Quotes about Vocation

When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we know better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

What the Bible offers is not a "works contract," but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator's purpose for his world.

Saul of Tarsus, in other words, had found a new vocation. It would demand all the energy, all the zeal, that he had devoted to his former way of life. He was now to be a herald of the king.

According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God's purposes for the world.

When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father's purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.

God made humans to reflect his glory, his love, his wisdom into the world, and in the new creation God will not revoke this vocation. He will gloriously fulfill it. We will become more human, not less.

Israel isn't chosen in order to be God's special people while the rest of the world remains in outer darkness. Israel is chosen to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Israel is chosen so that, through Israel, God can bless all people. And now Jesus is calling Israel to be the light of the world at last. He is opening the way, carving a path through the jungle towards that vocation, urging his followers to come with him on the dangerous road.

That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.

Romans 2:17—3:9 is concerned, first, with the worldwide purpose of Israel's divine vocation (2:17—20); second, with Israel's covenantal failure (2:21—24; 3:2—4); and third, with the problem that this poses for God's dikaiosyn?, his "righteousness" (3:5). How is God to be faithful to the covenant—to rescue and bless the world through the Jews—if Israel is faithless?

Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we knew better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

The non-Jewish nations were supposed to look at Israel and praise Israel's God. Instead, they looked at Israel and blasphemed his name. The vocation had turned sour.