The Overcomer Trust

“CALLED BY GRACE” (Gal. 1)

By J.C.Metcalfe.

“Only the man who has felt the power of Jesus can tell someone else of that marvellous power . . . The passion for Jesus becomes a passion for telling others about Jesus.”  S.D.Gordon.

To start our study of the call of God we will look first of all at what Paul has to say about God’s call to him. Almost automatically one finds oneself turning to the first chapter of Galatians. Here Paul tells just how he was set apart to serve the Saviour, to Whom he had surrendered unconditionally on the road to Damascus. First of all, however, in verse six he speaks of the call of God, which is common to all Christians, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (Gal. 1 v6). A note in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges runs, “Our calling is in grace, in His free and unmerited favour and goodness, as opposed to all notion of salvation by moral or ceremonial righteousness”.

It cannot be too strongly emphasised that God’s call is to jettison every other basis of confidence and to rely utterly and alone upon His provided substitute, Who on the Cross bore our sins, and now in the glory is the continual and sole pledge of our acceptance with God. Until this call has been heard and accepted, it is meaningless to speak of a call to Christian service.

How fond we are of coining words and phrases, which are not found in Scripture, and adding them to an already unwieldy evangelical vocabulary! The word ‘challenge’ is likely, unless we are very careful, to obscure the call of grace and to rivet our attention on some effort of our own, which we feel may win acceptance with God, and may easily degenerate into ‘another gospel’.

From the moment that we respond as lost sinners to the call of God and find our salvation in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, we become dependent upon Him. All His dealings with us are then designed to teach us the joy of reliance upon Him in actual day by day experience. From being dead to God we have become vitally alive to Him, and His indwelling Spirit imparts to us a seeking after God, which is our wonderful heritage. Oswald Chambers wrote in his book, “My Utmost for His Highest”, ‘The call of God is not for the special few, it is for everyone. Whether or not I hear God’s call depends on the state of my ears, and what I hear depends on my attitude . . . The chosen ones are those who have come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, whereby their attitude has been altered and their ears unstopped, and they hear the still small voice questioning, ‘Who will go for us?’

It is not a question of God singling out a man and saying, ‘Now you go’. Get out of your mind the idea of expecting God to come with compulsions and pleadings. When our Lord called His disciples there was no irresistible compulsion from outside. The quiet passionate insistence of His ‘Follow Me’ was spoken to men with every power wide awake. If we let the Spirit of God bring us face to face with God we too will hear something akin to what Isaiah heard, the still small voice of God, and in perfect freedom will say, ‘Here am I, send me’.

We are called in the first instance into fellowship with God, a fellowship which means that our interests are common. He cares for us and His concerns are ours. If then He needs us for any special task He is able to lead us step by step into His plans as they mature. As a young Christian I was brought up on the book, “Hudson Taylor in Early Years”, and have again and again turned to its pages. The thing that has always stood out to me is the fact that God first of all led him on in passionate devotion to Himself, and then came the time when He felt that He could share with His servant His own concern for the millions of China.

So it was with Paul. In Galatians 1 v13-16 he gives us a remarkable piece of spiritual autobiography, and sketches in a few sentences his early adherence to religion, the religion of law, works and tradition. Because of his natural disposition of passionate earnestness he was able to say, “I was ahead of most of my contemporaries in the Jewish religion and had a far greater enthusiasm for the old traditions”  (J.B.Phillips). Then God intervenes and viewing his whole life with new eyes he now sees God’s hand laid upon him from before his birth. How wonderfully heredity, environment and upbringing, in the hand of our gracious God can all contribute to the formation of a character in which He will be glorified. We can be so fearful of the attitudes from our unconverted days, but if we will let Him, God can turn all that the past contains, even the bad, to profit.

Next Paul speaks of grace and God’s summons to him to break with everything upon which he might rely, and to trust Christ alone. “Circumcised on the eighth day”, he writes, “of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the Church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ” (Phil. 3 v5-7). Called into grace his response was wholehearted. Everything was deserted, ‘counted refuse’, for the knowledge of Christ, in Whom all the love of God for and the grace of God towards man is centered.

Finally he stresses the object of the gracious calling, “to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles” (v16). Agar Beet pithily remarks, “For none but those in whose inner life Christ is revealed can preach Him aright”. It would also seem that such preaching is not merely that of lip but also of life; and that the apostle implies that every attitude is to be a sermon, a conclusion which his final meeting with the elders of the Church at Ephesus would seem to confirm (Acts 20 v17-35). Here he appeals even more to the example he set them than the verbal messages he preached. The man who is truly called of God will seek by every means in his power to bring his life into harmony with his spoken message, so that the one is never contradicted by the other.

Bishop Lightfoot’s paraphrase of verses 15 and 16 is illuminating, “Then came my conversion. It was the work of God’s grace. It was foreordained before I had any separate existence. It was not therefore due to any merits of my own, it did not spring from any principles of my own. The revelation of His Son in me, the call to preach to the Gentiles, were acts of His good pleasure”. No wonder Paul takes up the position of complete abasement, “Yet when I preach the Gospel, I cannot boast: for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor. 9 v16). So often in these days a call into Christian service is invested with something of the romance of medieval knighthood and wears a mantle of high endeavour. And yet good advice to any budding worker is, ‘Do not preach unless you must”. There is a gracious compulsion about a call to service which quietly and gradually draws a man on into an ever deepening fellowship with his Lord, through which he learns to see the need which God sees and then sometimes with seeming suddenness, as when Barnabas arrived in Tarsus seeking for Saul, he is launched out, not by his own engineering but by an act of God into the full plan for his life. This plan will inevitably lead him into conflict, self-denial and suffering, but at the same time into such close contact with his Lord that he will be mightily enriched, now in this life as well as in eternity (Matt. 19 v29-30).

The reason for which the Church exists is that Christ should be proclaimed as Saviour and Lord and there is no other. God’s purpose is that His Son shall be seen in the life of the Church, which means the lives of the individual members, and that all of us shall be ready to fit into His campaign of grace in whatever capacity, great or small, prominent or hidden, in which He deigns to place us. For “in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as He wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. . .  Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Cor. 12 v18-27). Therefore “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2 v3-4). As we learn these lessons, and discover how we can bear the burdens of others and care for their concerns, He Who calls us will put us in the place where we shall most be able, whether by life or lip, to preach Him to all.

That will be great gain. Grace will have triumphed and He will be glorified.

From: ‘The Bible and the Call of God’.

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