calling brings.
The freedom
that calling brings
and I want to look at it
from two angles.
And the first is this,
that this understanding
of calling
frees us
to see both marriage
and singleness
as equal gifts.
Because our secondary callings
flow from our primary callings
and because it's God
who sanctifies us,
not our circumstances,
being single
is not a junior varsity way
to serve God.
In fact,
Paul says that singleness
in many ways
is preferable to marriage.
And he says this
at length in chapters,
later on in chapter seven,
that single people
have many advantages
to serving God
that married people do not.
That they're able
to serve God
with a kind of freedom
and flexibility
and single-mindedness
that married people
don't have.
I think we see this
as we look across
church history.
Many of the most
influential
and impactful people
in church history
have been single.
So whether we think
about Hannah Moore,
who is a British author
and reformer
who worked with
William Wilberforce
to end the slave trade.
We think about
Amy Carmichael,
who was an influential
missionary in India
for 40 years,
who helped young women
recover out of the
sex trafficking trade.
If you think about
someone like C.S. Lewis,
who was only married
for three years of his life.
Lottie Moon,
who served Christ
as a missionary
in China for 40 years.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
the German pastor
and theologian
who built an underground
seminary during World War II
and resisted the Nazis.
Not to mention
the Apostle Paul
and the Lord Jesus himself.
It is often single people
who model for us
what a wholehearted
response to serving God
looks like.
And even though
we might know this
theologically,
that singleness
is as equal
as a calling
as marriage,
it doesn't always
feel like that,
does it?
It can often feel
painful and lonely.
And I think
to not acknowledge
that would be a mistake.
And yet,
single friends
in the room,
I hope that you
are encouraged
by the freedom
that is found
here in this text.
That because of
how Scripture
defines calling,
you are not
second class.
You're not on
the JV team.
You're not in
a holding pattern
on the tarmac
of life,
waiting for God's
call on your life
to take off.
No,
God's call
on your life
is right now
to serve Him
wholeheartedly.
You have
unique gifts
and capacities
that only you
can give
that our church
needs.
And our church
and the church
would be impoverished
without you.
So I think
that's the first
thing that we see
that this view
of calling
frees us
to see both
singleness
and marriage
as equal gifts.
And secondly,
this understanding
of calling
frees us
to serve God
in whatever we do,
whether it's
in our jobs
or as a parent
or as a neighbor.
It frees us
to serve God
in whatever we do
without seeking
salvation
through our circumstances.
I think part of
why this text
is so challenging
to modern people
like us
is because we live
in a time
of unprecedented
social mobility.
people change
cities and jobs
and spouses
more today
than ever before.
Now there is
a lot of good
that comes with that
but it also comes
with a cost.
There's the illusion
that there is
an infinite number
of options out there
in terms of
where to live,
where to work
and who to marry
and therefore
it always seems
like there's
someone or something
better out there
for us
than our current
situation.
and that can
leave us
feeling restless
and rootless
and aimless.
Always wondering
if there's something
better out there
for us
that will fulfill
us more.
If I could only
get married
then I would
finally be content.
If I could only
find a job
that would fulfill
my passion
then I would
finally be happy.
If I could only
fill in the blank
for you.
That is a restless
place to be
and many of us
have been there.
It's so easy
to believe
that a change
in our situation
is the thing
that will make us
finally free
and happy.
But to do so
is to make
an idol
of our circumstances.
To do so
is to treat
our circumstances
as a functional
savior.
To look to them
for only what
God can give us.
If calling
is about finding
your passion
in life
if it's about
finding your
dream job
you'll never
be free
because there
will always be
something better
out there
for you.
Not only do
our circumstances
not sanctify us
they also
can never
satisfy us.
They will always
leave us feeling
restless and anxious.
But if calling
is about the God
who calls us
first to himself
and second
to our situations
then we are
free to serve
him wherever
we are.
In our
workplaces
as parents
as students
as friends
as neighbors
we're free
to serve him
wherever we are
because ultimately
we belong to him.
And that is why
Christ came.
And he came
to set us free
regardless of
what our situation
is
even ones that
are difficult.
Jesus Christ
himself
embraced a calling
from God
that had the
most difficult
circumstances
of all.
Rejection,
betrayal,
and suffering
and death
on a cross.
Jesus was
called
to be a slave
so that you
could be called
to freedom.
To the freedom
of serving God
wherever he
in his sovereign
wisdom
has placed you.
To bloom
where you're planted
to serve him
wholeheartedly.
Can we pray
for better
situations?
Yes.
And God
may in fact
answer some
of those prayers.
Sometimes
God changes
our situations
but most often
he works
through our
situations.
To call us
more deeply
into our
primary calling
to belong
to him
to deeper
faith
to deeper
love
to deeper
dependence
upon him.
Brothers
and sisters
God has
placed a
calling
on your
life
but it's
not to
find your
passion.
It's not
to find a
dream job.
It's to a
person.
God has
called you
to himself
to a
savior who
can give you
contentment
and joy
and hope
and purpose
that no
circumstance
could ever
give you.
And if you
find your
calling
first and
foremost
in him
then you
will be
free
to serve
him
wherever
you are
this time
tomorrow.
Let's pray.
Our God
and Father
we praise
you and
thank you
that you
have called
us to
yourself
and second
you have
called us
to the
places
and roles
that you
have assigned
us.
Lord
give us
freedom
give us
joy
to serve
you where
we are.
help us
to do
so
wholeheartedly.
Lord
give us
grace
to know
what it
means
to be
faithful
to you
where we
are today
and to
live out
the calling
you've
given us.
In
Christ's
name
Amen.