The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God's Purpose For Your Life

By Os Guinness

Why am I here? What is God's call in my life? How do I fit God's call with my own individuality? How should God's calling affect my career, my plans for the future, and my concepts of success?

First published in 1997 by distinguished author and speaker Os Guiness, The Call remains a treasured source of wisdom for those who ask these questions. According to Guinness, "No idea short of God's call can ground and fulfill the truest human desire for purpose and fulfillment."

In this newly updated and expanded anniversary edition, Guinness explores the truth that God has a specific calling for each one of us and guides a new generation of readers through the journey of hearing and heeding that call. 

With more than 100,000 copies in print, The Call is for all who desire a purposeful, intentional life of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Jul 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780785220107

Os Guinness

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) was born in China and educated in England. He is the author or editor of thirty-five books, including The Call, Renaissance, Fool's Talk, Carpe Diem Redeemed, and Last Call for Liberty. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide. A passionate advocate of freedom of religion and conscience for people of all faiths and none, he was the lead drafter for both the Williamsburg Charter and the Global Charter of Conscience. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the Washington, DC, area.

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INTRODUCTION

Two Words That Changed the World

The greatest gift in life is life itself. Your life is not an accident. God wanted you to be. How then are you searching for purpose in your life, your own ultimate why for everything you do? For a purpose big enough to absorb every ounce of your attention, deep enough to plumb every mystery of your passions, and lasting enough to inspire you until your last breath on earth? Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more powerful, more intimate, and more important than to listen to the call of God our Creator, and to realign yourself to the very purpose of life and the universe by following his call wherever your life leads. God wanted you to be, so responding to his call is the secret to making the most of life, the key to the deepest relationships, the surest road to self-knowledge and unfolding purpose, the most challenging, enthralling, and natural way to live life, and the way to make the most of the great adventure that forms our days as humans in this world.

God’s call is at the very heart of God’s good news, the best news ever. Yet if we are to discover all that God’s call should mean to us, we may need to rescue it from the weight of clichés, confusion, ignorance, and uncertainties that still commonly surround calling today. We will encounter many of these distortions along the path as we explore the great truth of God’s call more fully. But it is worth highlighting two broad and crippling distortions from the start—the shrinking and the hollowing out of calling.

First, there has been a dire shrinkage in how we understand God’s call by drastically reducing the immensity of its significance to our individual lives alone. It then becomes all about us—I, myself, and me, because we’re worth it. Calling certainly speaks to each of us individually, personally, and intimately, yet at the same time it is God’s call, and it is his call to a new humanity, to a new way of life, and to a role in working toward the new heaven and the new earth. It is therefore awesome in its creative power and comprehensive in its wide-ranging imperatives. And, not surprisingly, God’s call has a proven track record of shaping history and making a difference in the world that is culture-wide for societies just as it is life-long for individuals. We need to recapture that awe and that immensity from the start and see how we each fit into the grand picture that is so much bigger than just us.

EARTH-SHAKING, HISTORY-SHAPING

I was born in China and grew up in Nanjing, the capital of Nationalist China and the former capital of the mighty empire of the Ming Dynasty. The city had been brutalized by the horrific rape of Nanking in 1937, and after World War II it was threatened by the looming Red Army that was fighting its way closer from the north. But its magnificent city walls, its beautiful tree-lined avenues, and its historic Ming Tombs still bore the marks of its once-glorious past. For, in the fifteenth century, Nanjing was the proud capital of the richest and most powerful country in the world.

With an assurance born of thousands of years of Chinese power and greatness, and with a string of stunning innovations behind them, the Ming Emperors were expansive in their enterprises, and they could afford to be. They sent an admiral and a huge fleet to Africa, with ships far bigger and faster than Columbus’s, and then dispatched a million men to build the one hundred thousand houses of the new Forbidden City in Beijing. So, in A.D. 1500, who in their right mind would ever have believed that China would suddenly be eclipsed and then passed and dominated by a region of the world the Chinese considered a cultural backwater—Western Europe, the rocky little outcrop at the other end of the great Asian landmass?

Yet that of course is what happened. And centuries later, when the Chinese pride was restored, and China regained its superpower standing on the world stage, the Chinese asked how it was that Europe, and later the West at large, had leapfrogged them to become the vanguard of the modern world. In his book Civilization, historian Niall Ferguson described their inquiry in the words of a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences:

We were asked to look into what accounted for the . . . pre-eminence of the West all over the world. . . . At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful.

For anyone listening in on that Chinese investigation, its conclusion was brilliant but not quite right, because it begged an important question. The Christian faith had been predominant in Europe ever since the fourth century when the Emperor Theodosius had declared Rome officially Christian. Why then did Western Europe not rise to dominance before, and why did it rise so rapidly and to such prominence in the sixteenth century? The answer is not so much Christianity in general as it is the Reformation in particular. In their massive rejection of medieval corruptions and distortions, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other Reformers restored to the church not only the gospel, the authority of the Scriptures, and the importance of lay people. They restored many biblical truths that had been distorted and forgotten for a long time.

Among the powerful truths that helped to shape the rise of the modern world were the Reformation’s celebrated six Cs—calling (with its impact on purpose, work, and the rise of capitalism), covenant (which led to constitutionalism and constitutional freedom), conscience (and the rise of religious freedom and human rights), a commitment to God’s people, the Jews (and the reversal of the horrendous anti-Semitism that stained the record of the medieval church), coherence (so that people tried to think about anything and everything under the lordship of Jesus), and corrigibility (the notion of semper reformanda and the principle that we are all, always, in ongoing need of renewal and reformation).

To be sure, these gifts of the Reformation must never be stated in a triumphalist manner, and they are not the monopoly of any branch of the church today. They need to be described and assessed with careful nuance, warts and all, and they need to be traced back to their roots in both the Old and the New Testaments. But there is no question that these central truths of the Reformation contributed to the rise of the modern world, though with unforeseen consequences and unknown aftermaths that would surprise the Reformers themselves. And among them all, no truth has had a greater impact than the rediscovery of the biblical truth of God’s call and our calling, or vocation.

In other words, we must recognize from the start that we are not simply talking about calling as purely personal, spiritual, and devotional—your individual purpose and mine. Calling is all those things, but it is far more than just a truth for you and me. God is calling us to play our part in the righting of wrongs in the world, in the renewal and restoration of the earth, and in carrying his message to the ends of the earth. Calling therefore carries a truth that is awesome in its significance and earthshaking in its implications. Its imperative covers the whole earth, the entire course of history, and every moment of our lives. So we must not shrink it to be anything less.

Needless to say, this reminder of the global impact of calling through the Reformation is only one example of what is an older, deeper, and even more awesome story that goes all the way back to creation and the universal human beginnings, and then on to God’s call to Abraham and his vision of a new way. To explore the truth of God’s call is to appreciate what is nothing less than God’s grand global project for the restoration and renewal of humanity and the earth—and our part in it. But the reminder is enough to establish the truth that God’s call makes the world an entirely different place and life a completely different project for all who listen to that call, and for all who are committed to follow the Caller until that great day when listening gives way to seeing and faith to knowing in its fullest reality.

CLICHÉS AND COUNTERFEITS

The second broad distortion we must clear up from the start is the hollowing out of calling from so much of today’s hype and hoopla surrounding purpose. The air of the modern world is abuzz with glittering talk of purpose that is shallow, and often empty. Everyone today is intentional, on-purpose, and missional, and every day—not just New Year’s Day—is now appropriate for new resolutions and new–new resolutions. Never have so many books, seminars, and consultants offered us such simple steps and such low-hanging ways to make us all purposeful and dynamic in five or ten minutes. Armed with mission statements, inspirational slogans, and measurable outcomes, we can maximize our waking moments in fifteen-minute segments, survey our life achievements, and assess our legacies. The fatal conceit that we can figure it all out is all too plain.

Some people, it seems, gush so enthusiastically about the purpose they recommend for you that you would think it was a new discovery, and we were the first humans in history to realize the importance of thinking and planning ahead. Like the Western fad for dieting, such talk hits an obvious chord, but all too often it is fatuous and sometimes fraudulent. Like so much of the all new, or latest and greatest, it flatters to deceive and promises more than it delivers. Were we to stop long enough to examine the results, we might be tempted to sue for false advertising. But long before then, we are on to the next book, caught up in the next seminar, attracted by the next offer, and off in pursuit of the next new–new thing.

God’s call, by contrast, is no cliché. It is clear, powerful, substantive, and compelling. And because it comes from God, and its beginning and ending rest on him, there is no pretense that it is all up to us. To be sure, God’s call can be ducked, derailed, and drowned out, but it must never be shrunk and it must never be hollowed out. When that happens, the resulting confusion is always to our loss, and we stumble around and fall short of the great purpose of our lives.

What follows in this book is a series of short reflections on the many-sided wonder of God’s call. There might well be a hundred chapters or more, for there is no end to the wonder of God’s call, but that would be burdensome, even if penned by Dante or Shakespeare. But I hope that what is here you will read slowly, always aware that you are in the presence of the One who calls us all, and always thinking things through in terms of your own life and your own calling in the world. No human book, however long, could ever do full justice to the wonder of calling. Only gratitude, worship, and lives well lived can do that.

God’s call is God’s word to each of us, powerful, precious, and deeply personal. Writing and reading about calling can never get beyond our poor words about his words. Thank God that the day will come when such poor words will no longer be needed, when we see God face-to-face, and a lifetime of hearing will be swallowed up in sight. That moment when we see our Caller for the first time will surge beyond mere words, and it will leave all human words beggared and in the dust. Yet until that great day comes, we only have words, and poor words at that. But such as they are, let’s strive to begin to understand and to respond to the two words that have changed the world, the two words that are changing the world today, and the two words that can change each of us and our lives beyond our wildest dreams. Listen to the commanding invitation of Jesus that is both a call and a charge: Follow me.

OS GUINNESS

McLean, Virginia

SEPTEMBER 2017

1

THE ULTIMATE WHY

As you know, I have been very fortunate in my career and I’ve made a lot of money—far more than I ever dreamed of, far more than I could ever spend, far more than my family needs." The speaker was a prominent businessman at a conference near Oxford University. The strength of his determination and character showed in his face, but a moment’s hesitation betrayed deeper emotions hidden behind the outward intensity. A single tear rolled slowly down his well-tanned cheek.

To be honest, one of my motives for making so much money was simple—to have the money to hire people to do what I don’t like doing. But there’s one thing I’ve never been able to hire anyone to do for me: find my own sense of purpose and fulfillment. I’d give anything to discover that.

In more than fifty years of public speaking and in countless conversations around the world, I have heard that issue come up more than any other. At some point every one of us confronts the question: How do I find and fulfill the central purpose of my life? Other questions may be logically prior to and lie even deeper than this one—for example, Who am I? What is the meaning of life itself? But few questions are raised more loudly and more insistently today than the first. As modern people we are all on a search for significance. We desire to make a difference. We long to leave a legacy. We yearn, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, to leave the world a bit better. Our passion is to know that we are fulfilling the purpose for which we are here on earth.

All other standards of success—wealth, power, position, knowledge, friendships—grow tinny and hollow if we do not satisfy this deeper longing. For some people the hollowness leads to what Henry Thoreau described as lives of quiet desperation; for others the emptiness and aimlessness deepen into a stronger despair. In an early draft of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Inquisitor gives a terrifying account of what happens to the human soul when it doubts its purpose: For the secret of man’s being is not only to live . . . but to live for something definite. Without a firm notion of what he is living for, man will not accept life and will rather destroy himself than remain on earth.

Call it the greatest good (summum bonum), the ultimate end, the meaning of life, or whatever you choose. But finding and fulfilling the purpose of our lives comes up in myriad ways and in all the seasons of our lives:

•Teenagers feel it as the world of freedom beyond home and secondary school beckons with a dizzying range of choices.

•Graduate students confront it when the excitement of the world is my oyster is chilled by the thought that opening up one choice means closing down others.

•Those in their early thirties know it when their daily work assumes its own brute reality beyond their earlier considerations of the wishes of their parents, the fashions of their peers, and the allure of salary and career prospects.

•People in midlife face it when a mismatch between their gifts and their work reminds them daily that they are square pegs in round holes. Can they see themselves doing that for the rest of their lives?

•Mothers feel it when their children grow up, and they wonder which high purpose will fill the void in the next stage of their lives.

•People in their forties and fifties with enormous success suddenly come up against it when their accomplishments raise questions concerning the social responsibility of their success and, deeper still, the purpose of their lives.

•People confront it in all the varying transitions of life—from moving homes to switching jobs to breakdowns in marriage to crises of health. Negotiating the changes feels longer and worse than the changes themselves because transition challenges our sense of personal meaning.

•Those in their later years often face it again. What does life add up to? Were their successes real, and were they worth the trade-offs? Having gained a whole world, however huge or tiny, have we sold our souls cheaply and missed the point of it all? As Walker Percy wrote, You can get all A’s and still flunk life.

This issue, the question of his own life-purpose, is what drove the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century. As he realized well, personal purpose is not a matter of philosophy or theory. It is not purely objective, and it is not inherited like a legacy. Many a scientist has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, many a philosopher can survey vast systems of thought, many a theologian can unpack the profundities of religion, and many a journalist can seemingly speak on any topic raised. But all that is theory and, without a sense of personal purpose, vanity.

Deep in our hearts, we all want to find and fulfill a purpose bigger than ourselves. Only such a larger purpose can inspire us to heights we know we could never reach on our own. For each of us the real purpose is personal and passionate: to know what we are here to do, and why. Kierkegaard wrote in his Journal: "The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."

In our own day this question is urgent in the highly modern parts of the world, and there is a simple reason why. Three factors have converged to fuel a search for significance without precedent in human history. First, the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our experiences as human beings. Second, the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity for choice and change in all we do. Third, fulfillment of the search for purpose is thwarted by a stunning fact: Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life. Thus more ignorance, confusion—and longing—surround this topic now than at almost any time in history. The trouble is that, as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for. Some feel they have time but not enough money; others feel they have money but not enough time. But for most of us, in the midst of material plenty, we have spiritual poverty.

This book is for all who long to find and fulfill the purpose of their lives. It argues that this purpose can be found only when we discover the specific purpose for which we were created and to which we are called. Answering the call of our Creator is the ultimate why for living, the highest source of purpose in human existence. Apart from such a calling, all hope of discovering purpose (as in the current talk of shifting from success to significance) will end in disappointment. To be sure, calling is not what it is commonly thought to be. It has to be dug out from under the rubble of ignorance and confusion. And, uncomfortably, it often flies directly in the face of our human inclinations. But nothing short of God’s call can ground and fulfill the truest human desire for purpose.

The inadequacy of other answers is growing clearer by the day. Capitalism, for all its creativity and fruitfulness, falls short when challenged to answer the question Why? By itself it is literally meaning-less, in that it is only a mechanism, not a source of meaning. So too are politics, science, psychology, management, self-help techniques, and a host of other modern theories. What Tolstoy wrote of science applies to all of them: Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important to us, ‘what shall we do and how shall we live?’ There is no answer outside a quest for purpose, and no answer to the quest is deeper and more satisfying than answering the call.

What do I mean by calling? For the moment let me define it simply like this: Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.

This truth—calling—has been a driving force in many of the greatest leaps forward in world history—the call of Abraham to start God’s new way on earth, the constitution of the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai, the birth of the Christian movement in Galilee, and the sixteenth-century Reformation and its incalculable impetus to the rise of the modern world, to name a few. Little wonder that the rediscovery of calling should be critical today, not least in satisfying the passion for purpose of millions of questing modern people.

For whom is this book written? For all who seek such purpose. For all, whether believers or seekers, who are open to the call of the most influential person in history—Jesus of Nazareth. In particular, this book is written for those who know that their source of purpose must rise above the highest of self-help humanist hopes and who long for their faith to have integrity and effectiveness in the face of all the challenges of the modern world.

Let me speak personally. I’ve written many books over the course of my life, but no book has burned within me longer or more fiercely than this one. The truth of calling has been as important to me in my journey of faith as any truth of the gospel of Jesus. In my early days of following Jesus, I was nearly swayed by others to head toward spheres of work they believed were worthier for everyone and right for me. If I was truly dedicated, they said, I should train to be a minister or a missionary. (We will examine this fallacy of full-time religious service in chapter 7.) Coming to understand calling liberated me from their well-meaning but false teaching and set my feet on the path that has been God’s way for me.

I did not know it then, but the start of my search (and the genesis of this book) lay in a chance conversation in the 1960s, in the days before self-service gas stations. I had just had my car filled up with gas and enjoyed a marvelously rich conversation with the pump attendant. As I turned the key and the engine of the forty-year-old Austin Seven roared to life, a thought suddenly hit me with the force of an avalanche: This man was the first person I had spoken to in a week who was not a church member. I was in danger of being drawn into a religious ghetto.

Urged on all sides to see that, because I had come to faith, my future must lie in the ministry, I had volunteered to work in a well-known church for nine months—and was miserable. To be fair, I admired the pastor and the people and enjoyed much of the work. But it just wasn’t me. My passion was to relate my faith to the exciting and exploding secular world of early 1960s Europe, but there was little or no scope for that in the ministry. Ten minutes of conversation with a friendly gas pump attendant on a beautiful spring evening in Southampton, England, and I knew once and for all that I was not cut out to be a minister.

Needless to say, recognizing who we aren’t is only the first step toward knowing who we are. Escape from a false sense of life-purpose is only liberating if it leads to a true one. Journalist Ambrose Bierce reached only halfway. When I was in my twenties, he wrote, I concluded one day that I was not a poet. It was the bitterest moment of my life.

Looking back on the years since my conversation at the gas station, I can see that calling was positive for me, not negative. Released from what was not me, my discovery of my calling enabled me to find what I was. Having wrestled with the stirring saga of calling in history and having taken up the challenge of God’s individual call to me, I have been mastered by this truth. God’s call has become a sure beacon ahead of me and a blazing fire within me as I have tried to figure out my way and negotiate the challenges of the extraordinary times in which we live. The chapters that follow are not academic or theoretical; they have been hammered out on the anvil of my own experience.

Do you long to discover your own sense of purpose and fulfillment? Let me be plain. You will not find here a one-page executive summary, a how-to manual, a twelve-step program, or a ready-made game plan for figuring out the rest of your life. What you will find may point you toward one of the most powerful and truly awesome truths that has ever arrested the human heart.

In Ages of Faith, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the final aim of life is placed beyond life. That is what calling does. Follow me, Jesus said two thousand years ago, and he changed the course of history. That is why calling provides the Archimedean point by which faith moves the world. That is why calling is the most comprehensive reorientation and the most profound motivation in human experience—the ultimate Why for living in all history. Calling begins and ends such ages, and lives, of faith by placing the final aim of life beyond the world where it was meant to be. Answering the call is the way to find and fulfill the central purpose of your life—God’s purpose for your life.

Do you have a reason for being, a focused sense of purpose in your life? Or is your life the product of shifting resolutions and the myriad pulls of forces outside yourself? Do you want to go beyond success to significance? Have you come to realize that self-reliance always falls short and that world-denying solutions provide no answer in the end? Listen to the commanding invitation of Jesus that is both a call and a charge: Follow me.

2

SEEKERS SOUGHT

He was only sixty-four years old, but battered by the vagaries of life, he was taken to be in his seventies. Nearing the end of his life far from his sunlit Italy, burdened by the irreparable disintegration of his greatest masterpiece, and brooding on his life’s grand failures, he was submerged in melancholy. Almost doodling perhaps, he took a sheet and drew a series of little rectangles. Each one stood for one of his life’s great endeavors, the dreams and aspirations that had inspired his adult days as the greatest artist of his generation and probably the most versatile and creative inventor of all time.

First he sketched the little rectangles upright. But then, as if he’d pushed them, he drew them toppling one on top of another like collapsing dominoes. Underneath he wrote, One pushes down the other. By these little blocks are meant the life and the efforts of men.

Who, knowing his story, could blame Leonardo da Vinci? Strong, handsome, gifted, self-reliant, and ambitious, he had set out in life with extraordinary assurance but refreshing modesty. When he was young and living in Florence, he had even copied into his notebook the verse:

Let him who cannot do the thing he would

Will to do that he can. To will is foolish

Where there’s no power to do. That man is wise

Who, if he cannot, does not wish he could.

But da Vinci soon left such cautious modesty behind. Throughout his adult life, whether in Florence, Milan, Rome, or France, he was bent on stretching the limits of his powers. Some would say he merely exemplified the hard lot of artists amid the rivalries, jealousies, and favoritisms of the world of Renaissance art and its patrons. As Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance artist and historian, wrote, Florence treats its artists as time its creatures: it creates them and then slowly destroys and consumes them.

Others, both then and later, said that da Vinci would have been wiser to concentrate on a few gifts rather than the many that comprised his genius. This lack of focus, they said, was why he procrastinated while others, like Michelangelo, produced. Alas, Pope Leo X exclaimed dismissively of da Vinci, this man will never get anything done, for he is thinking about the end before he begins. Vasari himself regretted that da Vinci had not kept to painting rather than pursuing his myriad inventions that were years, sometimes centuries, before their time.

But the real problem lay elsewhere. The creator of such peerless masterpieces as the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa was a passionate seeker with a voracious hunger for knowledge and a pressing sense of the fleeting nature of time. But da Vinci’s creative gifts, his ardent pursuit of knowledge, and his awareness of the brevity of life all clashed to create a crushing sense that the pursuit of perfection was a tragic impossibility. It was always, "So little time. So much