“Jesus Calls Us”

“Jesus Calls Us”

JESUS CALLS US
Lecture by Le Moine G. Lewis, February 20, 1950,
at Abilene Christian College (9:30 a. m.)

I want to begin by reading a passage from the first chapter of Luke:
“Yea and thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Most High:
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to make ready his ways;
To give knowledge of salvation unto his people In the remission of their sins,
Because of the tender mercy of our God,
Whereby the dayspring from on high shall visit us,
To shine upon them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death;
To guide our feet into the way of peace.” Luke 1:76-79. In my work in Boston before coming to Abilene, one of the most important parts of the whole year’s program was an annual Vacation Bible School. Every year at the close of the school the children presented a program for the parents in which each child had a part. Of all the programs the one that stands out the clearest in my mind is one presented three years ago in about two minutes by the little pre-school class. The eight or nine boys and girls lined up across the platform, shied away from the audience, and sang in a very clear tone, “Jesus Loves Me.” None of us were prepared for the way the program would end. When they had finished the song, the little boy in the center of the line stepped forward one step and pointed his finger straight at the audience and said in a loud, clear voice, “And Jesus loves you, too.” The audience contact was terrific. The little boy’s name was Larry Lang. I wish I could say this morning in the same clear convincing way that Larry did—a way that would beget faith in your heart—“and Jesus calls you, too!”

We must not think that we are lost in a great sea of humanity. The Lord has his eyes upon everyone of us, and he has a place for us. He has a work for us, and he calls us to that work. I think it is rather hard to talk to members of the church of Christ about a call, especially when you make it as earnest and as personal as I want you to take this call this morning. Our minds almost instinctively go back to the old revivalistic calls of the last century, or even the last generation, in which preachers whipped the people up into a mass hysteria, and the people got up and related the story of physical and psychical phenomena which they interpreted as being a call, the Lord’s call to them. They thought they were being called like the apostle Paul. When the Lord appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, Paul did not take it as those people took their call, that that call showed them that they were saved. Paul’s call convinced him that he was lost, and he went into the city fasting and praying, till one came and said, “Arise and be baptized and wash away thy sins.”

Great numbers of the people, perhaps most of then now, have gotten away from the idea of a call such as that for the mass of the people, but I suppose that in at least three-fourths of the churches they still count very important some kind of a call to the ministry. And in' their ordination services one of the most important parts is the asking of the candidate to relate the story of his call. But it is not just preachers that the Lord is calling. He is calling every man.

Professor Henry Cadbury of Harvard offers a course on problems in the Apostolic Age in which he assigns a paper entitled, “The Emergence of the Laity.” Here is a man, a New Testament scholar of world renown, who is saying that in the New Testament times there was no such thing as a laity.
The laity only emerged later, out of a holy priesthood, in which every man was a preacher. It was only later that the people lost that great spirit, lost the sense of that call.

If you asked most of the people around us they would not feel that members of the church of Christ even believe in a call. The word has fallen into somewhat bad repute among us. Very few of us are very acutely aware that God has called us for anything personal. A few days ago I was reading a recent book entitled “Small Sects in America.” I came to the section on the church of Christ and there I found us classified as a small legalistic sect. When I read that it stung me, just as I am sure it stings you. But that is the way that people think of us. There is no use in our quarreling with them. We should rather look down at ourselves and ask why it is that they classify us that way. And I am sure that one of the reasons would be that the people around us who know us have never become aware that we in our hearts feel a deep call to the work of the Lord. They have observed something in us of a lack of personal consecration. Perhaps some of them know where a lot of the members of the church of Christ are on Sunday night. If a stranger who had been at our services on Sunday morning should come back on Sunday night, earnestly looking for the Lord’s church, he would say, “This must not be it because these people do not count it very important themselves.”

Out among the people that we call Fundamentalists when something good happens to them, they begin to talk about what the Lord has done for them. But when something comes to most of us, we talk about our “good luck.” And there is a lack of a sense of a close personal relationship between us and God. People feel that when they are around us. They know that we have not sent out missionaries as other people have sent them out. We have not built, hospitals to care for the sick and suffering; we have not distinguished ourselves in the work of caring for the needy. And as they listen to our preaching so often they go away thinking of law rather than thinking of Grace. But as distasteful as the word “call” may have become to us in the past, you cannot get away from the idea that the Lord does call you. There is a lot in the New Testament about the call. In Hebrews the third chapter and the first verse we read about “A heavenly calling.” Turn to IT Tim. 1:9 and you find that God called us with “a holy calling, according to his purpose.” 1 Corinthians 1:26 tells us that not many mighty, not many wise, not many noble are called. In 2 Peter 1:10 we are urged to make our calling and election sure. In Php_3:14 we are exhorted to press on unto the mark unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and in Ephesians 4:1 to “walk worthy of the calling wherewith you have been called.” And in II Thessa- lonians 1:12 we have the humble prayer that God may count us worthy of our calling. Did you ever stop to think how God calls? Let us look at some of the great men in church history and find out how it was that they were called into their task. One of the most influential men and one who is sometimes called the father of theology, the great Augustine, had been a rather profligate young man. How was he called out of that profligate life into the great life that he lived? Well, he had had before him the example of the godly Monica, he sat under the preaching of the great Ambrose, but the crisis and the turning point came when he turned to his New Testament and read Romans 13:12-14 : “The night is far spent, and the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk becomingly, as in the day; not in revelling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and jealousy. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.” As Augustine read that he said, “That is God speaking to Augustine. That is God saying to me, Augustine, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus and make no provision for the flesh’."

One of the greatest men since the time of the apostles, and the man who influenced this world more than any other since Paul, was Martin Luther. What was it .that called Martin Luther out of his monk’s cell, to rock and to shake the power of the papacy, and to free the world from the yoke of popery? It was the New Testament that he had read there in the monk’s cell. As Luther read there of the sinfulness of man, the righteousness of God, and how faith in Christ could bridge the gap, he said, “That is God talking to Martin Luther, a poor miserable bag of rags,” and he answered that call.

Then let us take Francis of Assisi, a rich young man, who read, “Get you no gold nor silver in your purses” and he said, “That is talking to me, Francis,” and he gave away what he had and went out into the service of others —such service that many have declared him to be the most Christ-like man since the apostles. But to come down to times closer to us, to a man to whom we all owe a great deal for starting the world back on the road to New Testament Christianity, back beyond denominationalism to the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. What was it that guided Alexander Campbell out of the maze of sectarian darkness and denominational confusion? It was his Greek New Testament that guided his feet through the dark wilderness, and as he read he kept saying to himself, “This is talking to me, Alexander Campbell.” When he read about baptism he concluded, “I have not been baptized,” and he went out looking for someone to baptize him. The call of God will come to you and it will come to me when we sit down with our New Testament not as dead letters written two thousand years ago, but as God talking to you individually, and talking to me individually. “For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.” As you read it, it will lay bare to you your own heart, your own selfishness, your own failings, your own shortcomings.

There is a great passage over in the six chapter of John where Jesus says that no man can come unto his Father except the Father draw him. He goes on to say that he who hears and learns comes unto him. In his book on prayer, S. D. Gordon has a chapter entitled, “The Listening Side of Prayer.” Everyone of us should sit down with our New Testaments and we ought to read them prayerfully, listening for our names—listening for God to call us. But there are many people who will never read. God can call them through your life and through mine. They see us. It is trite, but it is still true, that we are “the only gospel a careless world will read.” And the Lord expects us to let our lives be echoes—echoes of his call.

He calls us in the cries of the needy all around the world, and if we do not hear that call, it is because we have not heard the Lord’s prior call to self-discipline, to self-consecration unto God. God first calls people to repentance. His call is not to tell them that they are saved as people took it a generation ago, but it is as it was in Paul’s case or in the cases of Augustine, Luther, Francis, or Alexander Campbell. God’s call convinced them that they were lost. God’s call to us today is still a call to repentance, that if we will cleanse ourselves, then we can be vessels of honor, meet for the Master’s service. And it was this call to selfdiscipline that bothered Augustine and he wrestled with it, “What are the things that I, Augustine, am going to ^ive up? What are the things that I am going to have to quit?” We do not find many people today agonizing over this. A lot of people come into the church without ever going through the agonizing struggle of self-discipline and selfconsecration, because the church has become so much like the world that a lot of people do not realize that there is anything for them to give up.

One of the tasks that I inherited from my predecessor in the work in Boston was the task of teaching two ladies with whom Brother Harold Thomas had been working for some time. One of these ladies lived right across the street from Brother Thomas, and she had seen the consecrated lives of those great servants of God, Brother Thomas and his wife, and how they had sacrificed and even robbed their own children and done it with joy and gladness that they might work in a difficult place. The other lady also lived across the street from a very consecrated family. I had the heart-touching experience of being there with those two ladies when they were fighting out that battle of whether or not they would consecrate themselves to God’s service. I saw them as the tears rolled down their faces, and I saw one of them as she turned to go away, saying, “I cannot be a Christian; it costs too much. I cannot be and I cannot do what the Thomases are and do.” There was her family that would cast her off, and there were the drinks she served in her home, and there were the dancing lessons of her little girl. Those things bothered her and she felt that strain and that call because of the consecrated lives that had been before her. The other lady with tears rolling down her cheeks was going through the same fight because she had seen the same kind of Christian example. But she bad not been coming to the Bible classes very long when she began putting into the work of the Lord the money that her husband allowed her for recreation, ^hose ladies would not have known that fight and that battle and struggle if they had not seen those consecrated examples before them. So often we make it too easy, and so often people do not feel this great call because they do not see lives that have been consecrated in that way.

Look across the street at the house across from you. Those neople have a salary comparable to yours. How much less than those people who are not Christians do you have of the things of this old world? When the time came for you to build your new home, to get your car, did you stop, sit down and think, “Can I afford this? .How does this compare with my expenditures in the Kingdom of God?” If you have just as much and just as many of the things of this old world as your neighbor, what difference does Christianity make?

I shall never forget that shortly after we were married, my wife and I were visiting in a godly Christian home. We were talking to this young couple about our silver pattern, and about how proud we were of it. The lady looked across the table at us—we knew her life and we knew what good she had done—and she said, “We did not pick out any silver because Christians cannot afford it.” Later that day I walked along the streets of Evanston with her husband, a promising young professor. Along the street were many beautiful homes that I presumed belonged to the professors of the great university, and I said, “Tom, it will not be many years until you will have a place like this.” He looked back and said, “No, a Christian cannot afford a home like those. All I want is a place adequate to house our boys.” I am not saying that it is wrong for us to have the new house or to get the new car, but. I am saying that we ought to sit down and make sure that our expenditures on ourselves are in proportion to what we spend for the Kingdom of God. And we must never lose sight of the fact that we are trying to follow one who had no place to lay his head.

Sometimes we miss the whole point of this call to self-sacrifice. God calls us to sacrifice that others may have. We miss the point when we make it an end rather than a means. The man who skimps and saves and puts everything in the bank really is not sacrificing any more than the man who spends all he gets on some pleasure. God wants us to give in order to meet the needs of others. He wants us to help people who will never be able to pay us back. Did you ever stop to compare what you spend entertaining your friends with what you spend feeding the poor ? And yet Jesus said that when you make a dinner or supper you should not invite your kindred and your rich friends, but to go out and invite the blind, the maimed, and the lame who will not be able to repay you. And he said that then you shall be blessed, and that you will be recompensed in the resurrection of the just. •
All around the world God calls us to service in the cries of the needy. Sometimes this old world is so filled with suffering and trouble we wonder how God can allow it all.

“So many nights they pass beside my bed—
A weary mother wanting bread Forgetting self in children yet unfed.
‘0, God,’ I cry, “thy people die.
Art thou asleep as well as I?
Wake up! Wake up! How cans’t thou lie Asleep when there’s so much to do?’
His answer broke the silence through,
‘Sleeping? No, but waking you’!” The man lying on the road to Jericho was God’s call to the Good Samaritan. Who is your neighbor? God calls us to give the people more than just bread and clothes. There is the word of life—the bread and water of life—that if we break to them they may have life that is life indeed. God calls us to the great task of evangelizing the world.

It seemed very visionary when that young man of Galilee long ago stood and said that the field is the world. The only church that has ever been equal to the task of evangelizing the world of its time was that church of the first century. But very soon the spirit of the world came in and diluted the spirit in that church and never again has the church been equal to the task.

It is only a consecrated church that can evangelize the world. We can with profit go back to that Old Testament story of Gideon’s army. There was Gideon with his 33,000 men confronted by a whole valley of Midianites. God told Gideon that he had too many men. When Gideon told the men that all of them that were afraid could go home, 23,000 of them left because they did not think they had a chancA But God said that he still had too many men. With three hundred Gideon won the victory. God always wins with a consecrated loyal few. When the church permits itself to be filled with half-hearted people, then it falters and it stumbles before the great task that God has given it. The field is still the world and we need that spirit of Madam Curie when they had failed in their 487th experiment and Pierre said, “It can’t be done; it may be done in a hundred years, but not in our lifetime,” and she said, “If it takes a hundred years it will be a pity; I cannot do less than give it the best I have as long as I live.” That is what God wants when he calls. He wants the kind of people who will say like Samuel, “Speak Lord, thy servant hears; command and I’ll obey.” And people like Isaiah who said, “Here am I, Lord, send me.”

There is always something urgent about God’s call. And when Christianity loses that sense of urgency, it becomes cold and legalistic and formal and drifts into high ritual or into sheer hypocrisy. When Jesus stood and surveyed the world he saw a field white unto harvest and I think all of us are close enough to the farm to appreciate what that meant. It is very real to me because just before I was ready to come to college my father planted some extra wheat so that he would have money to send me. There was the beautiful wheat waving in the breeze. As we started in with the binder, the clouds began to gather; my father whipped the team on with the clouds boiling. At last the storm broke and the harvest was swept away.

Jesus saw the world white to harvest. He saw the laborers were few and he said, “Pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers into his harvest.”
Jesus walked beside the sea. He saw some fishermen busy with their nets. He said to those fishermen, “Follow me,” and they followed him and he made them fishers of men. He did not send them out unprepared. Three years he trained them, and the church today stands as a monument that they were fishers of men. And God calls you, and if you will answer that call, he will make you a fisher of men, too. As the late William Temple in his little book, Basic Con-victions, if we accept the gospel as the truth, “We have no longer any real option in the matter of being or failing to be missionaries. If it is the truth, it lays upon us missionary obligations by the very consideration that it is true. ... If you have received the fullest of what God offers, then you cannot keep it to yourself because of what it is. The fact that you are not passing it on proves that you haven’t got it; and if you have got it, it will make you pass it on, because of what it is . . . To be a Christian is to be a missionary.”

There is a constraining power about the Truth. There is something about it that we must make it known when we know it ourselves. If the world is going on to judgment, going on to destruction, then to be quiet we would be like the sleeping watchman, and God will require the souls of the people that are lost at our hands. This gives us a new rule by which to measure ourselves as Christians. We are not going to fulfill this task or these calls that the Lord gives us by just five dollars here and ten dollars there for Italy or Japan. God calls us to let the neighbor right next door know, and all the people around us, till the whole world knows the Lord. And we can measure ourselves as Christians by asking ourselves, “How many people have I called into his service?”
A part of the rule that I think we have never used as much as we should is the part, “How many people have I called to go spread the word?”
You fathers and mothers—you have two, three, four chil-dren. How many of these children are going out to preach God’s word?
You say, “None.”

Why? Did you ever pray for it? Did you consecrate your children to the Lord as Hannah did Samuel?
You Sunday School teachers: You have been teaching for five, ten, fifteen or twenty years. Out of your classes how many men have gone forth to preach the word, and how many girls to labor at their

You elders of the church: You have been watching over the flock for fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years. Out of your flock how many workers have gone out into God’s kingdom? How does the number of men who have gone out to preach the word compare with the number who have drifted away? Drifted away under your teaching. These are men for whom some day you will have to give an account. And those of you who are preaching: You have been preaching for ten, twenty, thirty years. How many young men look to you as Timothy and Titus looked up to Paul? How many young men as they sat under your preaching looked up and said, “I want to preach, too?” Here is the real test of good preaching. If those boys and girls who heard you speak the word have not longed to have a part in that work, then something is wrong with your life and something is wrong with your preaching. The Lord calls us to be fishers of men. But even when he was here all the people did not hear that call. There were some in whose ears the siren voice of pleasure was ringing so loudly they did not hear what Jesus said. The Sadducees and the Pharisees could hear only the call of tradition and the call of position. And there were some— I am sure there were people right there in Jerusalem, who when the news of the crucifixion reached them, they said, “You know, I intended to go hear that man sometime, but I just never did find time.” And there was the young man who came running to Jesus because he thought he was the Messiah. But when the Lord told him to sell all he had and give it to the poor and to come follow him, he went away sad. The Lord put to that young man almost the same call that came to the fishermen. Did you ever think how different the story would have been if that young man had put himself and all that he had into God’s service? His name would be told wherever the gospel goes. But we do not even know his name.

How different it was with those fishermen. They could not know that day all that it meant when Jesus called them. He was just a stranger there on Galilee’s shore. But there was a strange power in his words and a strange winsomeness in his face. They answered. It meant toil and suffering. It meant death for almost everyone of them—a martyr’s death. But as we come to the close of the New Testament we read of the great city four-square with the twelve foundations and on those foundations the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. They answered God’s call.'

God is calling everyone of us. He created us for a purpose. We came into this world for a work. And no one else can do that work for us. Every man has his own task. If we do not seize our task, God’s work will be weakened that much.

You and I will never find perfect happiness except in answering God’s call. The happiest man is the man who has the deepest conviction, “This is the job for which I came into the world; it is worth all that I can give to it and more. And I can be confident that all the way the Lord is going to be with me and uphold me and keep me.”'

I would not have you think that it will always be a glamorous call of world traveling, of some great world ad-venture. It may be in a very humble place, but in a very real way giving- yourself in service, in consecration, in echoing God’s call to men. We need to learn the lesson of that little servant girl in London, who prayed, “God of all pots and pans and things.” She had learned there in her work 'in the kitchen to be a worker together with God. Our call may be like that of the Philippians, to uphold the hands of those like Paul. But what we want to make sure of is that we are carrying our end of the stick; that our sacrifice is equal to that of any who go, that some day God will count us workers together with them.

We shall never be able to find happiness running away from that call any more than Jonah found it in trying to run away from Nineveh. That call went with him to the very depths of the sea. The Lord calls us to get the world ready for his coming. Through long ages God was getting the world ready for his first coming, and as a last crowning act of all that preparation, he called John the Baptist, “And thou child shalt go before the face of the Lord, to make ready his ways.” As the apostles stood on the hill and watched Jesus going back into the heavens, the angel stood by them and said, “This Jesus who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven.” And he is counting upon you and on me to keep faith alive on the earth, and he calls us to get the world ready for that coming.

Perhaps there is someone here in the audience this morning who has never purified himself for the Lord’s work. You feel that call that his word brings you to repent, to arise and be baptized and wash away your sins. That is what God calls people to—not to tell them that they are saved, but to tell them that they are lost and that others are lost and that he wants them to help bring them to salvation. And if there is someone here who has made a mess of his life, who has left the Lord long knocking at his door trying to get back in, there is a great company of good people here. Would you have all these people this morning join in prayer for you that you may rise above your difficulties and above your troubles to give yourself with all your heart into God’s service? Let us stand and sing.