John Bevere - Unlocking Your Calling
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Well, guys, I’m so excited to talk to you about discovering your calling. You know, this is something I’ve been studying for 30 years. I interview people about this because I believe it’s so important, and you’re going to understand my passion here as we get into this course. I’m just so excited to have Chris from Australia say something. Chris, come on, baby, here we are! I love it! I love it! And then we’ve got Jonathan. Jonathan, you’re from Indiana, which makes my wife very happy; she grew up in West Lafayette.
Where did you grow up? What city? Portage, Indiana. I know where that is! I’m so excited that Brandy is here, your wife, and Brandy’s from Holden Beach, North Carolina. What a coincidence! We’ve had some great family vacations there. It’s so good to have you, Brandy. Then our son Arden is here, the youngest and tallest. He just got back from Australia after a year of Bible school. And Casey, it’s so great to have you here, a Wisconsin girl! Are you a Green Bay Packer fan? You have to be if you live there!
Well, listen, I want to open up with Paul’s word in Second Timothy, chapter 1, verse 9. Paul says, «God, who has saved us …» and I’ve got it on the monitor back here: «God, who has saved us.» So right there he opens up, «saved,» and we’re done talking about that because then he goes on and says, «called us with a holy calling.» So the first thing I want to say is your calling is holy. Doesn’t that excite you right there? Holy means it’s pure; it’s transcendent; it’s a cut above anything else. There is no man, woman, or child on the planet who could give you a greater calling than the holy calling that God has given you Himself. But notice he says, «not according to our works,» so you can’t change your calling that God has placed on your life no matter what you do, how many hours you pray, or how much you serve. It’s according to His grace, which is free unmerited favor from God, but according to His own purpose. So your calling has a purpose, but it’s His purpose that is behind it. Grace is a key word because you can never fulfill your calling without the grace of God, which was given to us in Christ Jesus.
Now you have a calling, all right? So let’s just make this clear: every single one of you has a calling. Now, there are two types of callings that the Bible talks about. First of all, there are general callings. What do I mean by general callings? This is the calling that God has placed on every single Christian—it’s the same. But then there is your specific calling. Your specific calling, in other words, the unique vocational life calling. Now, let me first of all introduce you and show you that there are general callings in the Scriptures. Number one, we’re called to live a holy life. If you look at First Thessalonians 4:7, God has called us to live holy lives, not impure lives, so a calling, a general calling on our life, is to live holy. Number two, to know Jesus intimately. Paul said, «I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call.» This is one of the highest calls of God in Christ Jesus.
So, as far as general calls, we are called to know Him intimately. Three, to forgive. Now remember, this is just a sampling: don’t repay evil for evil. This is a command: don’t retaliate with insults when people insult you. Instead, pay them back with a blessing. That is what God has called you to do. I love this! And He will grant you His blessing. He said He’ll bless you for blessing those who have insulted you. Amazing! That’s a call on every Christian’s life. Let me just go one more: to live in freedom and to serve one another. Galatians 5:13 says, «For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters, but don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature; instead, use your freedom to serve one another.»
So we’re not here to talk about general callings. In this course, from this point forward, we are talking about our specific, our unique, our life, our vocational calling. Now, for the sake of this course, I’m going to call it our specific calling. But when you hear «specific,» think life calling, think unique calling, think vocational, and on and on. So here’s the truth: you ready for this? Yes! You have a specific call upon your life. All right, let’s first define what calling is. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary gives a phenomenal definition of what calling is: it is a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action or vocation, especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence. That is amazing, isn’t it?
Now, in regard to my life, how does a young boy who is raised in a town of 2,800 people, who’s a Catholic altar boy for eight years, who attends Catholic school for seven years, who gets a mechanical engineering degree at Purdue University, and who works for IBM and Rockwell International, end up preaching the gospel to over 50 nations to millions of people? How? The call of God! How? In regard to a friend of mine’s life: how does this young man, raised in church, go to Bible school intending to become a minister? He actually interns for another year after Bible school. How does he end up in the military, serving for 20 years as a Navy SEAL instructor, impacting many thousands of people? How does this happen? The call of God!
In regard to another friend of mine, how does a man raise in a small town who is a janitor of a paper mill all his life—who’s really unknown to the public—but yet he has impacted millions of lives? How? The call of God! How about my wife? In regard to my wife’s life, how does a young girl raised in a small town in Indiana, who loses her eye to cancer at five years, who is given six months to live at five years of age, who opts out of speech in high school, a required course, and who opts out of typing, which is a required course, how does this young girl end up speaking to millions of people and becoming a New York Times bestseller? The call of God!
That’s what we’re here to talk about today. Look at what Paul says in regard to his life. He says in Galatians 1:15, «God chose me and called me by His marvelous grace.» Man, I love this! I’m getting so excited right now! This is Paul’s specific calling that he is addressing here. So this is not a general calling; this is his life calling. God chose him and called him by His marvelous grace. Now, here’s a misconception that we need to blast, and I mean dynamite! Better yet, we should use an atomic bomb to get rid of this thing. Here’s the misconception that so many people have: only ministers or people who are called to ministry, only people who are missionaries, or worship leaders have a call of God upon their lives. That couldn’t be further from the truth! Every single human being has a call of God upon their life. That means all five of you, and everyone watching this course, has a call of God upon their lives.
So are you ready for a truth? This is a powerful truth. Okay, here it is: you were created on purpose for a purpose. All right? I want you to write that down: you were created on purpose for a purpose. Jeremiah 1:5 says, «I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.» So you weren’t born by accident; you were born on purpose. But here’s the second statement: you were born for a purpose. How do we know you were born for a purpose? Because Ephesians 2:10 says this: «For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.»
Now, I want you to notice that word «should,» because I’m really going to go into that later, but I want you to see this: we are created in Christ for good works. Now, the word «for» there, if you look it up, I’ve highlighted it for a reason—it’s a very interesting word in the Complete Word Study Bible Dictionary—it says that this word is a marker of purpose. This points to the goal of an event. All right, so a really good translation of this would be «for the purpose of.» So can we look at Ephesians 2:10 again, inserting that in? Look at this: «We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for the purpose of good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should …» So that’s not guaranteed!
We’re going to talk about that word «should» because it’s really important. So I’m going to say it again: you were created for a purpose to do something! Isn’t that exciting? That thrills me!
All right, now I’m going to reiterate the misconception one more time. Here it is: people think, «Oh, he’s a tremendous minister, a tremendous author; he or she has a great call on their life.» You have a great call on your life, Chris! I mean, you may be in ministry one day or you may not be, but you still have a great call on your life! Let me really illustrate this. A couple of years ago, I was in Hawaii, and I discovered that a Navy SEAL wanted to go to dinner with me. Now, if a Navy SEAL wants to go to dinner with me, I’m dropping everything and going to dinner; my respect for the SEALs is huge!
So we sit down in this restaurant in Hawaii, and I just looked at him and said, «So what’s your story?» He began to talk, and he talked to me for two solid hours. I don’t think I said more than 20 words in that two hours. I was mesmerized by this man of God. He said, «John, I was raised in the church, and I loved God passionately.» So he said, «I thought in order to serve God wholeheartedly and purely, I needed to go into ministry.» He said, «So I went to two years of Bible school; then I began to intern in a church, a big church.» He said, «I was interning in their youth group in my third year, and I was accused of sleeping with a girl.» He looked at me and said, «John, I never slept with her!» But he said, «The elders believed it, and they threw me out basically. I lost all my credentials.»
He said, «When you’re like 21 years old and you lose three years of your life, that’s a significant loss.» He said, «I was devastated, and my relationship with God was about as big as this plate.» I remember him looking at this plate, and it was small. He said, «I dug in and started seeking God like I never sought God before in my entire life.» He said, «In the middle of seeking God, God said this to me: 'I didn’t call you to ministry; I called you to military.'» So he said, «I went to the Air Force, the Marines; I went to the recruiting office for the Army. The last one was the Navy.» He said, «I was a little nervous because I felt no life in any of the others, and I’d been praying.»
He said, «The recruiter in the naval office starts going down through a checklist, and he says the word SEALs.» He said, «When he said the word SEALs, life exploded on the inside of me!» He said, «That’s it! That’s what I’m supposed to do!» And the recruiter looked at him and said, «No, no, no, you don’t want to enlist to be a SEAL. Every guy in this recruiting office enlisted, and every one of us flunked out. Only 10 percent of the people that enlist for the SEALs make it.» He goes, «I don’t care; that’s what I’m supposed to do!»
Well, what the recruiter didn’t know, and he didn’t know, is that he didn’t know how to swim! Think about it: Navy SEAL, and he doesn’t know how to swim? Come on! And the other thing the recruiter didn’t know is that he had very narrow ear canals. As a young man, he had to have several operations and tubes put in his ears. He said, «If I got any water in my ears—just a few drops—I’d be in excruciating pain.» He said, «So I started praying, 'God, You’ve called me to do this, right? You’ve got to help me learn how to swim.'» And he said, «I taught myself how to swim through prayer.»
He said, «Then one day, I went down two feet, I went down three feet, I went down four feet, I went down five feet—said no pain! God totally healed my ears!» He said, «Then he went through the SEAL training program, and three times he came up to the activation week, and three times some catastrophe happened.» The first time, he was on an obstacle course and a piece of wood went right through his arm. The second time, he was on a boat, and a big wave came in in San Diego, and the guy behind him’s oar hit him perfectly in the ear and ruptured his eardrum.
He said, «So I had to drop out. God healed me, then I got in again.» And he said, «The third time, they’re running with a boat on top of their head on the beach, and some kid dug a hole, and his foot went right into it, tearing everything in his knee from his ankle up to his knee.» The doctor then flunked him during his physical and said, «Young man, because you flunk this physical, you can never become a SEAL.» He said, «I looked at the doctor and said, 'Doctor, I have to do this! You can’t flunk me out! '»
And the doctor said, «Young man, this is an officer!» The doctor let him have it! So he said, «Then I went to a Bible study that week, and the guy at the Bible study—I didn’t realize it was the commanding officer of that doctor—and the man was talking about being led by the Spirit. To illustrate, he said, 'You know, I had an application come across my desk that was denied, and in my spirit, I felt like that was wrong.' So he said, 'I overrode the doctor, ' and he said, 'John, it ended up being me! ' He became a Navy SEAL!
He started telling me about his missions. Guys, I’m telling you! He was telling me things that caused the hair on my arms to stand up. I remember him telling me how they went into an ambush; it was automatic fire, and he said, „I heard whistles going by my head.“ Yet 30 of the SEALs went in, got these guys, and got out—not one of them got killed! He said, „Two weeks later, I’m talking to my mom, and we always carry our phone on our sleeve. It has to be off, and it can only have pre-programmed numbers or pre-existing dialed numbers on it. It has to be totally clear in case they’re captured.“ He said, „My phone had turned itself on! It was off, and it called my mother.“ And she just happened to be in a prayer meeting! They prayed for our safety when they heard the bullets and the screaming, and he was spared!
He started telling me story after story after story like this that night at dinner, and I realized I was sitting with a man that was called to be a SEAL. He has been a SEAL for 19 years and is now an instructor, which makes him the elite of the elite. I remember going back to my room that night. The first thing I did was dial my wife, Lisa, and I said, „Lisa, I was trembling. I just sat with a man of God for two hours! I’ve sat with many ministers and didn’t sense the presence of God that I sensed on this Navy SEAL.“ He’s become a very close friend, and I can call him now, and I call him a lot because I want to know about him, and I want to be a Navy SEAL for God! How about you? Come on, Casey! Come on, Jonathan! Come on, Casey! Come on, Arden! Are you getting it?
All right, so this leads us to a truth that I want to amplify. All right, who you are. Now, listen to me, this is so important. Who you are is the foundation of what you were created to do. All right? So your calling, the foundation of your calling, is who you are. All right? So here’s the truth: your effectiveness in your specific calling is dependent upon you knowing who you are. So let’s just go through it real quick: you are in Christ! I want you to think about this: you are in Christ! You are a member of His body! You are one with Him! Wow! You’ve got to know that to fulfill your calling effectively! You are God’s child! We’re His offspring; Acts 17:28 tells us that we have been born of God, and whoever is born of God overcomes the world. What’s the world? It’s the corruption that comes into people’s lives through sin and lust. We are free from enslavement! As Jesus is, so are we in this world! We are the head and not the tail; we’re above only and not beneath! That sounds like leadership to me!
We’re ambassadors for Christ! There’s so much! But what I want to get into is what’s our primary identity: we are servants! Okay? I want to stress this because let me tell you why: if you discover your calling and you don’t realize you are a servant, your calling will destroy you—just like Saul’s calling destroyed him! Saul came into his calling of being king of Israel, but because he didn’t have a servant’s heart like David did, his calling destroyed him!
So let me make this really clear: you’ve got to know who you are in Christ, but you’ve also got to know you’re called to be a servant! I prayed a prayer when I was a young man; it was probably one of the wisest prayers I’ve ever prayed, and that was this: I said, „God, never, ever, ever allow my calling to exceed the character that you’ve developed in me.“ It may have slowed me up for a time, but you know what? I’m so glad I prayed that because I don’t want my calling to destroy me! So here’s the problem: you know what psychologists tell us? The average person spends 85 percent of the time thinking about themselves and 15 percent of the time thinking about others. Yet listen to what Paul says in Philippians chapter 2. He says, „Don’t be selfish. Don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests but take interest in others, too.“ And then he says, „This is the mind that was in Christ.“
As believers fulfilling our calling, we can’t be people who spend 85 percent of the time thinking about ourselves and 15 percent thinking about others! That was Saul! Saul destroyed himself because of that mentality. We have to be servants! That’s why Jesus, the last thing He did at that upper room, was wash those guys' feet! He said, „I’m your Lord and King,“ and you rightly say, „But here I am a servant. This is why I came; I didn’t come to be served. I came to seek to serve.“
All right, so Albert Pine makes this statement, and I love this: „What we do for ourselves dies with us; what we do for others is immortal.“ In this course, get ready. You ready, guys? We’re going to equip you to discover what you’re called to do. Secondly, we’re going to show you how to get there. And third, we’re going to show you how to succeed in your callings. So, are you ready to get to the next lesson? Yes! Let’s do it!