Calling, recalled, promotion, chosen, destiny

God calls and God chooses.

Brothers and sisters, consider your calling: Not many were wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

-1 Corinthians 1:26-27


God's economy is different than ours.

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields because of my name will receive a hundred times more and will inherit eternal life.  But many who are first will be last, and the last first.

-Matthew 19:29-30


God can recall people who were rejected or fumbled (Joseph, Moses, Jephthah, Peter).

So Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead. The people made him their leader and commander, and Jephthah repeated all his terms in the presence of the Lord at Mizpah.

-Judges 11:11


God's ways are different than human promotion and advancement.

The Lord will make you the head and not the tail; you will only move upward and never downward if you listen to the Lord your God’s commands I am giving you today and are careful to follow them.

-Deuteronomy 28:13


Kingdom promotion is based on God's call, servanthood, and faithfulness.

“‘Well done, good servant!’ he told him. ‘Because you have been faithful in a very small matter, have authority over ten towns.’

-Luke 19:17


Servanthood and friendship both are part of the calling.  He chooses our assignment, our gifts, and calling.

I do not call you servants anymore, because a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.  You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you.

-John 15:15-16


God calls, but we must lay hold of it and respond to God.

“For many are invited, but few are chosen.”

-Matthew 22:14


The ministry is power through weakness.

Concerning this, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it would leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.”

-2 Corinthians 12:8


A calling from God works out under illogical, impossible, inconceivable circumstances.

This is what the Lord says—
who makes a way in the sea,
and a path through raging water,
who brings out the chariot and horse,
the army and the mighty one together
(they lie down, they do not rise again;
they are extinguished, put out like a wick)—
“Do not remember the past events;
pay no attention to things of old.
Look, I am about to do something new;
even now it is coming. Do you not see it?
Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert.

-Isaiah 43:16-19


Called ones must give up everything for the calling.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure, buried in a field, that a man found and reburied. Then in his joy he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. When he found one priceless pearl, he went and sold everything he had and bought it.

-Matthew 13:44-46



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