(August 19, 2017) 8:28 AM Here’s yet another takeaway from Phil. 1:1. (Yes, Dave’s beating a dead horse.)

Paul greets the church and then its leaders.

Please don’t overlook this, friends. Let’s be real. You and I would have greeted the pastor and then the people. Not so Paul.

Often doctrine elevates the “pastorate” as the highest calling in life. This isn’t true, because it omits Christian engineers and school teachers and housewives and janitors and every other “calling” in life you can think of. If non-pastors are second-class citizens in the kingdom, then you’ve just excluded millions from Gospel work. You know, the Gospel is proclaimed as clearly through a mother changing her baby’s diaper as through the labor of preparing and delivering a sermon. But, you say, there’s “the call.” Yes there is. And this call, in the New Testament, is not what you might think it is. In the New Testament, one’s calling encompasses far more than one’s vocation (or avocation for that matter). Just read Eph. 4:1 or 2 Thess. 1:11. We can all lived called lives, Gospel lives, in every imaginable context. This includes, of course, the calling to serve your church as a loving, caring, overseer/elder/pastor/shepherd — faithfully leading, teaching, admonishing, and loving the flock. (See John 10 for what a loving shepherd looks like.) That may involve a career/profession or it may not. We need you, pastors! But you may also serve the Lord as a teacher (as I try to do). Maybe this morning you punched a time clock. It really doesn’t matter that much. The manner in which I treat my students, the way in which I prepare and deliver my lectures, the dignity with which I regard my pupils, the courtesy I extend to them by answering their emails in a timely manner, the effort I put into developing them as teachers in their own right, the example I set before them as a Christ-minded man, the way I treat my faculty colleagues — this is the called life I am asked to pursue as a professional Greek teacher. This might not seem like much, but it is. Friend, live out your calling today. If you’re one of my dear students, please remember that you don’t have to wait until you graduate to begin serving King Jesus. To become a fulltime missionary you don’t have to wait until you deputize and deploy. A missional life most often shows up quietly in our work places and neighborhoods (even during 5K races). My dream for you is to be exactly who you were created to be by God. My dream is to see all of us in fulltime Christian ministry. My dream is for all God’s people (the “saints” of Phil. 1:1) to be smitten with Jesus, so much so that there’s nothing they’d rather do than serve Him like a selfless slave, as Paul and Timothy did. But at no point should you ever think of yourself as somehow less than “called” because you are not employed by a local church. We are all God’s servants, sheep and shepherds alike. Yours might seem like small work. In fact, you might not think it’s Christian service at all. Let God surprise you.

May God make us all worthy of our high calling today.