As a Christian I have heard a multitude of times the concept of hearing God’s call. It’s mentioned all the time and referenced in any situation that involves a decision. All right now don't get ahead of me and think I am going to start bashing on this concept and tearing it to pieces. In fact what I want to do is the exact opposite of that and say we are not taking the concept far enough. We need to not only hear the call of God but we need to listen to it and act upon it.
Being a former PK (Pastor kid) and a current MK (Missionary kid) this idea has been around me all my life. Do you have any direction in your life or feel unsatisfied with your current situation? If you said yes to either one of those the first piece of advice someone is likely to give you is you need to listen to God’s call. So you go back to your daily routine and pray and study and grow as a Christian. However, you still feel the same way as before. You are incredibly confused. You’re convinced that you have heard God’s call and yet nothing has changed. Why? Because, you just heard the call and did not listen to it or act upon it.
When I was in 7th grade my father was a pastor of a small church in Ohio. One day he and my mother came to me and told me that this place and this ministry was not what God had in mind for us. I was horribly confused and in denial why God would want to take me away from the place I had so far spent my entire life. I was pretty angry with God but over time it worked out and now I realize that was what God wanted for us. The point of that story was that my father not only heard God’s call for him but was willing and had the faith to listen to him. This is what we all need to strive to do. Listen to God and not just sit back and say all right God when is this plan of yours going to start cause I am ready when you are.
If we spend our entire lives doing what we want and ignoring any type of call or nudge from God we won’t necessarily have a bad life and everything will turn out horrible or we’ll never truly get anywhere. What I'm saying is that we can have a life blessed by God and endorsed by God. It’s like a sports team. A team can do fine by itself with no corporate sponsor, and privately owned. But with no sponsor it can go south very quickly. What a sponsor is there for is breathing room someone that will have your back if you have a rough season or loose an important player. For Christians God is the corporate sponsor of our lives. When we have a bad year or month or couple of years maybe it was because we were doing it on our own without any advice from our backer.
Put simply if we hear God and don’t act on it we never truly heard Him in the first place. We can’t sit by idly and wait for God’s call to start we need to listen. We need to trust. Most important we need to act on what His plans for us are. As a Christian we need to strive to not only listen very carefully for what God wants us to do. We need to also take that risk and jump in head first and trust that he has our back in whatever we do for Him.
