- How can we measure success differently for the next decade? What would it look like not to just bring people into the church, but to send them back out into the world? At Grace, we wanna follow Jesus in our whole lives, where we live, work, learn, and play. The church isn't just here to meet your needs, it's here to train and equip you a need to meet the needs of the world. Join us in September as we think big, start small, and go deep as a missional force in our communities. Well, hi everyone, I wanna begin with a question. What is the goal of the Christian life? A lot of people think it's to get to heaven, and certainly that's one of the most beautiful outcomes. But if that was the goal, doesn't it? Standard reason that the moment you got saved, you would just get whisked away by God. God's like, "Who got another one, and let's bring 'em in." Why mess around with anything down here on earth any longer? So if you were saved at 15, why would you spend 70 more years before getting promoted to heaven at age 85, or if you were saved at 40? Why wait for 32 more years before heaven? It seems a bit inefficient of God to waste all that time. That is, unless there's a different goal of the Christian life during our time on earth. In fact, the Bible seems to indicate that if you're a Christian, your goal on earth is to discover and live out God's purpose for your life. That the years of life between your salvation and heaven are your opportunity to pursue your divine calling. There's this incredible aspect of our relationship with God called co-creationism. Jewish theology would often emphasize these two truths. One, that God is not dependent on us. Thank the Lord He's not. God doesn't need us. He can operate just fine without anything that you or I have to offer. God is not dependent on us, but the second truth is, God chooses to not be independent of us. So God's purpose is always run through a person. God's desire to liberate people from slavery included Moses. God's rescue of His people from catastrophe included Esther. God's efforts to rescue mankind flowed through Mary and Joseph. So God invites people, like you and me, to co-create the future with Him. We see it right from the start of the Bible when God creates Adam and Eve, and then He immediately shares that creative impulse with them. They tend to the garden, name the animals, multiply to the nations. And the journey toward understanding your calling also involves understanding that at God's invitation, you are a co-creator with Him to create the future of the earth. Isn't that an incredible gift and responsibility? And listen, your calling is not a mystery to be unraveled. It's not a series of clues to be decoded or a Rubik's Cube to be solved. Callings are not just for the professional Christians either. The pastors and missionaries. Your calling will probably not be discovered by some magnificent experience like Moses and a burning bush or Paul with fire in the sky or Mary's meet up with an angel. These are exceptions and not the rule. But God's calling is for everyone. And it's often discovered by walking with God through the simple assignments of day-to-day life, allowing your spirit to be responsive and getting your mind and heart around how He made you and putting words to where He has placed you to serve Him with your life. And so we're gonna look today at Jeremiah chapter one, which is a beautiful biblical example of a calling from God in action. See, as so God intimately invited this teenager to look at the plans for His life. And as we roll out this awake-the-lake vision here at Grace for our future, this idea of helping each person to discover your calling is right at the cornerstone of this whole initiative. Here's my big idea today. God has entrusted you with a unique calling, will you discover it? A lot of people don't. Listen to this quote from Mark Badderson. He says, "I'm not convinced that your date of death "is the date carved on your tombstone. "Most people die long before that. "We start dying when we have nothing worth living for "and we don't really start living "until we find something worth dying for. "Knowing your calling is the way to true life." And so I'd encourage you to head on over to Jeremiah chapter one in your Bible or your Bible app. And we're gonna start in verse four. And as you're getting there, I just wanna set some context. Jeremiah was a prophet in the Old Testament. He prophesied right before and really during the darkest moment in Israel's history, during the exile. He was a prophet in Judah. And even though Judah had seen the spiritual decline of Israel and the destruction and judgment that followed, the people of Judah continued to turn their backs on God. And so Jeremiah's task was to warn these unrepentant people that the day of reckoning was almost upon them. He prophesied for 50 years. And he's become known as the weeping prophet because although he pleaded with Judah to return to God over and over and over again, the people never did. And so we find ourselves today at the beginning of Jeremiah's story. And at this point, Jeremiah's a teenager with his whole life ahead of him. And already we find that he knows and he loves God. And so I wanna frame today's message this way. These are three unique truths about your unique calling. We look at Jeremiah chapter one, verse four. It says, "Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, "before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. "And before you were born, I consecrated you. "I appointed you a prophet to the nations." So here's the first unique truth that I want you to see about your unique calling. Your calling has been handcrafted by God. Do you hear the depth of the intimate knowledge that God has for each of his children? He says, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." There's this eternal knowledge of the name and the soul and the role of each person to God. God knew you from eternity past. And listen, God is not just expressing a knowledge of Jeremiah's life here. He's also expressing a consecration of his role. It says here that Jeremiah was appointed as a prophet to the nations before he was even born. This word prophet here is kind of a looser term. It means speaker or I like the literal translation, gushing at the mouth. Some of you could adopt that as your own calling. God has called me to be a gusher of the mouth. I'm not annoying, I'm just living out my calling. I can see all the merchandise now. Anyway, before you came into existence, you were in God's imagination. He has made you exactly who you are to be in order to do everything he has called you to do. There is no one like you on the planet. He formed you in the womb. It says he knows you and he's destined you for specific work in the world. A huge part of understanding what God has called you to do is understanding first who he made you to be, looking at your passions, looking at your gifts and your skills, examining your life experiences and the things that he's allowed you to walk through and learn along the way. I heard a speaker one time say that when we stand before God at the end of our life, people think, always think that God's gonna ask why weren't you more like Jesus, which he probably will. This speaker said, what if God asked a different question? Why weren't you more like you? You see, every part of you was designed by God with detailed precision. And Ephesians 210 Paul reminds us of this one. He says, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. This word workmanship is actually the word for poyema, which where we get our word poem. We are his poem, poetry, we are his work of art. We are God's masterpiece. But notice, it's not so that we can sit back and just admire our beauty or admire the skills that God has given us. It's not so that we can use those things for our own benefit, for our own lifestyle, for our own retirement account. He says, you were designed and you were created by God to do the good works that God has prepared for each of you to walk in. And so it sounds super spiritual to say, listen, I don't, I just need to get myself out of the way so that God can work. And listen, that's true when it comes to your old self, your sinful self. There is a death to the old self that Jesus commands and he's very clear about that. But there's also this redeemed self, a created self that God made a certain way so that he can co-create with you in the world. So it's not just God working, it's God and you working. I remember some years ago, I heard somebody play a guitar solo at church and I went up and encouraged them and I said, man, you're really gifted at guitar playing. It really blessed me to watch you use your gift today. And he was like, bro, that wasn't me at all. That was all God. And I always wanna say, it wasn't that good, man. I mean, if it was all God, he would have been shredding like nothing you've ever heard before. See, it's not unspiritual to understand that yes, God works with us, but he's always used imperfect people like us. That's the beauty of this co-creating arrangement that he's set up. So we have to get curious, not just about what does God want us to do out there. We have to get curious about what God has given us in here. Who are you? What gifts do you have? What personality do you have? What perspective do you have? What life experiences do you have? What are you skilled at? What are you passionate about? What are you frustrated about? All of these things are part of your makeup. All of these things are part of how God has handcrafted you and how God will use all of these things to accomplish the good works that he's prepared in advance for you to do. St. Augustine once said, men go abroad to wonder at the heights of the mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars. And they passed by themselves without wondering. God said to Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and before you were born, I consecrated you to speak for me because I created you to speak. So that's the first unique truth. You're calling has been handcrafted by God. Here's the second. Your calling will be accompanied, sorry, by doubts. Look at verse six, what he says. He says, then I said, ah, Lord God, behold, I do not know how to speak, for I'm only a youth. But the Lord said to me, do not say I'm only a youth for to all whom I send you, you shall go. And whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord. This is such a great word, especially for all of our young people today. First of all, what better time to wrestle through God's calling over your life than when you're young? So many young people are just using the world's playbook. You just go to high school and you either succeed or you just get by and then you go to college and you either succeed or just have a lot of fun. You get a job, you really enjoy that job or you really resent it, you buy a house, you start a family, you know the drill. And you can go through that whole cycle. Never asking the question, what has God won for my life? What has God given me? Where has God placed me? Who has God called me to influence? And guys, if you can be asking those questions at age 15, instead of at age 55, man, the impact God could have with your life, you know, we read the Bible and we think that all of these amazing saints are grizzled old white haired, wrinkled up men and women. Do you know how many people in your Bible God used when they were teenagers? Let's start with all 12 of the disciples for heaven's sakes. Jesus was running a youth group. You think about David, a teenager, Joseph, a teenager. Think about Miriam, Miriam, Moses sister, a teenager. Think about Esther, a very young woman. Think about Mary, the mother of Jesus. The angel appeared to her when she was a teenager. So many of Paul's traveling companions. Paul had to write to Timothy, the young pastor of a brand new church and say, don't let those people down on you just because you're a kid. Lead them, set an example for them. Students, right now, right now, be communicating to God about your calling. You guys are not the church of the future. You are the church of right now. And Jeremiah is in this same boat. He's really young. He tries to use his age as an excuse, but God's not having it. You see, with a calling comes all kinds of doubts. And like Jeremiah, we can convince ourselves that there's nothing truly special about who we are. We're too young or we're too old. Our abilities aren't that significant. Our passions aren't that extraordinary. The environment we're in would never allow us to pursue that calling, excuses upon excuses. And in the end, we settle for an ordinary life with modest expectations of what God could ever do through us. Here are four excuses when it comes to our calling. These are borrowed from Rob Wagner in his book Find Your Place. That the first is the jungles of Africa excuse. So a lot of people won't even look into their calling for fear that God might send them somewhere that they don't want to go or possibly call them to do something that they don't want to do. And I've just found this fear to be largely unfounded. God, in his grace, almost always causes us to desire the things he wants us to desire when we are walking with him. Now that doesn't mean things will always be safe or comfortable, but God doesn't just call you. He also prepares your heart for that calling. Second is that I don't have anything to offer excuse. This is pure insecurity and it prevents people from recognizing that God is the giver of all gifts and that he's given his spirit to every single one of his followers. And those gifts are an expression of his love and his creativity and his commitment to engage us in his work. And each and every gift and individual involved in God's work matters to God. So if you're loved by God and you're gifted by God and the gifts he's given you then are very important to him. Third is the I'm too busy excuse. Everyone has the same number of minutes in a day and yet some people think they're busier than others. But how we use those minutes is determined by what we find most valuable. So if there's no room in your schedule to discover and develop your calling means you simply have not valued your calling enough to prioritize it. And by doing so you're missing out on the very reason that you're on the planet. Also often living your calling isn't about adding more time to your schedule. It's about doing what you're already doing with a brand new perspective or maximizing your kingdom purposes. Fourth excuse is the I'm already using all my gifts excuse. This is often for people who are already serving comfortably in a role or in a ministry. And by doing so they may actually be passing up other opportunities to explore new areas of passion or giftedness. Sometimes it requires that fresh look to see if God might have gifts or opportunities that you're not currently using. And again, maybe he's calling you to keep doing exactly what you're doing but with a renewed emphasis or mindset. And so Jeremiah puts forward his excuse. He says, I don't know how to speak. I'm too young and God's response is priceless. Notice he brings it back to the court problem and the court problem he identifies as fear. He says, don't be afraid. Oh, why? Because I'll be with you. You'll go where I want you to go. You'll say what I want you to say and I'm gonna be with you every step of the way. See God comes back to our dependency on him. You know, when God calls you to something there's always a gap between what's required for the assignment and your skill level. And God does this on purpose to develop our dependency on him. In other words, you're never gonna feel fully equipped to do what God asks you to do. It feels like what God asks you to do is up here and your skills and ability and experiences are way down here. And so why would God do that? Well, he would do that so you could learn to depend on him. This is a kingdom assignment after all and you ain't the king. So God says to Moses, you're called to lead a nation but his experience was as a stutterer. God says to David, you're called to be a king but his skill was as a shepherd. God says to Noah, I'm calling you to build an ark but it's not even raining and people are making fun of me and where will I find materials and all the animals and I've never built a huge boat before. God says to Jeremiah, you're gonna be gushing at the mouth for me. But I don't know how to do that and I'm too young to figure that out. See, there's always this gap between what God has called you to which is up here and your abilities which are down here. Now, the temptation for us is to fill this gap with excuses and security or to fill this gap with your own ideas, your own efforts, your own strength. But the whole reason the gap is there is so that you can learn to fill it with dependency on God. It forces you into a posture of saying God, I know I can't do this on my own. You're gonna have to make up the difference. And that's what God's doing here with Jeremiah because part of God's training regimen for new recruits into this world of their calling is to learn dependency upon him. Look at verse nine. It says, "Then the Lord put out His hand "and He touched my mouth. "And the Lord said, 'Behold, I have put my words "in your mouth.'" See, I've set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Here's the third unique truth. It's that you're calling is your reason for being alive. Can you feel how profound this moment is between God and Jeremiah? Can you imagine being a teenage kid and taking this all in? First God touches his lips. And then he basically lays out Jeremiah's whole life purpose before him. He begins by saying, "I've put my words in your mouth." He says, "You're gonna be, "you're gonna be set up over nations and over kingdoms." And then God calls Jeremiah a planter and a builder, not a literal planter, like a farmer, not a literal builder, like a contractor, but a prophet, a speaker who builds things with his words, this planting and building. It's not gonna happen on neutral ground. Did you notice that to plant, he's gonna need to plow up some things first. Things that have grown where they shouldn't have grown. In order to build, there's gonna have to be some things that are torn down and removed. See, this calling is not gonna be easy. It's gonna consume his life at times. But it will be good and it will be lasting. Not everyone will appreciate it. In fact, for most of Jeremiah's life, people didn't appreciate it. But again, the promise remains the same. God says, "I will be with you." These are the same words Jesus passed on to his disciples in his great commission. We talked about this last week. Remember the command to be sure of this, be sure of this. I am with you always, there it is. I'm with you always, even to the end of the age. It's what God continues to say to all of us who have ever been designed by his great imagination. I will be with you. I designed you for good works to walk out a calling that I have for you in this world. And if you let me continue to form and make you, I'm gonna help you step into that divine design. The God who formed you is also committed to forge the future with you. But you must choose to step into it. Remember this, your calling is the reason you're still breathing air. I said at the beginning that one of our deep commitments in this new vision initiative is to help every believer, not just at grace, but really across our whole region to find and name their divine calling. This summer I was able to help create a training experience with our friends from Clarity House, Dave and Shane, it's called Hand Crafted. Discover the divine calling you were made for. And after we get some final bugs worked out, we're hoping to start offering this experience in January of 2025 to anyone who wants to discover and live out their calling, both inside and outside the walls of the church. I'm so excited to see many of you walk through this experience. It's one of the key pieces of our strategy going forward. Now, speaking of strategy, you know, I talked in week one about changing the finish line of discipleship that we'd created maybe at grace, a false finish line inside the walls of the church when really discipleship should be extending outside these walls seven days a week. So we created a new strategy map for Grace Church and how we want to approach this endeavor of working alongside the Holy Spirit to develop remarkable people. So let me nerd out on this just for a minute. The major shift is this. Previously, our next steps pathway was largely about moving people from program to program inside our walls. In this new strategy, half of it is inside and half of it is outside the church. This obviously represents all kinds of changes and challenges and how we structure the church and how we staff the church, for example. In many churches, most staff dollars and energies go toward making weekend services happen. And we're trying to reimagine a church spending similar efforts and energies, coaching and resourcing and serving people from our church who are living out their callings in the real world, not just pulling off great Sunday services. So the strategy map looks like this. We're calling disciples at grace to be together in worship. That's the gathering of the saints and it's still a cornerstone of who we are. The next major step is to experience belonging by joining either a life group or a ministry team, but that's not where the church's role ends. In the scriptures, the church both gathers and scatters. And so we're saying that once somebody gathers and connects and feels like family and belongs to a missional community in the form of a life group or a team, that the next step is to build your calling, to really put words to why God has you on the planet. And once you've established that, your job then is to bless your world. You'll notice that line on the strategy map going up and up and up as you're growing and maturing and finding your identity in Christ. And then why does the line drop down at the build you're calling into bless your world? Because when you find your calling, the true mark of Christian maturity is then to descend, to step down, to assume the role of a servant in the world and to bless your world. And as you're blessing the world around you by living out your calling, we also wanna help you to identify your primary place where you're leveraging that missional energy. In general terms, we wanna help you to prioritize one of five missional arenas in your life. Either your neighborhood or the marketplace where you work or the church or non-profit or an affinity group. So not only to identify what God has called you to do, but to identify the people in the place that God has led you to influence during this chapter of your life. Now, you may wonder why the map is shaped that way. There are two primary metaphors here that the shape represents to make it memorable. We're hoping to be able to draw things like this on a napkin. The first and main metaphor is that the shape is roughly the outline of Erie County along the Lakeshore. You can see that little peninsula there with the connect phase, jutting out as a place to take refuge and find relationship. And what better image for a vision that's called awake the lake than a strategy map in the shape of our Lakeshore? The secondary metaphor, because we're using this idea of story so heavily in our language, is that the shape loosely follows the pattern of a story arc, Fritegg's pyramid to be exact. It shows the parts of a story like the exciting force and the rising movement and the climax and then the falling action and the denouement, the resolution of the plot. Again, the imagery itself is secondary. The main point here is that our strategy going forward includes initiatives both inside the church, be and belong and outside the walls of the church, build and bless. And it's really making us rethink everything about how we operate as a church as we come alongside each of you to help you live out your discipleship journey. So we saw today through the story of Jeremiah that your calling has been handcrafted by God, that your calling will be accompanied by doubts and that your calling is the reason, your reason for being alive. I want to close out today with a story and a challenge. This past year was a very special one here in the Erie area as we experienced the total solar eclipse and impacted me way more than I thought it would. So our whole family crew kind of gathered by the lake and we got the special glasses and we got to watch the eclipse together for a generational kind of memory. And here's what made it so special. You know, we here in Erie, we were in what was called the path of totality. Now, having never experienced a total eclipse before, I didn't realize how important it was to be in the path of totality. Our daughter, Aidan, was in Columbus, Ohio just a few hours away, but they were not in the path of totality. They were in like a 97% coverage area. And I thought, how big of a deal could that really be? 3% more of a shadow. Like, but those of you who experienced it know that that 3% made all the difference. For those of you who weren't in the path of totality, the whole eclipse thing seemed a little bit overhyped. Was it just the media, you know, wanting to make up a story or the eclipse glasses makers wanting to make a profit? If you were in the 97% zone, it maybe got a little dark and maybe got a little gray for well, almost like a heavy fog set in. The streetlights came on for a minute, but soon everything was back to normal. Pretty cool. But if you weren't paying attention, you might have actually missed it. But for those of us in the path of totality, baby, we had a completely different experience. We were astounded by the wonder of this celestial moment. Some people cried. Others had existential moments of reflection and peace at the wonder of God's creation. It was a day we will never forget as long as we live. I went in and immediately wrote an entry in my journal about the event. It was deeply moving. But when we talked to our daughter in Columbus, it was as if the event in Erie and the event in Columbus were completely different things. And here's my point. What is true about the solar eclipse is also true about the journey toward your life's calling. You can choose to live on the edges of your divine design if you want. You can live in the 97%. And if you do, you're gonna accomplish some important things. Using some of the great skills that God has given you for good. You're gonna raise a family. You're gonna maybe attend church on Sundays. But you may also find yourself unchanged and unaffected in the deepest part of who you are. Jeremiah could have done that with his moment too. Despite his encounter with God as a teenager, he could have just gone a different direction. He could have given into his doubts and excuses. Maybe he would have had a solid career, helping people, but not quite the mouthpiece of God that was promised to him as a young man. But instead, Jeremiah chose to move into the path of totality with God, to step under the full shadow of his divine design and his life's calling. In fact, Jeremiah's Old Testament book lives on to tell the story of what a life that stepped into the totality of God can look like. Wasn't always easy. Wasn't always successful by the world's standards. But he got to walk intimately with his creator the whole way. What an adventure. You know, God's been dreaming about your life from the beginning of time. He said, "Before you were in your mother's womb, I knew you. I believe that you and I can actually learn to know and name our callings from God." But to do so, you're gonna have to do more than just hear a few sermons and go on your way. You're gonna have to step into a process of discovery and surrender. And that's what that handcrafted experience is that I mentioned earlier. We're hoping by the end of this, 1% of all of your county will go through that experience over the next couple of years. You know, I think there's a difference between God's will for your life and God's calling on your life. His will certainly is that you would have a heart posture of humility and surrender and willingness to obey in any and every circumstance. His calling, his calling is the work that he's wired you to do and the people that he's asked you to influence. And these things he invites you into while you maintain that surrendered heart posture. One of my favorite authors, Frederick Bekner has a quote where he says, "Calling is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." In other words, don't just ask what makes me come alive because you'll wind up a narcissist. And don't just ask what does the world need or you'll become exhausted and burned out. The sweet spot of this thing is when you figure out how you've been uniquely wired and prepared in what you love to do. And then you ask God, who and where have you called me to uniquely serve you with these gifts? There's incredible clarity that comes when you start putting words to that. That's where we wanna help our whole bunch of people at Grace Church to do that and to really a whole bunch of people around our region to do that. And I just believe we can unleash an army of tens of thousands of hopebearers that could just change this whole place. I'll get more specific on that next weekend. When I talk about this, I feel the unspoken anxiety of people thinking, am I missing it? Am I only glimpsing the edges of God's design or am I living in totality? How would a person even move from 97% to totality? It's easy to see when you think of somebody like a pastor Scott or Pastor Mike who you guys know, going from a vocation in the world to kind of full-time ministry. Is that what it has to look like? No, it doesn't, it truly, truly doesn't. It may mean staying in your exact job but identifying that God has given you a passion for a unique thing that you could finally put into words. Maybe it's connecting the disconnected. That's what God's wired you to do. And so at work, yes, you do your job and you do it really well. But you also have your antenna up in every single room you're in, every single meeting, every single conversation that if someone is disconnected from maybe their purpose or maybe our friend is disconnected from their family or a struggling person is disconnected from the resources that they need to survive. That the reason that you're on the planet is to connect the disconnected. That changes everything for you if you know those words. Or maybe instead of just being a good neighbor, your calling is to see your neighborhood like a pastor sees a parish or that your calling is to make sure every student in your school gets a word of encouragement by year's end. See, sometimes stepping out of the shadows and into totality just looks like putting words to what God wants to co-create with you in the world. God has entrusted you with a unique calling. Will you discover it? Now, let me leave you today with a question as a next step. Would you ask this? What is holding me back from discovering or stepping into my calling? Use your chair time this week and Jeremiah chapter one to wrestle with God about that one. I love you guys.
