God Calls - What is God Calling You to do?

1 Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17

In our readings today, we hear of the God working through three men. Two of the stories are similar – a son dies, a mother cries, and a man of God brings the son back to life. The third story is quite different. Let’s look at these stories in the order they occurred. A warning – pull your toes back under the pew – God has asked me to step on a few toes this week!

In our story from 1st Kings, Elijah is a prophet called by God. Let me give you a bit of background:

In the years after King David and then King Solomon, civil war split the kingdom of David into two kingdoms, with the tribes of Judea and Benjamin uniting as the Kingdom of Judea in the south around Jerusalem, and the other ten tribes united as Israel in the north, in the area that would later be known as Samaria. After many years and many kings, a man named Ahab inherited the throne of Israel from his father Omri.

The writer of Kings tells us that Ahab was the worst king to date. He encouraged worship at centers outside of Jerusalem. He also had shrines built on high mountains and allowed non-Levites to become priests. Then, he married Jezibel, the daughter of the king of Sidon, and began to worship the false god Baal and the goddess Ashereh. This greatly upset God, for God's nation was led by a man who worshiped other gods. 

God sent Elijah to Ahab, the king of Israel to declare a drought, a time without any rain. Elijah told Ahab: “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.” And of course, this meant that there would soon be very little food, because plants require rain to grow and in those days they could not bring food in on trucks and trains from thousands of miles away when your own gardens dried up.

As you might expect, this did not endear Elijah to Ahab. God had Elijah leave town. At first, God sent Elijah to the east of the Jordan, but then the little stream he was camping beside dried up and so God sent Elijah to the north, to the town of Zarephath near Sidon – the home of Jezebel’s father.

There, Elijah met a widow who was so poor, so broke, so desperate because of the drought that she only had enough food to make Elijah, herself, and her son a couple of biscuits. Then, she and her son were planning to lay down and die from starvation.

But Elijah told her that she would have plenty of flour and plenty of oil, that she would not run out until the drought broke. He told her that God had made this promise.

And it happened that way. There was plenty of flour and plenty of oil. They never did run out of food. It was a miracle from God!

But then another problem happened. The boy began to have trouble breathing and eventually stopped breathing and died. The woman was upset. She thought that her boy had been taken from her because of her sin, her earlier wrongdoing, and that Elijah had come to remind her of her sin.

But instead, Elijah took the boy, prayed to God, and the boy came back to life. And the woman finally accepted that Elijah really did speak for God.

How many miracles do we need to see before we believe? Elijah had already shown one miracle of God – the bottomless flour and oil! Yet the woman did not believe until her son was brought back from the dead. How many miracles do you need to see to believe? Do you need to have someone close to you die and be brought back from the dead, or can you believe in God and God’s word on the basis of something less extreme? And perhaps even as important – how many miracles does it take before you will agree to truly serve God in all you do, how many miracles before you understand that God is not just calling you on Sunday mornings, how many miracles does it take before you decide that God can keep you supplied with flour and oil if you decide to chuck all of the world’s distractions, all the world’s temptations, all the world’s lies and follow the only One who will still care for you in a hundred years?

The woman shows us the way people are. The world has us so controlled with the ideas that employers and retirement plans and salaries are the only way to live life that we ignore the miracles around us and instead cling to the world that will forget us someday. We claim to trust in God, yet we live our lives as though we are atheists, trusting instead in our bank account, the things we have stored in our attics and outbuildings, our government programs, our health insurance, our hospitals. For you see, if we truly trusted in God’s generosity, then we would be supremely generous, if we truly trusted in God’s promise of eternal life, then we would not fear death, if we truly trusted in God’s love for us, then we would never be fearful or lonely or worried about anything. Do you trust in God or are you like many people, a person who talks a good talk about God but lives a life trusting in the same things any atheist trusts in?

A thousand years after Elijah and the widow, almost the same story happened again with Jesus, and once again, it was because he raised the widow’s son from the dead that many people began to believe that He spoke on behalf of God. They had seen other miracles, but on the basis of this miracle they finally believed He was a prophet. A boy had to die and be raised from the dead before the people would believe. As Luke writes:

16 They were all filled with awe and praised God. “A great prophet has appeared among us,” they said. “God has come to help his people.”17 This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.
Yet the people of Judea did not yet accept that He was God Himself walking among them. That would take His own death before they would believe.

In our third story, the Apostle Paul is talking about his own conversion. He talks about how He received the gospel from Jesus directly, and only later visited Peter for a couple of weeks and also saw James the brother of Jesus. In his case, the great miracle was the great change in Paul’s actions. You see, before Paul encountered Jesus, he was known as Saul. Saul was a Hebrew name; Paul was the Roman name. Before his encounter, Saul was persecuting Christians. Saul was hunting down Christians and putting them into jail.

And then one day, Jesus struck Saul with blindness and spoke with him. Saul had to be led to the city and did not recover his sight until a follower of Jesus laid hands on him. And after Saul met Jesus, Saul became known as Paul. In effect, Saul died and this new man with a new life named Paul began preaching that Jesus was Messiah and God walking upon the earth. And it was for this miraculous conversion that people gave God the glory. In many ways, it was the death of the man named Saul and the resurrection to a new birth of the man named Paul that people were thankful for.

In each of our three stories, a man did what God asked. In each of the stories, people came to know God and to worship God simply because a man had done what God told him to do. But in each case, a man had to die and be brought back to life for someone to believe in God’s goodness.

In our lives, God asks us to do many things. If you have been baptized as a Christian, your old person has died and you are a new person, raised from the dead. Now, the Holy Spirit lives inside of you and is speaking to you. You may be listening – or you may be ignoring that still, small voice that is always telling you the good, right things to do and say. If you read the Word of God and follow the guiding of the Holy Spirit, you will hear God calling to you, asking you to do and say things which will lead others toward Christ and toward God and toward a life of holiness.

Yet in our world today, we have many outside voices telling us things which go directly against the Holy Spirit. The world wants to devour and destroy Christians. Those voices tell us: “You don’t know enough to speak about God.” They tell us “You’re too old or you’re too young to help someone.” The voices insist: “Christians are hateful people, surely you don’t want to be known as a Christian!” Other voices tell us “Don’t let anyone know you’re a Christian”. Still other voices speak forth: “You don’t have the money to help, you might need that money next week, you’ll retire without any money!” The voices are telling you “Be respectable, don’t mention God, people will think you’re a fanatic!”

And all the time, if you listen to those outside voices - those voices of the world - people around you - people you could be helping, people who need to know the love of God and Christ are struggling. They are desperate, they are dying, they are falling down the hole of despair and they are ending up dead, dead, dead without God. And if you die without God, the Bible tells us you spend eternity apart from God in a flaming pit.

And so today, let me put you on the spot and ask you this question: Who will you let down this week? How timid will you be, how respectable will you be, how rich will you be, how far from God will you stay? How much will you act like an atheist this week? Or will you act like the Christian you claim to be?

Many of you knew Hobe and Shirley Bunner, the couple that owned KC Auto. Did anyone get through a car-buying discussion with them without knowing that they were committed to helping people understand God and Christ? No…they decorated their office with Christian symbols, they talked about church, they talked about Jesus Christ their savior, they always did the right thing, they stayed honest in a difficult business, they always pointed to Jesus Christ in deed and in word, and they gave up thousands of dollars to help people who needed helping. And even though they both suffered terribly from poor health at the end, they were joyful and they kept pointing to Jesus. This is what Christians are to act like!

We know of the Apostle Paul because of one simple reason – when Paul encountered Jesus, he was such an honest man that he spent the rest of his life telling the truth about Jesus to everyone he could find. Paul traveled, on foot and by crude boat thousands of miles to bring the Gospel to thousands of people. And although he wrote much of the New Testament, we remember him most for his complete change of heart, from persecutor of Christians to the greatest salesman of Christianity. This is the change that Christianity is supposed to bring to a person's life!

My wife is a wonderful person. When people meet her, you know very quickly that talking about God is very important to her. And she tells me that within about five minutes of meeting someone, she can figure out what is important to someone else. 

What is important to you? Is it your work, is it your children, is it your grandchildren, is it your studies, is it your money, is it the Mountaineers, is it your God? Our God is supposed to be the most important thing in our lives!

Only loving God, of all those important things, will make an eternal, positive difference. God is calling you today to look at your life, your priorities, your obedience to God. Are you willing to follow the call that God has placed upon your heart?

God has given you certain talents, certain gifts, certain abilities to help people in different ways - you may be able to speak, you may be able to sing, you may be an excellent woodworker, artist, or administrator. God has given you passions – you may love children, you may love the elderly, you may love the people of India. God has given you a style of working – perhaps you like working in groups, perhaps you like working alone, perhaps you like the computer, perhaps you like the skillsaw, perhaps the sewing machine, perhaps the dining room table. Yet no matter what your gifts, your passions, your style, God has called you to work with God to change this world – and to rescue people in this world.

With the Holy Spirit guiding you, the love of Christ in your heart, and the power of God the Father behind you, you CAN make a difference in this world. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of Christianity playing defense, giving up ground to the evil and the secular in the world. It’s time for the counterattack of good over evil, it’s time for the counterattack of life over death, it’s time for God’s loving people to stop sitting around and to use the mighty sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God to reclaim that which has been lost!

God has not called you to act like an atheist – God’s called you to act as a Christian, fully committed to God, fully committed to loving God and fully committed to loving other people. God has actually called you to come out of the world and be God’s servant, doing what the world will not do, and not doing what the world likes to do. What special task is God asking you to do? What great blessings is God waiting to shower you with if you follow God’s call? God has called you today – do you believe that? If so, it is time for action, it is time to stop sitting around, it is time to stand up and walk forward.

God’s call is for you. What is God calling you to do? Why don’t you ask Him at the altar of prayer today.