The Call That Will Change Your Life
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
The knowledge of God’s call on our life has the potential to transform our lives from an ordinary one to an extraordinary life of joy and purpose.
Much like us, Jeremiah lived in troubled times. The promise of Israel appeared to be crumbling as godly leadership failed and people turned their backs on God. Just two decades from the death of King Josiah, Judah had become a puppet state of foreign countries, eventually leading to exile on Babylon. In all this strife, Jeremiah was to be God’s voice to His people.
It’s no wonder then that God’s call to Jeremiah began with words of assurance and encouragement.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
Knowing God’s call for our lives will create in us an awareness of His love and security.
Before we were aware of him, God was very aware of us, he was thinking of us and making plans for our lives. He possesses not just a passing knowledge but rather an intimate, detailed and personal knowledge of us and our future.
How can it be that God would know us personally before we were even born? He can because we are the result of his dream. In the same way that a master architect envisages and dreams a house knowing what it will look like and feel like, God knew us intimately before it was ever our time to be born.
Parents know what this feels like. When parents first find out they are expecting, they begin to dream about their child. A deep love for their child can develop before the baby is even born.
‘I have loved you with an everlasting love.’ Jeremiah 31:3
How beautiful is it, that our Father God, who knows beforehand our nature and all the personal nuances that make us unique, has chosen to know us and love us. We can be secure in the knowledge that our Heavenly Father, who knows the beginning from the end, is mindful of us.
“Before you were born I set you apart.”
The second way that knowing God’s call will change our lives is that we become aware that our lives are not to be ordinary. We are not to conform to the whims and patterns of the world around us. God has called us to be different; to be significant. He wants us to affect change in our society, not to be changed by it.
In the same way that God called the Children of Israel out of Egypt, to be different from Egypt, God has set you apart from the world. The world will devalue you, but God esteems you. The world will want to shape you, but God has made you in His image.
Knowing God’s call on our lives protects us from the demeaning nature of sin and allows God to transform us with the redeeming quality of grace.
“I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
The third thing knowing God’s call on our lives will do is give us an eternal purpose for our lives. Just as God appointed Jeremiah as a prophet to the nations, God has a plan and purpose for our lives.
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. ”
Knowing God’s call on our lives gives us the ultimate reason to get up every day. We have a purpose; we have a direction; we have a God-given mission for our lives.
Let’s take time to read God’s Word, to meditate on and pray about God’s call on our lives; it’s one of the most transforming revelations we could ever know.
Written by Grant Peterson
