Christian Vocation
What is ministry? – Part 3
(Part 1, Part 2)
1 Thess. 4:1, “Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more.”
1 Tim. 4:16, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching…”
Our life and doctrine are both constantly upheld in scripture. It is not good enough to simply have all the right answers. If we get the gospel right it will necessarily change our answer to the question, “who is my neighbor?” We must be doers and hearers of the word, showing our faith by what we do (James 2:18). Equally dangerous is the cry that is often heard these days to just do something. The problem is, we are always doing something. What matters is whether our faith is displayed by our works or not.
In our previous two posts, seeking to answer the question, “What is ministry?”, we’ve considered the first two most fundamental diagnostic questions, “Where is the love?” and “Where is the church?” As image bearers of God, we must first have faith and know what it is that God has done to show his love to us. The truth directs our actions, and that’s why we need the church, to ensure that we are both rightly dividing and rightly applying the word of God to our lives.
As we’ve noted before, there is much confusion about what ministry is supposed to be, and that’s because many Christians have asked the church to do too much or on the other hand they have not looked to the church to do what God has called us to do in his word. One significant area of collateral damage from a bad ecclesiology is our understanding of Christian vocation. What does a Christian do, and how does a Christian work?
Why is the idea of Christian vocation so important, and how does it affect our thinking about ministry? Well, if we do not rightly understand what we are doing as a church, then we will be confused about what we are supposed to do as a Christian too. Unfortunately, a false divide has been perpetuated between “the secular” and “the sacred.” But for a Christian, if our lives are a living sacrifice and we are doing everything as unto the Lord, then everything is sacred for us. Too many Christians try to live in this world like any non-believer would live and only occasionally function as a Christian. This is evidenced when “church work” is seen as more spiritual and more significant than any other job. People can then be made to feel guilty for spending so much time in their vocation and not enough time doing “real ministry”. If you want to be really spiritual, then you’ll quit your job and become a missionary or work for an official ministry. This dichotomy is not God’s calling. While there is an important distinction between ministry and vocation, there is no competition between the two.
There are two concepts to help us here. First, we need to make clear the distinction between the church and the Christian. In one sense, what we do as a church is quite simple. We will explore our church ministry essentials in a future post. And when we clarify that, we’ll see that everything else is secondary, supportive, and full of a world of opportunities for Christians to use their God-given abilities for his glory and kingdom. This distinction between the church and the Christian is one of the most important ones we can make. Our current cultural environment of identity politics is greatly confused about the individual and the group and what responsibilities and expectations lies with each. On the one hand we cannot be so independently minded that we have no conscientiousness of the group. But on the other hand, we cannot be so identified with the group that the individual disappears. Only our identity as a member of the body of Christ can rightly uphold the dignity and responsibility of both the member and the body. As a member of the body of Christ, I never act independently, and what happens to one affects the rest. But also, the body does not force unanimity in its members, but encourages each one to play the unique role that God has assigned to it. Therefore, the Christian in his vocation is always mindful that his work is not his church’s work, but also that being a Christian uniquely changes how and even what he does for work. Being a Christian means that our work should always be a testimony to who Jesus is and what he has done for his body.
The second helpful concept here is to recognize that we need both the evangel and the ethic. We must not simply preach the gospel and dust our hands off as if there is nothing else to do. Yes, we must preach the gospel. Yes, the gospel is of first importance, but it is not of sole importance. As we have been learning in our morning exposition in Romans 12, our genuine love actually looks a certain way in our lives. The gospel truth produces a gospel duty. Not only must we understand what the gospel means, we must understand what it now requires of me. And this is a crucial distinction to not confuse. The implications of the gospel are not themselves the gospel. And just because there have been many to fall to this confusion, we must not lose those necessary implications. For example, the doing of justice in our society is not itself the gospel, but for those who know the justification of the cross, we are eager to take up our cross for the sake of others, to love the fatherless and the widow, to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.
This is the beginning of Christian vocation. Christians are new creatures in Jesus Christ. He changes how we think and how we act. Everything we do is now different. Jesus is Lord over all of life. And that means that the gospel will have implications for how we farm, engineer, educate, or whatever we are doing to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue and have dominion over it. As disciples of Jesus this ought to be one of our primary discussions. In our Discipleship Groups, I expect that a lot of our conversations are about how we might do our jobs as a Christian. This is a great example of what it means for us to be gathered as a church making disciples of one another. We come together so that we may submit to our Lord in his word and so that all of life may now be lived for his glory.