Summoned: Stepping Up to Live and Lead With Jesusናሙና

How Calling Comes to Us

Let’s say that you want to hear God’s call, or to refine it if you have. Here are four ways that God might speak (sometimes they overlap).

1. Through awe-inspiring encounters (think burning bushes and bright lights from heaven). Awe-inspiring encounters are unmistakable experiences of God’s presence that show us God is with us and has work for us to do. As with Moses at the burning bush or Saul on the road to Damascus, God might meet you in an undeniable, unforgettable, awe-inspiring way.

2. Indirectly, through other people. These are occasions when other people take action on our behalf to dedicate us to God or recruit us into a specific work, like Hannah dedicating Samuel, Mordecai engaging Esther’s help, Paul recruiting Timothy, or John the Baptist’s parents giving him to the Lord at birth. The calling then becomes actualized when it’s accepted and embraced personally.

3. Through providential circumstances. You might look back at different circumstances in your life or look around at current factors and conclude that God is directing you toward a particular cause or group of people. This was the case with Nehemiah when he discovered how poorly Jerusalem and Judah were faring in the fifth century BC. Nehemiah also experienced a growing inner conviction that God was leading him to serve in Jerusalem.

4. Through recognition of God’s shaping of your life—seeing God at work in your story. By reading your story, you can find indicators of what you’re passionate about, what your gifts are, how you prefer to interact with others and which experiences have most clearly directed you thus far. Put these together, and you can often start to discern God’s call.