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[0:00] If you've got a Bible, you can go to the very beginning of your Bible again, Genesis chapter 1. We're going to read almost the same passage that we read last week.! It's slightly different though. So this week it's 1, 26 to chapter 2, verse 7, and then also verses 15 and 25 to 25 of chapter 2.

[0:21] As I said last week, this is one of those places you should not get lost in when you're trying to look for it in your Bible because it's right at the very, very beginning. Genesis chapter 1 and verse 26.

[0:40] Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

[0:54] So God created mankind in His own image. In the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number.

[1:06] Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.

[1:23] They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground, everything that has breath, the breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food.

[1:34] And it was so. God saw all that He had made and it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

[1:46] By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing, so on the seventh day He rested from all His work. And then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done.

[2:00] This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth, and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no one to work the ground.

[2:18] But streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. And then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

[2:29] And the man became a living being. Now jump down to verse 15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work at it, to take care of it.

[2:44] And the Lord God commanded the man, You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die. The Lord God said, It is not good for the man to be alone.

[2:57] I will make a helper suitable for him. Now the Lord had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them.

[3:09] And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. But for Adam, no suitable helper was found.

[3:21] And so the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

[3:37] The man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

[3:53] Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Let's ask for God's help as we study this morning.

[4:06] Gracious God, we come as people needing to be fed by the bread of life. Something that will fill us up in a way that normal food just can't fill us up.

[4:20] And so we pray that in your word you would feed us this morning. Feed us truth, your truth, and change us by the truth that we feast on. Help us to see your son and his glory.

[4:32] Wonderful things that he's done for us and be transformed by that. Bless us now we pray for Christ's sake. Amen. So in week two of our series on the subject of work, integrating faith and work, thinking about that time that you spend most of your week in, working, whatever it is that you do for work, last week we looked at the design of work, we looked at how God has instituted design for us.

[5:04] This week we're doing something called a clash of callings. Now I heard some positive feedback last week after the first sermon in this series. Several people told me they're really grateful that we're doing this series because it's particularly pertinent and it's an important topic, it's relevant to them.

[5:20] And so I'm very glad to have pleased some people last week because this week I might have to tick some people off a little bit. And so it was nice to build up some credit on the front end. Where are we going?

[5:34] I want to start this way. One of the words that we use to talk about work is the word vocation. It comes from the Greek, not the Greek, the Latin word vocatio, if I'm saying that right.

[5:46] It means a call or a summons. So our vocation is our calling. And it's appropriate for us to think of our work as a calling. Because as we sort of saw last week, God has designed us to work.

[6:00] So in that sense, it is totally right to say that, well, God has called us to work. All lawful work is then a calling, not just certain types of work, like becoming a pastor or a missionary or a teacher.

[6:14] I know sometimes we look at certain people's vocations, particularly people who are working with other people in really difficult, harsh circumstances, and we say, well, that person really has a calling on their life.

[6:25] But biblically speaking, all of us who engage in lawful work are called by God to work. And so it's really important then that we understand our callings, because I think misunderstanding callings and how calling works can cause a lot of pain and a lot of frustration, and also a lot of discontentment in work.

[6:47] And so we're talking about callings this morning. Two things I want you to see. I want you to see creational callings, number one. And then number two, callings in conflict. Creational callings and then callings in conflict.

[6:59] So here's the first thing, creational callings. In 1605, a Puritan by the name of William Perkins published a piece that was entitled A Treatise of the Vacations or Callings of Men with the Sorts and Kinds of Them and the Right Use of Them.

[7:16] So it's a pretty wordy title there. His publisher probably didn't like it. But it was a really influential piece that was written, at the time, kind of the height of Puritanism, on vocation, and influenced in a lot of the way that Protestants thought about work going forward.

[7:32] And one of the things that he does in that piece of writing is that he distinguishes between what he calls callings, which are, and I quote, which are of the essence and the foundation of any good society, and then callings which serve, and I quote again, the good, happy, and quiet estate of a society.

[7:50] So the basic idea is this. There are some callings common to all that are foundational to society.

[8:03] And then there are our supporting callings, which for most of us are actual jobs that we do, that bring about the peace and the good running of society, the good ordering of society.

[8:13] And so he would say, well, those foundational callings, there's actually only a few of them. The foundational callings are the callings to family, to church, and to the state or the civil magistrate.

[8:26] Our supporting callings then, on the other hand, those are things like being lawyers or physicians or politicians or merchants or homemakers or soldiers or police, all those other things. Now, the reason why this distinction is really important, it's not just a semantic distinction or something like that, is because if you don't understand the relationship between these two types of callings, and if you, in some sense, put these callings against each other, you get into a whole lot of trouble in your work life.

[8:57] In fact, not just your work life, but your whole life, really. And so what I want to do is I want to trace out some of these foundational callings as they come to us in Scripture. And because they are foundational, you should expect to see some of them or something of them in those opening two chapters of the book of Genesis, the beginning of the Bible, where the foundations of human life are already set up.

[9:18] So let's go through those three that he mentions. Let's start with family. This is actually probably the most obvious one from the text. So if you look at Genesis 1.26, Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

[9:41] So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number.

[9:52] Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea, and the birds in the sky, and over every living creature that moves on the ground. So straight off of the bat there, as we get this introduction, God creates human beings.

[10:05] He tells them to rule and have dominion over the creation. And, even actually before that, he tells them to be fruitful and multiply. That is, build families, he says.

[10:20] Now this comes on, it's not just in chapter 1, it comes on in chapter 2 as well. So as we saw last week, God gives Adam his vocation, his calling to be a gardener. Chapter 2 verse 15.

[10:31] But there's a context in which he gets this vocation. The Lord in verse 18 says, It's not good for him to be alone.

[10:44] Favorite passage of every cheesy Christian pickup line. It's not good for him to be alone. It's not good for a man to be alone. And so he creates Eve, the woman, as a suitable helper, the text says.

[10:56] It's like a co-worker. That term, suitable helper, has had all sorts of ink spilt over it, particularly in recent history. It's a Hebrew word. It's a word, ezer.

[11:07] And it's important that you understand that term is not a term that denotes inferiority, as some people have sometimes mistakenly taken it back in line. As you think of a helper, you think, Oh, this person is inferior to me.

[11:20] In fact, there are other parts of the Old Testament where our all-powerful transcendent God is described as our helper, our ezer. So this is not a comment on inferiority, superiority between men and women.

[11:34] It's a statement about the suitability of women to work alongside men in their overall calling of building a civilization. That doesn't mean, and we probably need an entire sermon on this as well, and we ran out of time for this one today, but that doesn't mean that men and women always work in exactly the same ways, but it does mean that both of them are called together to build, to create, to work the garden, so to speak, without one being less or the other one being greater there.

[12:06] So God brings Eve to Adam. Adam writes the first love poem. This is Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh.

[12:17] That's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's a start. And what's being set up here is marriage, the basis, the foundation for family building.

[12:30] So Adam is to carry out his vocation as a gardener. That's what he's called to do. But he's got to do that within the context of his relationship to Eve. And his calling to marriage is calling to building a family.

[12:43] He's calling to being fruitful and multiplying. So that's the first thing that we see there, family. What about church? William Perkins at Puritan, he puts church up there alongside family as a foundational calling that is common to all of us.

[12:59] And you might say, well, where do we see that exactly in these opening chapters? We obviously don't see a church in the first two chapters like we see in the New Testament in the Lord's description of what a church is.

[13:10] But what we do see, I think, is we see the basic building blocks. The most important of which is the fact that Adam and Eve are in the presence of God. They talk with him.

[13:21] They walk with him. In Genesis chapter 3, the next chapter, it says that God is walking in the garden in the cool of the day as if that's his common practice. He walks around with them. He has open communion with them.

[13:31] He relates to them. And so after the fall, worship then is, in one sense, centered on trying to get back to that, trying to get back to the presence of God where we can commune with him, where we can listen to his voice.

[13:50] And so I'll give you an example of how this then plays out in the rest of the Bible. If you think, for example, in the Old Testament of the tabernacle, the Old Testament precursor to gathered worship.

[14:05] In the heart of the tabernacle, which is this very elaborate tent structure that Moses has instructed to create, the heart of that tent structure is the Holy of Holies. That's that little square room where the Ark of the Covenant is stored.

[14:19] And it's there that the text tells us in some strange, special way, God's presence manifests itself in a unique way. Now what several commentators have pointed out that looked at the book of Exodus is that if you look at the tabernacle, you look at all the details of the construction of the tabernacle, there are numerous echoes of Eden in the tabernacle.

[14:40] You enter the tabernacle from the east, for example. In Genesis, Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 are expelled out of the garden to the east.

[14:51] And you kind of get this idea that going east is going away from God, going west is coming back towards God. So you enter from the east in the tabernacle, coming back west. There are cherubim all over the place.

[15:01] There's angelic beings. They're woven into the fabric of the tent. They're above the mercy seat of the Ark. They're everywhere in the structure, just like the cherubim guarding the way back into the Garden of Eden.

[15:13] The menorah, the lampstand, represents the tree of life. It's stylized with those branches coming out of it. The decoration throughout the tabernacle is heavily botanical, bringing to mind this idea of a garden.

[15:30] You've got this overwhelming sense as you go back into that tent structure that you're going back into the garden. You're going back into God's presence.

[15:42] And that was the focal point of Israelite worship, ancient Israelite worship. Now in the New Testament, you go forward and we get told this. We get told that Christ tabernacles with us.

[15:55] That's what John literally says. Christ tabernacles with us, the Apostle John. That is, in Christ we have God's presence come to be with us.

[16:07] Our worship of Jesus is a re-entering into the presence of God. It's like going back to Eden, in some sense. Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, which some of you are studying in our evening Sunday seminars, it tells us that Jesus is our great high priest.

[16:20] We read about it this morning. Jesus is our great high priest who has, through the shedding of his own blood, opened the way for us to go back into the presence of God, back into that heavenly tabernacle. And now, for those of us who do believe, through trusting in Christ, God places his Holy Spirit in us and the presence of God dwells in us.

[16:41] Christ has, in the gospel, what he's done is he's brought us back into Eden where we get to walk with God in the cool of the day again. Hear his voice to us. And so the church then, as the institution that facilitates the worship of God, is a key foundational calling of ours.

[17:04] And our commitment to church is something we have to hold as foundational as we carry all our other callings around it. So there's the second thing. The third foundational calling is the calling to order, or the calling to rule of law, which necessitates, I think, and most people think this, the existence of the state of some sort, or the civil magistrate, a governing body for our society.

[17:29] This is pretty implicit in the calling that's given to Adam and Eve to rule, to have dominion over the creation. That is, their interaction with God's creation is to be a move from, well, it's supposed to be an interaction of order, not an interaction of chaos, an interaction of structure, not anarchy.

[17:51] God is a God of order. We see that in the book of 1 Corinthians, chapter 14. If we are His image bearers, as Genesis 1, 27 says, then we necessarily must reflect something of that as we build the society.

[18:06] As we go about our different callings, our different work, and we build society together. So there must be rule of law, which means we will need something approximating a state, and a magistrate. Plus, God Himself is a law-giving God.

[18:19] So Genesis 2, 15, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and to care for it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die.

[18:40] So the first thing, actually, that God does after He gives Adam His calling as a gardener is He gives him a rule. He gives him a law. Don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

[18:52] And there's a consequence attached to it. There's a judgment to this law. And so you can really see here in the foundational chapters of the Bible, it is baked into God's relating to us.

[19:06] And therefore, as image bearers, it's got to be built in how we relate to each other, that we would live in societies of rule and law and order. And so as we carry out our various callings, then we carry them out with that commitment to law-keeping, to governance, good governance.

[19:25] So if you look at Genesis 1 and 2, those are our three foundational, creational callings. Family, church, state. This is not only in Perkins, you can find this in a lot of other authors.

[19:36] You can actually even find it in non-Christian sources, Greek philosophy as well, as I think about it. And obviously not as much emphasis on the church there, but on these sort of foundational ideas. What we see here is that they all have their root in creation.

[19:52] So that's the first point. Here's the second one though. Callings in conflict. One of the biggest problems that we have today in our modern society is that we can work in supporting callings, all our other callings, in such a way that they conflict with our foundational callings.

[20:13] And when we do that, we damage ourselves, we damage society, and we dishonor God because He's designed us to work this way.

[20:26] So I want to spend the rest of our time talking about that exactly. And we could have spent three or four sermons talking about this, so I've tried to really just give you a flyby over this. But let me start by giving you an example, so a working example of conflicts in calling.

[20:40] So you know what we're talking about here. I want you to imagine a husband and a father of three young children. He has a job, and his job is that he does consulting on environmental issues related to the mining industry.

[20:58] He spent the last few years contracting to all sorts of different mining companies that are out there in this country, and we've got lots of mines here in South Africa. The pay's been pretty decent. He's able to support his family.

[21:09] He's able to put his kids through school. Him and his wife have even just bought a house, and they have a bond, and they have a dog, so they are like real adults now. And while he makes enough, he's certainly not flesh.

[21:23] So there's no overseas holidays. He doesn't have a beach house in Azafontein. But the work itself is good. It's challenging because it's client-based, and so there's a level of volatility, like clients come, clients go.

[21:39] There's also a bit of traveling that he needs to do to get on site at various mines, but it's not excessive where his wife and his kids never ever get to see him. So overall, if you looked at him, you would say, look, he's somewhat fulfilled.

[21:52] He'd love more stability in the job than there currently is there. He'd certainly love a bit more money as well. So there's some discontent there, but that's him. Now what happens to him is one of the biggest mining companies in the country comes along to him, and they offer him an in-house job.

[22:10] Say, get rid of all your clients and come and work for us. The salary is double what he currently makes from all his clients. There is great job security. This company has a good track record with their employees.

[22:24] The one downside is that the job requires excessive travel. He has to be on site in all sorts of different locations, the mines they have across the country, for very long, sustained periods of the year.

[22:41] If he takes the job, it's going to significantly stunt his ability to parent his children well, to be present in their lives. He'll be able to get them loads of money.

[22:53] He'll put them in really, really good schools. He can get them into university when they get to that stage, but he's largely going to be absent for a lot of it. And so the question is, well, what does he do?

[23:04] What does he do? See, at that point, there's a clash between his foundational calling as a parent, as a father, and his supporting calling as an environmental analyst.

[23:19] Both are good, lawful jobs. Both are jobs that the society needs, those jobs. We need people to be doing these things, so the question is, well, how does he adjudicate between them? Now, you could flip this, or you could adjust this illustration for the other two foundational callings.

[23:35] So we could talk about how the impact of the success of travel would impinge upon his ability to engage with the local church, his ability to fellowship and grow as a Christian, come to church regularly.

[23:46] We could talk about how maybe how being in-house with this big mining company, there might be times where the company decides to skirt around the laws of the country when it comes to mining, and because he's in-house, because he's not, they're not a client anymore, well, there's extra pressure now.

[24:04] To cut corners, to overlook some laws, to find sketchy loopholes in business practices. In all of those scenarios, you can see different ways in which foundational callings come into conflict with our supporting callings.

[24:23] And so how do we navigate this? How do you all, because you're going to have to face this all the time. I work in the church, it's easy for me, but how are you going to face this? How are we going to navigate this? It's tricky.

[24:37] Here are some basic considerations I'd like you to have. There are many more, but here are some basic ones. Number one, foundational callings are primary. Foundational callings are primary.

[24:48] At one level, that's just kind of obvious. Even ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle seem to think something along these lines. If we don't have families, if we don't have the rule of law, if we don't have, for the Christian, if we don't have the church and relationship with God, well then every other vacation is somewhat meaningless.

[25:03] It's somewhat pointless. It has no basis. It's like a plant, it's like a flower without roots. I'm a good husband, if I may say so myself.

[25:15] So I will occasionally get some flowers for my wife, whether it's like her birthday or it's Valentine's Day or something like that. And they're really, really beautiful when they come home at first, the flowers. And sometimes they last for quite a long time.

[25:27] If you buy them from Woolies, you get that little sachet of plant food that keeps them going for even longer. But they all eventually die. No matter how many sachets you pour into that water, eventually the petals fall off and the stems go brown and they die.

[25:47] There's no foundation. There's no root. There's nothing underneath them sustaining them. Now that's what all of our supporting vocations are like without connection to the foundational vocations.

[26:02] I think one of the biggest dangers I see with young people going into the working world in the city is that we don't see that connection. We don't think about that connection.

[26:13] We don't see or we don't care particularly much about that connection between our work and our ability to build healthy marriages, raise godly children, serve the church, pursue the rule of law and justice.

[26:24] And so naturally then, if you're not cognizant of that connection, your career becomes almost exclusively about personal self-fulfillment.

[26:35] It has to. What else is it going to do? Well, you're getting your sense of worth, you're getting your identity from the work that you do, how you perform with the work that you do, how you are rising up the ladder of your particular career.

[26:47] And the problem then is that if you root your primary identity and your sense of self-worth in your supporting career, there eventually comes a point when it gets exposed for being that flower without the root.

[27:04] When retrenchment comes, when massive staff conflict comes, when the work itself stops giving you those dopamine hits that it used to give you when you first got into this, eventually the petals fall off, eventually the stem starts to turn brown and then you have nothing.

[27:25] You have nothing to turn to. You haven't built a family, you haven't pursued or cared about justice and you have no relationship with God and His church to root yourself in.

[27:39] And so foundational callings, friends, have to stay primary. They have to make up the root. Of how you think about your calling in this life. So that's the first thing. Second thing, not all of this is always your fault.

[27:56] Directly at least. Not all of this is always your fault. So we can talk about the relationship between supporting callings and foundational callings in such a way that I think it can make you feel like every single time your supporting calling, your day-to-day job trumps the foundational calling, you or some are always morally culpable for that.

[28:17] It's your fault. You did some dumb stuff. You made some dumb decisions. Now it's your fault and the past is going to get on your case. But that is not always the case. Because we do live in a fallen world.

[28:29] Made up of fallen people with fallen systems and fallen economies. Next week, we're going to talk in detail about the fall's effect on work. But let me just say that sometimes the effect of the fall that is our world's alienation from its creator God rears its ugly head in our work lives in ways that are outside of our individual control in the moment.

[28:57] So for example, building family is a foundational calling. But some of us will never get married. Some of us will never have children for a variety of reasons outside of control.

[29:12] Whether that's illness or infertility, bigger social trends, unimaginable economic pressures, or the Lord for whatever reason just not providing you with a spouse.

[29:23] And that's not because you made a sinful career choice or something. You probably desperately want to be married. You probably desperately want to have children. It's simply, though very tragically, I think, the effect of living in a world that is alienated from its creator.

[29:41] And so that's the reality. And so I think, friends, we need to have massive, massive sympathy and support and care for each other as we navigate these callings just because there's a guy out there who takes a job that is going to disrupt his family life significantly.

[29:59] He's not always because he's making some sort of ungodly choice to have his supporting calling win out over his foundational calling. Sometimes he's just backed into an economic corner for a period of time and there's just no way out of it.

[30:17] In a country like ours, that is a very present reality for a lot of people. In moments, people like that, they don't need our condemnation.

[30:27] They need our care and they need our support. They need the church family at that point. It's not always your fault. Number three, that being said, the third thing I want to say is be very, very, very, very, very careful of justifying your supporting calling, trumping your foundational calling.

[30:54] Be very careful of how you justify that to your own head and your heart. Be very careful of saying to your head, saying to your heart and to others around you, I really, really have to take this career path. I have zero other options.

[31:05] I have to take this path. I know it's going to be detrimental to building a family or I know it's going to be slightly less than honest work, but I really, really, really have no other options. I have to take this path. Friends, Jeremiah chapter 17, verse 9 would come to us as one of the most well-known verses in the Bible and it would say the heart is deceitful above all things.

[31:25] It really is. The older you get, the more you realize that. It is very, very easy for us to turn what are real, difficult situations into impossible situations and therefore justify behavior that undermines our foundational callings given to us by God.

[31:49] Perhaps the area that I see this most often happening is in the area of church and the worship of God. So over the years, I've had so many, so many pastoral conversations with young people here in the city, not even young people, older people as well, in particularly difficult work situations, work environments, and in a desperate attempt to try and solve their problems, they pick jobs that directly inhibit their ability to regularly worship and gather with God's people.

[32:20] Now again, I am not saying there might not be some extreme cases where for a short season a person has to take work in an environment that is going to hinder their ability to be a part of a church.

[32:32] But the vast, vast majority of the time that I've seen this happen, it hasn't been the most extreme or unavoidable situation. Often there have been other viable options on the table.

[32:45] Difficult options sometimes, but viable options on the table. And I want to say to you that when I see those people take those options, the negative option, it never goes well.

[32:59] It never ever goes well. People with the very, very best intentions, oh, this is just going to be a while. They attend church less, they worship less, and their faith shrivels up and dies over and over again.

[33:14] So be very, very, very careful of justifying ungodly pursuits in your career. Maybe just one extra thing to say on this point, given the age range of our congregation, the relatively young age range of our congregation.

[33:30] Many of the discussions that we have around this subject seem to make a lot of sense if you're kind of already married, have kids, and now you're trying to make complex career decisions later on in life.

[33:41] But I want to say that even if you are single or you are young and married and without kids, there are ways that you can undermine your foundational callings and your career pursuits. And by far and away, other than the church thing, the most common way that this happens in the city is through delay.

[34:02] Delay. Delaying marriage and delaying having kids. And again, we can justify all sorts of reasonable reasons for delaying these things.

[34:15] So we can say, well, I've got this really good reason for doing that. I've got this really good reason for why I'm only going to get married later. But when we do that, we have to be oh so very, very, very careful that we are not going against our creational design here.

[34:31] Both marriage and procreation are built into the foundation of who we are as people. That is to say, they are part of our telos, our design goal in life that God sets out for us in the beginning.

[34:44] I mean, we are explicitly commanded there in the text. You saw that in Genesis 1. command to be fruitful and multiply. I see no good reason in the rest of Scripture for why that command wouldn't still apply in a general sense to all of us as the human race and particularly as Christians.

[35:03] Now yes, some of us will never marry, as I said, or never have children. And there are often painful reasons outside of our control for that. That doesn't make those people less human or less in line with the goals that God has for them.

[35:16] But those exceptions also don't give us license to go against our foundational callings through the excessive delay of marriage or seeing children as a burden like some parts of our secular culture do rather than the blessing the Lord has given for us.

[35:34] I said I was going to tick some of you off this morning. Often that delay, when I see it in people and I have conversations with people, often it's a cover. Often it is a cover for selfishness, it's a cover for a sinful type of autonomy, it's a cover for a heart that's not trusting God to provide down the line.

[35:54] And so I just want to say be careful. Be very, very careful, friends. I also counsel a lot of older people who have delayed these foundational vocations for all sorts of justifiable reasons back in the day and now, later in life, there is a lot of grief.

[36:11] There is a lot of hurt and regret. Let's be very careful of what we justify when we do have that clash. Fourth and final thing here.

[36:26] God has got your back. God has got your back. I don't want to pretend like you are not going to have to make difficult decisions around some of these things. You are going to have to make difficult decisions.

[36:37] Probably most of your stress in life is going to come around these sorts of those decisions in the future as you try and balance out foundational supporting callings. Following God's creational design for you in this world, in a world that has turned its back on Him, is going to come with cost.

[36:52] It just is. That cost could come in the form of you earning less. It could come in the cost of you being seen as less successful than your peers, seen by your boss as lacking in ambition.

[37:06] It could even come in the form of a loss of a job as you have to leave one career altogether and move to another one. As you make all these difficult judgment calls, as you try and navigate this space, you need to know that while the world has turned its back on God, God has not turned His back on you.

[37:25] He has not turned His back on you. Romans 8, verse 28 to 30 is a passage in the New Testament that deals with the subject of calling, but in a slightly different way to how we've been talking about calling this morning.

[37:40] Paul writes this and he says, And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

[37:59] And those He predestined, He also called. Those He called, He also justified. Those He justified, He also glorified. See what Paul's saying? He's saying, If you love the Lord and you walk in the ways that He's designed for you to walk, then you can be absolutely confident.

[38:16] Even in those really, really difficult moments, you can be confident that He is working for your good. That's what Paul is saying. And the reason that you can be confident is because you've received a calling.

[38:28] You've received a calling. Not a supporting calling, not even a foundational calling like we've been speaking about, but the call that comes from the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The call that took you from darkness into life, into light.

[38:41] The call that justified you before our holy God like He says there. If you have believed the gospel, the good news of what Jesus Christ has done on your behalf, you have received that calling.

[38:53] And if you've believed that gospel, then you also know something else about work. You know what it means to stick to your foundational callings if you believe that gospel.

[39:04] Because that's exactly what you've seen happen. You've seen Christ do that for you. You've seen Him walk as a son in perfect obedience to His Father, fulfilling His calling to family, even obedience to the point of death.

[39:19] You've seen Him do that. You've seen Him love and serve and fulfill His calling to the church, His body, as He allows His own body to be scarred and to be pierced for you.

[39:36] You've seen Him impeccably live out His calling to justice and the rule of law as He undergoes His Father's divine wrath to satisfy perfect justice for you.

[39:48] You've seen Him fulfill all of these foundational vocations. Christians, you have life today as a Christian because Christ committed to His foundational vocation all the way to death.

[40:07] That's what you live in the gospel today. And because that's the foundation of the gospel call, you know that God now has your back.

[40:19] that when Paul says he works all things for the good of those who love Him, that's not a nicety that he's saying. It's truth and it will hold you in every single difficult circumstance that you're going to face in the future, every single tricky path you're going to have to navigate in the future.

[40:37] Hold on to that gospel, hold on to that vision of Christ fulfilling those foundational vocations and then you will be equipped and strengthened to navigate this tension between your foundational vocations and your supporting vocations.

[40:52] Like I said, there was so much more we could say on this subject and maybe if you want to send me questions in there we can talk more about some of the details of how this might work out. But I pray this will be helpful to you as you reflect the gospel.

[41:03] Let's pray together. Merciful God, you've designed us in a certain way and we know that your way is good and we want to live in your way and we want to live out that foundational calling for our lives and yet at the same time we live in a world of sin that disrupts us.

[41:26] It robs us of our ability to be what you design us to be. It robs us of the ability to build families. It robs us of the ability to live in safe societies where the rule of law is always obeyed.

[41:42] It disrupts our fellowship with the church so we're not naive about this. At the same time Lord, our answer is not to abandon those foundational callings and just run after our secular callings and hope that those will fulfill us.

[41:57] That is the wrong way to medicate and try and get rid of the fallout of the fall. The right way is to recommit to our foundational callings but to do it now in the strength and the power of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ who has overcome the fall in all its effects.

[42:14] He who would fulfill his vocational callings to the point of death that we might have life. He is our model. He is our strength. He's our hope Lord and help us to rest in him and trust in him. I pray for any person who's sitting here right now with really difficult decisions they're trying to make about work and vocation.

[42:31] I pray that you would give them wisdom and you would lead them in truth. I pray for any person who's sitting here this morning who's thought about those vocational callings and they've looked back at their own life maybe with regret or asked just for whatever reasons have not been able to live out those foundational callings.

[42:49] That you would comfort their hearts and they would know that in the new creation all is restored every tear is wiped away. Our foundations are reset and we enter into your joy.

[43:00] Comfort them and help us as a church to comfort them. But help us in a tricky place like the city where we have to navigate this sort of stuff all the time to do this well to model it well as a community to others Lord of what it looks like to balance out our callings.

[43:15]  We pray this all for Christ's sake and his glory. Amen.