![\"Artboard](\"https://5475273.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/5475273/1517LMS_Theme/Images/Artboard%206.png\")
Let's get started!
\nIn this first session, I'll begin by introducing the topic of Vocation and man's impressive ability for good and evil. We'll look at the Tower of Babel account and God's surprising comment that, \"Nothing they have planned to do will be impossible for them,\" (Genesis 11:6). It seems almost–almost–as if God is scared of his creation.
\nEach of us has enormous potential. I know that as an individual, for instance, the potential I have for evil is bone-chilling. But the opposite is true too. We don't always appreciate that. I didn't really appreciate it until I was a father.
\nWe'll briefly review our Two Calls: (1) The call to faith and (2) the call to a vocation. We'll also look at the categories of vocation and what I'm calling, \"Gods Economy of Love.\"
\nLet's dive in.
\n- Mike
"}00:00 [ Music ]
\n00:15 >> Hello and welcome to this 1517 Academy class on vocation.
\n00:20 We're going to entitle this class as Masks of God,
\n00:25 the Lutheran Doctrine of Vocation.
\n00:30 few of these Academy classes and we hope that you will take a look at all of them.
\n00:36 My name is Michael Berg.
\n00:37 I serve as an assistant professor of theology at Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee,
\n00:43 Wisconsin, and privileged to take you through this seven-part course on the Lutheran Doctrine
\n00:50 of Ocation.
\n00:51 A first lesson will serve as an introductory lesson of sorts, and we're going to call it
\n01:00 potential. I am fascinated with the tower of Babel account in Genesis. If you remember
\n01:08 that the people of earth after the flood had spread out and they started to congregate
\n01:13 into cities and a group of them, the people of the earth, started to build a tower and
\n01:21 they meant for that tower to reach into the heavens. They were falling into the same trap
\n01:30 to be like God. They wanted to reach into the heavens. But what really fascinates me
\n01:37 about this is an account, is that it's almost, almost as if God is scared of His creation.
\n01:45 After all the planning and the building of this grand tower that was going to attempt
\n01:50 to reach into the heavens as if they could ever make it, this is the dialogue within
\n02:00 When people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan
\n02:07 to do will be impossible for them.
\n02:11 Come.
\n02:12 Let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other.
\n02:19 It's almost, almost as if God is scared of His creation.
\n02:26 Why would that be?
\n02:30 great potential. We as human beings have great potential for evil. I know that as an
\n02:40 individual, my potential for evil is chilling. You know, it wasn't the great tyrants and
\n02:47 leaders in the history of mankind who carried out the tragic genocides and the unjust
\n03:00 the potential I have for evil is bone-chilling, and God knew it. He knew what we could do,
\n03:11 and so He babbled our language. But the opposite is true too. Our potential for good
\n03:20 is equally as grand, and I don't think we appreciate that enough. It's something I know I didn't
\n03:30 father. Now I'm the oldest of six children, and so I knew what was coming
\n03:35 when it came time for me to be a parent. I wasn't that guy who didn't know how
\n03:38 to hold a baby or change a diaper. But that didn't make me confident about being
\n03:45 a father. It actually made me petrified because I knew how much patience and love
\n03:51 it would take, and I didn't have it. I had a limit. I had a limit of my potential
\n04:00 But then I held that baby girl in my arms for the very first time.
\n04:06 And that ceiling that I thought was my ceiling of potential for love was shattered.
\n04:13 When my wife was pregnant with our second child,
\n04:16 I'm ashamed to admit that I thought I wouldn't love the second child.
\n04:21 How could I?
\n04:23 Because I couldn't take any love from my first child.
\n04:25 That's not how love works.
\n04:27 It's not like a piece of pie.
\n04:30 How could I love this other child?
\n04:32 I was tapped out.
\n04:34 I had a limit of potential, and that was it.
\n04:36 But then I held that second baby girl in my arms.
\n04:41 And my limit was shattered again.
\n04:45 And then I finally got it.
\n04:46 I could have a dozen children,
\n04:49 and I would have enough love for them.
\n04:52 I wouldn't have enough money or time or patience,
\n04:55 but I would have enough love as watered down
\n05:00 enough love. Our potential is great, and we know it. Whether we admit it or not,
\n05:09 we know that we were made for something great. And that's because we're created
\n05:15 in the image of God, with all the rationality and the beauty and the complexity
\n05:21 and the creativity and the desire for freedom and the desire for drama that
\n05:30 We don't have drama in our lives.
\n05:32 We'll make it up because we know instinctively that we are important.
\n05:37 We're something different than the animals.
\n05:40 I doubt that the squirrels get together and look up into the night sky
\n05:44 and wonder what it would be like to go to the moon.
\n05:48 But we did, and we did something about it.
\n05:52 We have wonderment.
\n05:53 We explore.
\n05:54 We think.
\n05:55 We write.
\n05:56 We create.
\n05:57 We invent.
\n06:00 we are epic, and we know it, because we're created, whether we admit it or not, in the image of God.
\n06:08 And we also know instinctively that we have lost that perfect image of God because of sin.
\n06:14 We are dissatisfied. We are discontent with our lives.
\n06:20 And that's not such a bad thing. We know that we were made for something better.
\n06:30 knows how great our potential is, that He called us.
\n06:36 In fact, He called us Christians twice.
\n06:40 The first call is a call of grace.
\n06:43 It is a call to believe.
\n06:44 It says, \"Trust me.
\n06:45 I am the one that's going to save you.
\n06:48 I am the one who is going to save you from sin and death and hell and the devil just
\n06:53 trusts me.\"
\n06:55 Not only that, but I give you this world to enjoy.
\n07:00 This call is the sending of the Holy Spirit into dark and dead hearts and makes them alive with the gospel.
\n07:08 It's unconditional love. That's the first call, the call to faith.
\n07:14 But God does not stop there. He gives Christians a second call, and that's where we get into the doctrine of vocation.
\n07:22 Vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, which means \"to call.\"
\n07:30 God, there is somebody who is called the Christian, but there's a third ingredient as well, and
\n07:37 that is the neighbor.
\n07:40 God calls people to a neighbor relationship.
\n07:44 He calls people to serve neighbor.
\n07:49 So who is my neighbor?
\n07:50 It's actually a complicated question, I suppose.
\n07:53 It was a question that Jesus was asked, and he answered it, with a parable of the good
\n07:57 Samaritan.
\n08:00 the neighbor is anybody that you have a relationship with. So if you are a father,
\n08:06 your children are your neighbors. When a woman is an entrepreneur, her customers,
\n08:13 her vendors, her employees are her neighbors. God calls people to work in
\n08:30 the world. This is how he gets things done. We'll come back to that for a second. We should
\n08:38 take a step back and talk about the idea of stations. God is a God of order and he has
\n08:44 ordered this world. He's ordered the family. He's ordered government. He's ordered many
\n08:49 things. And everybody has a station in life. And I don't mean sort of a class idea, but
\n09:00 It is where they stand, the word stand and station are related.
\n09:05 And so a teacher has a station.
\n09:08 She stands before her students.
\n09:11 A doctor has a station.
\n09:14 She stands before her patients and her coworkers and the hospital that she works for.
\n09:21 Everybody has stations in life.
\n09:30 God's order, we often come up with false stations. So if that doctor is also a
\n09:38 lone shark, that is not a separate station, that's a false station, it's an
\n09:44 immoral station, it is a disorder in God's order. Everybody has multiple
\n09:51 stations in life, but those stations for the Christian become callings. And this
\n10:00 I would imagine that the atheist lawyer doesn't think that he is being called by God since
\n10:07 he doesn't believe in God.
\n10:09 He still may perform his task admirably, even maybe more admirably than his co-worker
\n10:16 who is Christian.
\n10:17 But that's not the point.
\n10:19 The idea for a Christian is that God is specifically called that person to serve neighbor,
\n10:30 puts on the person as if that person was a mask and then uses them in his economy of love.
\n10:39 It's how he gets things done. I suppose God could do it a different way and he has in the past.
\n10:47 I suppose you could come home from a hard day's labor and go into your backyard and find your
\n10:54 picnic table in the backyard covered with a with a cute little red and white checkered table
\n11:00 with your favorite comfort food all prepared for you that God just did it
\n11:04 miraculously, just poof, and it was there. He could feed you that way. He did it for
\n11:10 the Israelites for 40 years in the wilderness he could. But that's not his
\n11:15 style. It's not how he normally operates. Instead, he used the farmer and
\n11:23 the FDA inspector and the truck driver and the grocer and the person who
\n11:30 the person who cleans up after the food, and on and on.
\n11:34 Why?
\n11:35 To love you.
\n11:36 So that you don't starve to death, so that you can be fed more than that.
\n11:41 So you could enjoy this food, the fruits of this world that has been given back to you.
\n11:47 This is how God operates.
\n11:49 I suppose it seems more miraculous, and I suppose it is, if God could just say, \"Here's your meal.\"
\n12:00 And what God is doing is He is giving purpose to these people.
\n12:05 He is showing people how to love.
\n12:08 He is loving you in this divine web of interactions in vocation.
\n12:15 I like that concept of His economy of love.
\n12:19 This is how He gets things done by using all of these different people in their stations
\n12:25 in life.
\n12:30 I need you for this task.
\n12:32 I need you to teach our children.
\n12:34 I need you to nurse people back to health.
\n12:37 I need you to be a parent.
\n12:39 I need you to protect.
\n12:41 I need you.
\n12:42 I call you to work in my economy of love.
\n12:47 We'll play around with the idea through this seven lesson course with the idea of a setting.
\n12:54 A setting is simply a place where things get done.
\n13:00 He already talked about this idea that vocation is the setting for human potential.
\n13:05 We know that we were made for something great and we're dissatisfied with something that
\n13:10 is less than perfect.
\n13:12 And so God, who has redeemed this world and given us back to us, gives us this purpose,
\n13:20 gives us this divine purpose where we can reach our potential of love, imperfectly,
\n13:30 and what a wonderful thing that is. Our second lesson will be vocation is a
\n13:36 setting for spiritual warfare. The devil wants to disorder God's order of
\n13:43 vocations and stations. The devil wants us to be about ourselves, to be
\n13:48 curved inward, to make our vocations about ourselves, our success, our
\n13:53 promotions, our salaries. And because Christians are sinners saints
\n14:00 a little bit later, there's a spiritual battle going on, and the setting for this spiritual battle
\n14:06 is vocation. Do I die to myself to live for others, or do I live for myself? The third lesson
\n14:15 will be entitled vocation as the setting for sanctification. That this is not really about ourselves.
\n14:30 Theologically, sanctification for the sake of sanctification.
\n14:35 No, it's not about me being a good person.
\n14:38 It's about loving somebody else.
\n14:40 And that happens in vocation.
\n14:43 Our fourth lesson will be vocation as a setting for purpose.
\n14:48 Because we are people who know that we are important.
\n14:52 Because we have great potential for evil and for good.
\n14:56 We know that we need a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
\n15:00 we need a divine purpose, we who are created in the image of God, and God gives us that
\n15:06 purpose in vocation, the setting for that purpose.
\n15:11 Our fifth lesson will be vocation as a setting for a wider liberality.
\n15:17 We're free.
\n15:18 We're free from trying to please God.
\n15:21 Christ already did that for us.
\n15:30 And because we have this liberation, because we are free, we are free to love, to lose ourselves
\n15:38 in the craft and love of our work, and ultimately to lose ourselves in the love of neighbor.
\n15:45 Our sixth lesson will be entitled \"Vocation, a Setting for Human Flourishing.\"
\n15:51 This is the goal, the way it was always supposed to be.
\n15:54 God wants us to flourish.
\n15:56 And how do we do that in the setting of vocation?
\n16:00 to help humanity flourish, and we ourselves with this free purpose, this
\n16:05 freedom and this purpose can flourish ourselves, even in a broken world. Our
\n16:12 final lesson will be vocation as the setting for evangelism. Vocation is all
\n16:17 about neighbor, and so is evangelism, and so evangelism takes place, and you
\n16:22 guessed it, the setting of vocation. We'll also end with a little advice about
\n16:30 If God is calling us, how do we know, and what should we choose, the trades, or a white
\n16:36 college job, should we go to college, which college, all of those tough questions?
\n16:43 Let me end with this thought, that I believe that God has respect for His creation.
\n16:49 It seems kind of silly to say, \"How could God create?
\n16:52 How could God respect something that is below Him?\"
\n17:00 take on flesh and save us, he values us that much.
\n17:05 But he goes one step further as we have said.
\n17:08 He provides us with honor and work.
\n17:11 He lifts us up to a startling degree
\n17:15 so that we can honor in our job.
\n17:18 He says, \"I want you for this job.
\n17:20 \"I need you to do this.
\n17:22 \"I choose you for this task.\"
\n17:25 And so in a way, he respects us.
\n17:30 overtaken by honor but also humility.
\n17:34 How could he choose and use us?
\n17:37 How could he lift us to such a high degree?
\n17:40 And what that means is that whatever job you fulfill,
\n17:44 whatever occupation you are in,
\n17:47 whatever vocation you find yourself in, believe me,
\n17:51 it is your highest honor.
\n17:54 (upbeat music)
\n18:00 (upbeat music)
"}00:00 [Music]
\n00:15 Hello and welcome back to this 1517 Academy course entitled, \"Masks of God, the Lutheran Doctrine of Vocation.\"
\n00:30 Let's start with this idea.
\n00:32 I believe that we humans are the type of beings that want to be justified.
\n00:38 In other words, justification is a big theological word, but I think if we start with the ordinary
\n00:45 usage of that word in our day-to-day life, it will give us an insight into this theological
\n00:50 concept.
\n00:51 Let's say that I come home from work one day, and behind my vehicle I am pulling a
\n01:00 purchased. And I pull up into the driveway and my wife comes out and she wonders what
\n01:05 in the world did I do. When I get out of the car, I am faced with a situation where I need
\n01:12 to justify myself. I need to explain myself. I need to make a good reason for why I made
\n01:20 this big purchase without telling her. And I suppose the only reason is if I won the lottery
\n01:30 First, what am I trying to do there when I justify my actions?
\n01:35 I'm trying to make myself just.
\n01:38 In reality, I'm trying to make my actions right, even righteous.
\n01:44 In fact, the word \"justice\" and \"righteous\" or \"just\" and \"right\" in most languages are
\n01:49 the same word.
\n01:52 And so we try to justify ourselves.
\n01:54 We are trying to make ourselves righteous.
\n02:00 righteousness, and so we attempt to make ourselves righteous. I would go so far as to say that
\n02:09 we're trying to make ourselves valuable to other people. We're trying to justify our existence
\n02:16 to other people and whether we admit it or not before God as well. I would also suggest that
\n02:30 to justify ourselves.
\n02:32 I think this is why we gossip because if I have this little tidbit of information,
\n02:37 then I have value within the group.
\n02:41 My existence is justified.
\n02:43 I think this is why people try to give you their resume all the time, or why you keep
\n02:50 track of chores in the house that you were doing more work than the other people in your
\n02:56 apartment or in your home.
\n03:00 act the way they do, and I know because I was an eighth grade boy once.
\n03:05 Why do they pretend not to care at school?
\n03:08 I think unconsciously they are hedging their bets.
\n03:12 They don't want to look like they're dumb.
\n03:15 They don't want to look like a failure.
\n03:17 And so instead of trying and risking failure in school, something that maybe they're not
\n03:22 good at, they pretend like they don't care.
\n03:30 of those eighth-grade boys.
\n03:32 I think if we're honest with ourselves,
\n03:34 that we're always trying to justify our existence,
\n03:38 our value, before the world, and even before God.
\n03:43 We know that we're something different than the squirrels.
\n03:47 We were made for something epic.
\n03:51 Another way to look about at this is
\n03:54 the concept of two kinds of righteousness,
\n03:56 which Saint Paul talks about in his letter
\n04:00 in congregation. The two kinds of righteousness are this. There is a righteousness by law,
\n04:06 and there is a righteousness by faith. I think it's helpful to think about two systems.
\n04:13 System number one is a righteousness by law. What does that mean? It means I am right.
\n04:20 I am righteous. I am just. I am valuable because I followed a set of laws. Now, this
\n04:30 It's pretty okay.
\n04:32 If you do well in life, if you follow the rules, generally you'll be successful.
\n04:38 If you don't do well in life by not following the rules, not working hard, not following
\n04:44 the laws set out before you, you usually, with some exceptions, do poorly.
\n04:51 This is our default position.
\n04:54 But this is a terrible system for love.
\n05:00 of the father and the child coming home from the hospital
\n05:03 that I talked about in the first lesson,
\n05:06 where the father only loves if the child does something,
\n05:10 follows a law, only when the child does righteous things,
\n05:17 does then the father love them.
\n05:19 This would be terrible if we had this relationship with God.
\n05:23 Then we would no longer be in a father-child relationship
\n05:30 agreement with God. I say to God, this is what I'll do, and then you are obligated to protect me,
\n05:38 love me, save me. It's a quid pro quo relationship. And then God is not a God of love. He is a business
\n05:47 partner with us, and he is obligated, notice the law word, he is obligated to pay us the right wages.
\n06:00 This system is a dead end for us when it comes to God.
\n06:05 But thank goodness that there is a righteousness apart from the law,
\n06:09 a righteousness that is outside of us.
\n06:12 It is a righteousness earned by Jesus Christ,
\n06:15 who is our perfect high priest,
\n06:17 and was tempted in every way we are, except was without sin.
\n06:21 And that righteousness that he earned is given to us.
\n06:25 It's a righteousness outside of us, and we trust God.
\n06:30 righteous by faith, not by law.
\n06:35 This is the gospel.
\n06:38 And it has to be the foundation for our life.
\n06:43 Otherwise, all of our work in vocation
\n06:46 is geared towards pleasing God or pleasing the world.
\n06:50 It is a curved inward sort of disposition
\n06:55 rather than a curved outward disposition in love of neighbor.
\n07:00 Simpokos further, in his letter to the Roman congregation,
\n07:05 when he talks about the idea of the old Adam and the new person.
\n07:10 This is called the Simpok, and that shorthand for that Christians are simultaneously sinners and saints.
\n07:19 We are 100% sinners and 100% saints all at the same time,
\n07:25 and I know the math doesn't work out, but it sure explains my life,
\n07:30 But if you're honest, it explains your life as well.
\n07:35 The sinner, the old sinful nature, the old Adam or the old man,
\n07:41 is not his own master.
\n07:43 He has a master and that master is sin.
\n07:46 There is no reforming the sinner.
\n07:48 The sinner just sins.
\n07:50 That's what makes him a sinner.
\n07:54 And if you could stop sinning, may I ask you this question,
\n07:57 why haven't you already?
\n08:00 The saint, the new person, the new creation, the one who has declared righteous by faith,
\n08:09 who has the righteousness of Christ, also has a master.
\n08:13 The righteous person just does righteous things.
\n08:17 That's what makes him a righteous person.
\n08:20 And Christians are 100% sinners and 100% saints.
\n08:30 how we perform this vocational acts
\n08:33 that God has placed before us.
\n08:36 This sinner is annoyed by the neighbor.
\n08:40 The old man is annoyed by the neighbor
\n08:44 because the neighbor is in his way to his success,
\n08:49 to his life goals,
\n08:52 even if the sinner is kind and compassionate
\n09:00 Often, maybe always, it is for a different end than love, but his own righteousness,
\n09:09 his own virtue, his own way of saying, \"I matter, I'm kind, I am compassion.\"
\n09:18 And so even if the sinner helps a little old lady across the street and active kindness
\n09:30 what I did, then he has used his neighbor.
\n09:35 And we don't use people, we use things.
\n09:38 And if we use people for our own gain,
\n09:42 even if it is just to be a good person,
\n09:45 to be justified before the world,
\n09:47 we have used that person and therefore misuse them.
\n09:51 We may even go so far as to say that we have abused them.
\n10:00 righteous by faith are true person in Christ. This person delights in neighbor. Even if
\n10:08 the neighbor gets in the way of their success, of a promotion, or anything of that sort.
\n10:16 Even if the neighbor brings across to the Christian's life, the righteous person in
\n10:30 When we think about this we have to really think about freedom because maybe you're sort of wondering well if the righteous person is a slave to righteousness as Saint Paul says and doesn't have necessarily a free will.
\n10:45 Does that mean that everything's determined that we don't have a free will.
\n10:49 But I think we need to take a step back and talk about freedom for a second.
\n11:00 our choice to do whatever we want, however we want, whenever we want, with whomever we want,
\n11:05 as often as we want. But if we choose sin as the sinner, the old man always will,
\n11:14 this really isn't freedom, is it? Imagine a friend that you have who is addicted to some sort of
\n11:22 substance, and maybe you and their family and other friends get together for what we call an
\n11:30 for you and it's bad for the people around you and he may say in defiance, \"It's my body.
\n11:36 It's my choice. I am free to choose what to put into my body. I'm free.\" We all instinctively
\n11:45 understand that that's not freedom, but it's a prison and the prison of the worst kind because
\n11:50 it's a prison of his own choosing. Now I know what not to say to my wife, been married long enough.
\n12:00 to know that if I say something that there is going to be a hangover for about two to three days.
\n12:07 Now I cognitively know that the high that I'm going to feel about being more righteous than she is,
\n12:14 that I've done more work around the house than she has and that she doesn't appreciate me,
\n12:19 woe is me, this act of self-justification, I cognitively know that the high's not worth the
\n12:30 So why do I keep doing it? Because I'm an addict to sin.
\n12:35 And so I'm not really free when I choose to sin.
\n12:40 It's the exact opposite.
\n12:42 And so if sin is a prison and it is,
\n12:46 then the opposite of sin, which is love, actually, is freedom.
\n12:51 Even though it doesn't look like freedom on the outside
\n12:53 to give up yourself for somebody else,
\n12:56 it is to be what we were always intended to be.
\n13:00 It is created in the image of God type of people now redeemed in Christ who are free to love.
\n13:08 Think about it this way.
\n13:10 Often we think about freedom as freedom from something, so I may be free from sin.
\n13:17 That's a good thing.
\n13:18 But we're not always just free from something.
\n13:21 We are free for something to be truly human, to be truly who we are intended to be,
\n13:30 to free free for something, and in vocation we are free from trying to please God and
\n13:37 neighbor so that we can be free to love.
\n13:40 We are free from sin to be free for love.
\n13:46 And isn't it a delight on those seemingly rare occasions when you just do something
\n13:53 without any kind of notion that you would get credit for it?
\n13:57 You don't even care about that.
\n14:00 Maybe it costs you something.
\n14:02 You just do it because you're overtaken by love.
\n14:06 I know in a broken world that those are fairly rare occurrences.
\n14:10 I understand that.
\n14:12 But isn't that just a drop of heavenly peace from heaven that God has given us, that we
\n14:19 find ourselves in the delight of neighbor, free from sin, and free for love.
\n14:30 since we're in the book of Romans here,
\n14:32 when Saint Paul says that all of you
\n14:35 who are baptized into Christ Jesus
\n14:38 have been crucified with Christ Jesus,
\n14:40 have died and have been buried with Him
\n14:42 and then are also resurrected with Him.
\n14:46 I have my baptismal certificate that says
\n14:49 that I was baptized in St. Louis County, Missouri
\n14:51 on April 16th, 1978.
\n14:54 I have it framed on my bedroom door,
\n14:57 or my bedroom wall.
\n15:00 look at it and I say, \"I'm not that sinner anymore. I am something new. The old sinful nature has
\n15:08 died and what has been resurrected is Christ living in me. I'm not that jerk anymore on something
\n15:14 different.\" Now in this broken world, I'm going to do the whole thing over again the next day and
\n15:19 the next day until one day I'm resurrected and living perfectly in heavenly bliss. But my baptismal
\n15:30 death and resurrection. My sinful nature, every time I am preached law, every time I repent of
\n15:37 my sin, that old atom, that sinful nature, that sinner dies, drowned in the waters of baptism,
\n15:44 and what is resurrected is a new person who delights in neighbor and all of the locations that I carry
\n16:00 devil and God, but it's also warfare between myself, I who am a sinner and also a saint
\n16:08 simultaneously.
\n16:10 The devil wants things to be disordered, God wants things to be ordered and ordered
\n16:15 and loved.
\n16:17 And so God wants, or the devil wants to disorder my vocation.
\n16:21 He wants it to be about me.
\n16:30 for the world. What he really wants is us to attempt to justify our value and our work
\n16:37 before God. Because then Satan, and this is what Satan means, accuser, then Satan can
\n16:43 accuse us and say, \"This person wants to be judged by what he has done, what she has
\n16:52 done on this earth.\" And God, by your perfect law, you must send this person to hell because
\n17:00 perfect. That's what he wants the old sinful nature to do. To invocation see the neighbor as an
\n17:08 annoyance, somebody in the way. So that you will say, \"If I had better co-workers, if I had a better
\n17:14 family, then I would have been perfect.\" And then the world becomes a world of self-justification.
\n17:21 It becomes a dog-eat-dog world. It becomes a competition where I try to lower other people
\n17:30 competition of self-justification.
\n17:34 And so vocation, when a father serves his son or daughter, when a woman serves as a legislator
\n17:44 or a nurse, when a man goes to work to be an electrician, when he is involved in these
\n17:50 neighbor relationships, this is the setting for spiritual warfare.
\n18:00 to live for the person, or does the sinful self win that day?
\n18:06 It's a battle, isn't it?
\n18:08 And it's a tough battle until that end when we finally are done away with the sinful flesh
\n18:15 and live forever in heaven.
\n18:18 This is where spiritual warfare occurs.
\n18:21 And notice it's never an abstract matter that it's just about you and God,
\n18:27 but there's always neighbor involved.
\n18:30 die to yourself, to live for somebody else.
\n18:35 Let's stick with the book of Romans in Romans 12.
\n18:38 I wonder if St. Paul has in mind vocation, even though he doesn't use the word vocation.
\n18:45 He begins chapter 12 of his letter to the Roman congregation this way.
\n18:50 \"Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living
\n19:00 to God, this is your spiritual act of worship.
\n19:05 Now the first thing to point out about this passage is the oxymoron that we come across,
\n19:11 a living sacrifice.
\n19:14 Any Jewish Christian living in Rome, really any Gentile Christian living in Rome, anybody
\n19:19 living in Rome at that time, would have noticed the oxymoron of this phrase \"living sacrifices,\"
\n19:30 So how could there be a living sacrifice?
\n19:33 A sacrifice is an animal that has been killed and is burned into the glory or to the
\n19:39 appeasement of the gods that whoever those people are worshiping.
\n19:45 But if you notice what St. Paul has already done in Romans, you notice the death and resurrection
\n19:52 analogy that the sinful nature dies and the saint is resurrected to live.
\n20:00 in our world, and we carry out our callings, our vocations. We are living
\n20:05 sacrifices, dying to ourselves, and living for others. When a woman gives up
\n20:12 her whole self in motherhood, her time, her energy, her body, for her children,
\n20:19 she dies to her own concerns, and she lives for others. When the man stays
\n20:30 or an extra hour of wages.
\n20:33 When he does that just for the love of the craft
\n20:36 that he is in and the love of his coworkers
\n20:39 and his bosses and his customers,
\n20:41 he dies to himself and he lives for somebody else.
\n20:45 Vocation is the setting for this spiritual warfare.
\n20:50 The second kind of crazy thing to sort of notice here
\n20:54 is the idea of worship.
\n21:00 worship, being a living sacrifice, what does that mean? I think it means something like this.
\n21:08 That God doesn't need your worship. That God doesn't need your prayers. He doesn't need our
\n21:13 hymns on Sunday. He doesn't need our thanksgiving or anything like that. God is not a narcissist
\n21:20 sitting on his throne, and we come at Sunday morning to church, and we all line up and kiss
\n21:30 He's just fine by himself.
\n21:32 Thank you.
\n21:33 He doesn't need your worship.
\n21:38 In fact, what does he do with worship is that he actually makes it about ourselves.
\n21:43 Who benefits from prayer?
\n21:45 Well, we do as we learn the language of faith.
\n21:48 Who benefits from the songs of thanksgiving that we sing?
\n21:51 Well, the people next to us and ourselves, as we praise, we are also
\n22:00 what God has done. It's not like there's a celestial bank account where God is holding
\n22:05 an escrow all of our offerings. No, it is used for the love of world and for ourselves and
\n22:11 our local congregations. God doesn't need your worship at all. And so may I suggest
\n22:17 that Sunday morning that that worship is about getting. It's a selfish kind of thing.
\n22:30 beautiful grace that we do not deserve.
\n22:32 Do we say thank you?
\n22:34 Yes, because it's the polite thing to do,
\n22:36 but God pushes that right back down upon us.
\n22:40 And so our true worship is actually Monday through Saturday.
\n22:45 And the word that St. Paul uses here
\n22:48 that is translated into English worship
\n22:50 is where we get our English word liturgy.
\n22:54 It's a very churchally word, isn't it?
\n23:00 how you worship God. You may think about it this way. You go to Thanksgiving at
\n23:08 Grandma's house and she comes through the kitchen doors with this 16-pound turkey and
\n23:13 everybody ooze and ahs and she puts it down on the center of this beautifully laid table.
\n23:19 Now, if you have a bad grandma, she then sits on her throne and you come and you thank her,
\n23:23 you kiss her ring. But that's not grandma, is it? Grandma really only wants two things on that day.
\n23:30 wants you to enjoy the fruits of her labor.
\n23:33 She wants to feed you.
\n23:35 And the second thing is she wants her family
\n23:37 to get along for at least one afternoon.
\n23:40 This is how God operates.
\n23:42 He wants to give you.
\n23:44 He doesn't care about thank you cards.
\n23:46 He doesn't care about that at all.
\n23:48 He wants you to go out in the world
\n23:50 and live a life of gratitude.
\n23:54 If you had a parent who was so domineering
\n23:57 that even as a little child when you were
\n24:00 or going to school. You always looked over your shoulder wondering, \"Is Daddy and Mommy? Are they
\n24:07 pleased with me? Did I do enough to please them?\" Or maybe a father later in life is always talking
\n24:14 about living up to the family name. This would be a terrible relationship. Good parents want this.
\n24:23 They want their children to go out into the world, not concerned if they had done enough
\n24:30 the parents' love, but just to be who they were raised to be, good citizens, hard workers,
\n24:37 kind and compassionate people. I think it's true with God. He wants us to go out into the world
\n24:45 with very little concern if we're actually serving Him. We talk about the glory of God all
\n24:51 the time. Glory of God this, glory of God that. It's a beautiful biblical concept, but I think
\n25:00 hand for this, that we are so secure in the unconditional love of Christ, that our relationship
\n25:09 with God and His love is so secure that we go out into the world and we don't even question
\n25:16 it, we don't even think if God loves us or not, we're so secure in it.
\n25:22 And because we're so secure in it and because we have been made righteous in Christ, we
\n25:30 without any concern that we're doing it for the glory of God.
\n25:34 Glory of God is shorthand for being so secure in the love of Christ that we lose
\n25:42 ourselves in the craft of our vocations and the love of neighbor that we don't
\n25:47 even think about is this to the glory of God. And when God looks at that and sees
\n26:00 [MUSIC]
"}
I hope you enjoyed the first session.
\nIn this second lesson, we're going to start with this idea: I believe human beings are the type of beings that want to be justified. This is true both spiritually and in our everyday earthly lives. I would even say that we naturally feel we need to be valuable to others. We'll talk a little bit more about how that relates to the topic of Vocation.
\nWe'll also talk about how our vocations are the setting for the spiritual warfare. This is true of the spiritual warfare between God and the devil, as well as between our selves. We are, after all, simultaneously saints and sinners.
\n- Mike
"}
Welcome to the third session.
\nIn this session, we will take a closer look at Sanctification.
\nThere is no other theologian that has done as much for doctrine of Vocation as Martin Luther. It's not an exaggeration to say that his reformation reordered European Society. We'll talk a little bit about why.
\nWe'll also talk about the Three Estates that Luther defined and used to understand Vocation.
\nEnjoy and as always, don't hesitate to reach out with questions,
\n- Mike
"}00:00 [ Music ]
\n00:15 Hello and welcome back to this 1517 Academy class,
\n00:19 the masks of God, the Lutheran Doctrine of Vocation.
\n00:24 Our third lesson is entitled \"Vocation as the Setting
\n00:30 There is no other theologian that has done as much for the doctrine of
\n00:35 vocation than the great reformer Martin Luther.
\n00:38 And it's not an exaggeration to say that his reformation,
\n00:43 really the reformation of so many other people,
\n00:46 reordered European society.
\n00:49 Medieval European society had sort of a class system.
\n00:53 There was basically three classes.
\n00:55 You had the nobility, you had the commoners,
\n01:00 class, the clergy class. And for the most part, you remained in those classes. If you
\n01:07 were born nobility, you remained nobility. If you were commoner, you remained commoner.
\n01:14 And the only way to get outside of those classes was maybe to join that third estate
\n01:21 or class, and that would be the clergy class. Of course, you would be giving something up,
\n01:30 classes. If you were a peasant, perhaps you would gain an education that you
\n01:36 wouldn't normally have afforded. You could have three square meals a day and
\n01:42 a nice warm bed to sleep in if you became a nun or a monk or maybe even
\n01:48 becoming a priest. But you would also give up the opportunity to have your own
\n01:53 family because you would have to take a vow of celibacy. Now when Martin Luther
\n02:00 came upon this idea that he found from St. Paul's letter to the Romans, that he was righteous
\n02:08 by faith, not by law, that changed everything, his relationship with God, but it also changed
\n02:17 his relationship with his neighbors.
\n02:21 And because of that, a lot changed, including all of society.
\n02:30 society, not in these three classes, but three estates.
\n02:35 He called them the ecclesiastical estate, the civic estate, and then the economic estate.
\n02:42 You can hear echoes of what we talked about in our first lesson, the four categories of
\n02:48 vocation.
\n02:50 The ecclesiastical estate was the churchly estate.
\n02:54 Somebody may be a priest, none or a monk or a member of a local congregation.
\n03:00 was a citizen, a citizen perhaps of a free city or a principality and everybody in this
\n03:07 time that Luther was talking to the German people were a part of the Holy Roman Empire.
\n03:13 But then the third estate that he called the \"economic estate\" is really about both
\n03:18 family and somebody's occupation may make a living.
\n03:23 We may think of a family farm today or a mom and pop store where the lines between family
\n03:30 In fact, the word economy comes from a Greek word that means household.
\n03:36 Now notice the way Luther talked about this European society and really society as a
\n03:43 whole.
\n03:44 No longer will people identified by their birth.
\n03:48 A nobleman was always going to be a nobleman and a commoner was always going to be a commoner.
\n03:53 But rather, the identity became how did God use them in these three estates?
\n04:00 the sivic estate or the economic estate.
\n04:05 Now Luther, who was actually part of a burgeoning middle class that was also breaking up this
\n04:13 three-class system in Europe, famously studied first to be a lawyer at the University of
\n04:20 Erfurt, but then he also famously changed course abruptly and decided to become an Augustinian
\n04:30 class. He was going to be cloistered away, take a vow of celibacy, and his whole life
\n04:37 would be geared towards God. His work would be for God. He would be taking something of
\n04:45 a vow that would make him a little bit better than just the baptized believer. He would
\n04:50 be a worker for God as an Augustinian friar.
\n05:00 being a monk, if you can imagine that. If he was going to pray every three hours, then
\n05:06 he was going to do that. If he was going to work for God, he was going to do that. If
\n05:11 he was going to fight against his flesh in this vow of celibacy, then he was going
\n05:16 to do that 110 percent. It was just his personality. But because of that, he ran into
\n05:23 a problem, and that problem was that he was stuck in the system of righteousness by law.
\n05:30 that everything that he did was in view of God's judgment or grace, which I
\n05:37 suppose it is. And this worked out very poorly for Luther because try as he might
\n05:43 to be perfect, he couldn't. He would look inside of himself and he saw what
\n05:49 Jesus saw. He saw a dead tree. He saw something that was rotten. And the more
\n06:00 And the more he knew how sinful he was, and God for him became a tyrant.
\n06:06 He became that ruthless businessman who had an agreement with Luther, and the agreement
\n06:13 that he had was something impossible for Luther to keep.
\n06:17 He could not be perfect, not even close.
\n06:20 But then he realized that there was a righteousness by faith, a righteousness apart from the law.
\n06:28 He was free.
\n06:30 the question needs to be asked, what's a monk to do?
\n06:34 What is a monk whose entire life, his time, his effort, his energy, his whole self, his
\n06:42 whole being that was geared towards pleasing God, being the special spiritual person so
\n06:49 divorced from the regular mundane people?
\n06:53 What is a monk to do now?
\n07:00 himself. Now this is unfair to the monastic system of that time and of today. The monks back
\n07:07 then did a lot of great things. They worshipped. They were the ones often that preached. They
\n07:15 taught. They even made things with their hand. They brewed beer. They helped out the poor. They
\n07:20 did a lot of good things. But still the question remained, what's a monk now to do when he is no
\n07:30 God in order to find His value and His salvation. What is He to do with all of His time and energy?
\n07:38 This actually became a very practical question when in Germany, many of the monasteries and nunneries
\n07:45 were being emptied out and you had a flood of people. What were they to do? And the answer
\n07:51 was vocation. They would become, hopefully, teachers and candlestick makers and bakers
\n08:00 and cobblings, or at least going forward in generations, that these vocations would
\n08:06 be seen as just as holy as would be the occupation of being a nun, or a monk, or a priest, that
\n08:15 all work was spiritual.
\n08:18 That God sees all of this work as equal and all the distinctions fall away, and God
\n08:30 what gifts have I been given to you, and where have I placed you and called you in my economy of love?
\n08:40 We might think about it this way, that the love flows from God through the person to the neighbor.
\n08:49 Think about it as a waterfall, that the waterfall of God's love comes down upon us,
\n09:00 to enjoy. I suppose that I could take a bucket of God's love and throw it back up to him, and in that way
\n09:07 I would be in a vertical relationship, a vertical ethical relationship with God.
\n09:12 But as we notice last time God throws that love back down upon us, his praise and
\n09:18 thanksgiving that we offer to him
\n09:20 actually benefit us.
\n09:23 What I can do with that waterfall of God's love instead of trying to throw this bucket of love, this waterfall
\n09:30 up which falls that back down upon me is I can actually redirect that waterfall of love
\n09:36 to somebody else. So it's God's love through me to somebody else. It's not just a vertical
\n09:44 ethical orientation. Now that that water of God's love is going to flow down my arm and it's going
\n09:50 to come with all the filth that is my sin and it's going to run through my fingers. It's it's
\n09:54 sometimes hardly going to look like God's love but it's still God's love through me as he puts
\n10:00 me as a mask to serve my neighbor in my vocations. So what occurred was that there was an ethical
\n10:09 reorientation. Instead of a vertical ethical orientation, me and God, now there was a horizontal
\n10:17 ethical orientation that would be between me, the person in the vocation, and the neighbor
\n10:30 little stab at the monastic system at the end of a small booklet that he wrote called
\n10:36 the Small Catechism, which was a manual for parents to teach their children the basics
\n10:41 of the Christian faith.
\n10:42 As an addendum to this little manual, he entitled this thing called the Table of Duties, in
\n10:50 which he gave advice for different vocations, employers, employees, parents, and children.
\n11:00 called these holy orders. So when we used the word vocation in the medieval church,
\n11:08 that was exclusive to people who felt a calling to the clergy class. They would take their holy
\n11:16 orders, their marching orders. They would enter an order like the Augustinian order,
\n11:22 and they would be doing God's work. They had a special calling that was high above just the
\n11:30 And so when Luther wrote his table of duties, he says, \"Here are your holy orders, a little
\n11:36 stab at the idea of the monastic system where those people were cloistered away to
\n11:41 do God's work.\"
\n11:42 What he was saying was, \"This is God's work.
\n11:45 The carpenter does God's work, and it's just as holy as the priest before the altar.\"
\n12:00 on the doctrine of vocation in the 20th century,
\n12:04 notice that Luther went so far
\n12:07 as to think of vocation as the ethical agent.
\n12:12 And what he meant by that was this,
\n12:15 that the vocation, if it's God's work through us,
\n12:21 that it is God who is doing it
\n12:24 and the vocation, the calling becomes the ethical agent.
\n12:30 Luther would say things like this, \"It's always wrong to kill, not just murder, but kill.
\n12:36 It's always wrong to take life.
\n12:38 It is not our job to take life in any circumstance at all.\"
\n12:46 But if you are called to a vocation in which it calls for life to be taken, they think
\n12:53 even of a butcher or a hunter.
\n13:00 executioner. Today we can relate to the calling of a soldier. What is a soldier to do when
\n13:08 he comes upon the Fifth Commandment? You shall not kill. You shall not murder. Luther's
\n13:15 solution, and it doesn't solve all problems, but Luther's solution was to say the vocation
\n13:21 is the ethical agent. If God says that you are called to this position, such as soldier
\n13:30 and for the sake of law and order or protection that you kill, then you must kill.
\n13:37 And the ethical obligation is then on God, not on you.
\n13:43 So it's always wrong to kill.
\n13:47 But when you're called to do that, you are obligated to do that.
\n13:52 But the ethics of the whole matter is on God.
\n14:00 That dichotomy or really that paradox, that troubling ethical situation is put on God, not on us.
\n14:08 Now this doesn't solve all problems because you could see very easily that people could say,
\n14:13 \"I was just doing my job, don't blame me.\"
\n14:15 Or we could see a situation where people don't think about ethics at all and they just go about their jobs.
\n14:23 Of course we have to ask questions, \"What is a just war when it comes to a soldier?\"
\n14:30 Luther also said something very outrageous as he often did.
\n14:34 He often says something outrageous, and then we have to wait a few pages in his readings
\n14:39 before he explains it.
\n14:41 In his commentary on 1 Corinthians 7 verse 20, he went so far as to say that God doesn't
\n14:48 care if a man leaves his wife.
\n14:51 He says, \"What is it to God if a man marries or doesn't marry?\"
\n15:00 and you go, \"What are you talking about?
\n15:02 Doesn't God care about the family?
\n15:03 Doesn't God care about right and wrong?\"
\n15:05 Luther's point was that the vertical ethical situation
\n15:10 is taken care of by Jesus Christ.
\n15:11 Period, full stop, end of sentence, no more debate.
\n15:17 That God's love is unconditional.
\n15:19 That my performance and vocation
\n15:21 does not affect God's unconditional love
\n15:24 unless I reject Him.
\n15:25 If I am in faith, I am righteous by faith,
\n15:30 in the center. And the idea also was, do you think God really cares if you do good or bad?
\n15:38 God doesn't need your good works. God's not impressed by your good works. That would be a
\n15:44 righteousness by law. That would be the wrong system. So what is it to man if you are holy or
\n15:52 not? What is it to God, I should say, if you sin in this situation or not? If you stay with your
\n16:00 or leave your wife. But then a couple pages later, Luther comes back and says,
\n16:05 \"But that husband in this example owes everything to his wife. He belongs to her.
\n16:14 His whole self, his body, everything belongs to his wife.\"
\n16:19 Freed from this ethical obligation that is vertical, \"Should I marry or not marry
\n16:30 ethical orientation, and you owe everything to your neighbor in this situation.
\n16:36 The husband owes everything to his wife, his whole body, his whole self.
\n16:41 He belongs to her.
\n16:44 Before God, we are righteous on a kind of Christ.
\n16:48 Before neighbor, we love.
\n16:53 Perhaps then, I can't help but think about this, perhaps then that there is no such thing
\n16:57 as privacy.
\n17:00 and of course there are things that we are privy to and not privy to.
\n17:03 There is such a thing as privacy, I suppose.
\n17:07 But what I'm after is this idea that what I do in my private life is personal and it's
\n17:14 away from the world, or maybe it's just between me and God.
\n17:19 But I don't know that that's very accurate.
\n17:30 Let's use a crass example. Let's say a man watches pornography like a lot.
\n17:36 And all of the images that he looks at are about consenting adults.
\n17:41 People in our jaded world may say it's a victimless crime.
\n17:46 But is it really? You can't tell me that that man, what he does in private,
\n17:51 does not affect the way he looks at his wife, his daughters,
\n18:00 in general. What he does in private is who he is, some way, somehow, in public. And in
\n18:08 vocation, the ethical obligation to neighbor demands the whole self. It really does. And
\n18:17 this is harsh law, isn't it? Good thing we are not in an ethical orientation with God,
\n18:23 a system of righteousness by law anymore. But we are righteous by faith. No matter how
\n18:30 our vocations. This also leads me to think about the concept of virtue. The Greeks were really good
\n18:39 about talking about virtue. They would talk about the good life, the sumon bonam. What does it mean
\n18:46 to be a flourishing human being? What does it mean to have the good life? And most of them would
\n19:00 part of the good life.
\n19:03 And it was really wonderful way that they talked about virtue,
\n19:07 talked about patience and compassion and all of these things.
\n19:10 But I think there was a couple things missing.
\n19:12 One thing that was still sort of a curved inward thing,
\n19:15 even though to be unselfish was virtuous and you were
\n19:19 curved out in a way, you were finally, it was for your good life
\n19:23 and the good life of the society around you.
\n19:27 It was finally a curved inward thing.
\n19:30 So far as to say that for the most part the Greeks who were great at talking about virtue,
\n19:36 they had the concept of virtue for the sake of virtue.
\n19:39 They tell us the end, the goal, the destiny for many of them, I suppose not all, but many of them
\n19:46 was the virtue itself. It was about you living the good life and not going to the extreme of
\n20:00 would be sanctification for the sake of sanctification.
\n20:05 Look, I do these things so that I can be holy,
\n20:08 so that I can be a good Christian before God
\n20:12 and before the world.
\n20:14 The goal is finally self,
\n20:16 and when the goal is self,
\n20:17 sanctification for the sake of sanctification,
\n20:21 neighbor is gone, neighbor is gone.
\n20:24 Luther struggled with this because he had grown up
\n20:30 taught it for a year at the University of Wittenberg.
\n20:34 And the Aristotelian virtue ethics was actually great.
\n20:38 It has a lot to do with a regular day life.
\n20:42 To simplify it, it means something like this.
\n20:45 You're not really born a patient person, if we use patients as an example of virtue,
\n20:51 but you practice patience.
\n20:54 You become then a patient person.
\n21:00 how much of our life works.
\n21:02 I may be born with more of an aptitude
\n21:06 than other people to do word-working,
\n21:09 but I still need to work at it
\n21:11 before I can master that craft.
\n21:14 Practice makes perfect.
\n21:16 You practice something, then you become a good worker,
\n21:19 you become a patient person.
\n21:22 But this rubbed Luther the wrong way
\n21:25 because he kept going to what Jesus said
\n21:27 about good trees and bad trees,
\n21:30 bear good fruit, good fruit and bad trees bear bad fruit.
\n21:33 That's just the way it is.
\n21:36 And the idea there is that God made you righteous.
\n21:40 That's the first action.
\n21:42 And then a righteous person does righteous things.
\n21:46 A righteous tree produces righteous fruit.
\n21:52 And so my attempt at virtue, my attempt at sanctification for the sake of that virtue
\n22:00 Has it all wrong?
\n22:02 I am sanctified.
\n22:04 I am virtuous.
\n22:06 I am a saint, and a saint naturally produces good fruit,
\n22:11 and doesn't ask itself,
\n22:13 \"Am I a good tree or a bad tree?\"
\n22:16 Because it's always thinking about the neighbor.
\n22:21 I can't help but think of St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians,
\n22:30 that I'm sure you've heard at many o' weddings. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,
\n22:36 but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clinging symbol. The idea there is that love,
\n22:45 of course, is the greatest. Love is the one that lasts forever. And so God's not impressed with
\n22:51 your virtue. He's not impressed with your sanctification. He's not impressed with your virtue. God doesn't
\n23:00 Gustav Windgren famously said, \"What he wants is love, and so I like to replace speaking
\n23:08 in the tongues of men with any virtue that I think is pretty good.
\n23:12 If I have a work ethic that can move mountains but have not love, I am only a resounding
\n23:19 gong or a clanging symbol on just making a lot of loud noise, and I'm probably annoying
\n23:30 Let's end with this idea of posture, being curved inward or being curved outward, something
\n23:39 Christians have been talking about for a very long time.
\n23:43 When I'm curved inward, we call that navel gazing.
\n23:45 I'm looking at my belly button.
\n23:47 I'm looking inside of me.
\n23:49 And notice my posture, my shoulders are slumped, my chin is down.
\n23:53 I'm looking inside of me.
\n23:54 And when I look inside of me, I'm probably looking for hope.
\n24:00 I'm looking for my identity, I am in a situation of trying to justify myself.
\n24:07 But if I'm honest and look inside of myself, I see a rotten tree.
\n24:13 Or I become delusional and start thinking I'm pretty good and better than everybody
\n24:18 else.
\n24:19 Either way, I'm curved inward.
\n24:22 But to be curved outward, notice that my shoulders are back and my chin is up.
\n24:27 I look confident in a certain way.
\n24:30 God pushes our shoulders back.
\n24:32 He does this with his preaching of law, his alien work,
\n24:36 with his suffering, the mask upon which he hides
\n24:40 to remind us that we can't look in ourselves
\n24:42 for our faith, for our trust, for our identity, for our purpose.
\n24:45 He pushes us back and painfully so sometimes
\n24:49 so that we look outward and we see our salvation
\n24:52 outside of ourselves, we see the cross of Christ.
\n24:56 Oh, and by the way, now that we are curved outward
\n25:00 Christ, we also see our neighbor, perhaps for the very first time.
\n25:07 So know that when God pushes you back, He pushes your shoulders back so that you don't
\n25:12 trust in yourself and these silly attempts at self-justification.
\n25:16 He points you to Christ, and while you're looking up, you will also see that not only
\n25:21 Christ saved you, but that He used you.
\n25:30 You who have been crucified with Christ, you who have had the old sinful nature drowned
\n25:36 in the waters of baptism you are resurrected, and now you may just see your neighbor for
\n25:43 the very first time.
"}
Well, we're a little over halfway! I hope and pray that you are finding this exploration of Vocation helpful.
\nIn this fourth lesson, we will start by talking about the story of David and Bathsheba. Believe it or not, the first sin in this story is actually related to Vocation and can help us understand what sins against vocation do to others. We'll also talk about vocation as a, 'Christological Endeavor.'
\nI hope you enjoy.
\n- Mike
"}00:00 [Music]
\n00:15 Hello and welcome back to this 1517 Academy course,
\n00:19 Masks of God, the Lutheran Doctrine of Vocation.
\n00:23 Lesson 4 is entitled,
\n00:25 Vocation as the Setting for Purpose.
\n00:30 from King David. At this point in King David's life, he had solidified his power. He had defeated
\n00:38 his enemies. He had built his capital city on Mount Zion, Jerusalem. And one day, when his army
\n00:46 was off fighting in Raba, he was looking outside his palace and he saw a woman bathing on her rooftop.
\n01:00 know the rest of the story, that lust turned into an affair, which turned into a pregnancy.
\n01:07 Then David tried to cover up that pregnancy. He tried to bring back Bathsheba's husband,
\n01:13 Uriah the Hittite, who was fighting in his army and Raba. He thought maybe that Uriah
\n01:19 would go and sleep with his wife, but Uriah was a stand-up guy. He said, \"When the
\n01:24 Ark of the Covenant is out there, and when my boys are out there fighting, how could I
\n01:30 of home and he didn't sleep with his wife. Fast forward a little bit. David was frustrated
\n01:36 that he could not cover up this pregnancy. And so he ordered that his army would attack
\n01:41 the walls of the city that were besieging, but then quickly fall back. And he gave instructions
\n01:48 that Uriah the Hittite not be told to plan. Uriah the Hittite was a sitting duck and he
\n02:00 And perhaps you've heard this story in the context of a warning.
\n02:04 And the warning is small sins turn into big sins.
\n02:10 Notice the snowball effect.
\n02:12 David was lusting and it turned into an affair, eventually a cover-up, and even a heinous murder.
\n02:19 But there's a little detail of this story in 2 Samuel that we pass over.
\n02:30 out to war, and David sent out his army under the leadership of Joab to besiege the city of
\n02:37 Raba. We are told that David remained in Jerusalem. Those words haunt me, and I think
\n02:45 they haunted King David as well, when the time when kings go out to war to protect their
\n03:00 Jerusalem. And so the first sin in this snowball of nastiness and debauchery and murder was not
\n03:08 lost. It was a sin against vocation. Vocation David did not do what he was supposed to be doing.
\n03:16 He did not follow the call from God. And notice that even this small minor sin against vocation
\n03:30 the call of God is not an abstract thing just between me and God, but there is always a neighbor who suffers with that.
\n03:40 Before we go any further, we have to mention this beautiful part of the story, and that is when the prophet Nathan comes and confronts David with his sin.
\n04:00 David had to do. He did not have to grovel more. He did not have to pay back to Raya, the
\n04:05 Hittite family, not when it came to his relationship with God. He repented and he was forgiven.
\n04:13 And notice that God did something very extraordinary, forgiveness of sin and hutchist any sin,
\n04:19 but a string of really awful sins. He did it with an ordinary person, this prophet Nathan.
\n04:30 it's how he normally operates. He normally uses the ordinary to accomplish the extra ordinary,
\n04:39 the extraordinary. Sir, there are times when God does things that are supernatural and powerful
\n04:45 and make us say, \"Wow!\" But the truth of the matter is that he almost always, when he deals with
\n05:00 He formed Adam out of the dust of the earth and Eve from the rib of Adam.
\n05:05 He comes to us, hiding in flesh and the incarnation.
\n05:09 He continues to come to us in mere words, ink on a paper and a preacher whose words follow
\n05:18 the airwaves and then beat upon our eardrums.
\n05:22 It's a very physical way God interacts with us.
\n05:26 He is a gritty God.
\n05:30 blood and the beer to borrow a phrase, he is a gritty God that is involved in our world.
\n05:37 We may think about it this way.
\n05:40 If God is evangelical, and what I mean by evangelical is the original meaning.
\n05:45 Evangel means gospel.
\n05:47 Good news.
\n05:48 Good news of unconditional love, of salvation, on account of Christ.
\n05:51 If God is evangelical, he wants all men to be saved and not to perish, then it makes
\n06:00 that He would take on flesh and come to us.
\n06:04 If He wants to save us and He knows that we can't go to Him, how could we?
\n06:08 That would be a righteousness by law system.
\n06:11 Then it makes sense that He would take on flesh and come to us, live in our place.
\n06:16 That He would pay the price for our sins, that He would be our righteousness,
\n06:21 something we could not accomplish ourselves.
\n06:24 If God is evangelical, then it makes sense that He is incarnational, and it also makes sense
\n06:30 He's sacramental.
\n06:32 And what I mean by sacrament is not the narrow way
\n06:35 of looking at sacraments.
\n06:36 In our Lutheran tradition, we talk about baptism.
\n06:40 God's Word connected to something physical, like water,
\n06:43 or holy communion, bread and wine,
\n06:45 Christ's body and blood, or even an absolution
\n06:48 that a man speaking the forgiveness of sins,
\n06:51 like David heard from Nathan.
\n06:55 But even the Word is physical.
\n07:00 and words that are spoken.
\n07:02 We don't have a God who is mystical,
\n07:04 who is way out there, far away from us.
\n07:07 And we have to climb some high mountain
\n07:09 to find some sort of enlightenment.
\n07:11 It's not for the rich and the famous,
\n07:13 it's not just for those who have a special force
\n07:15 or a special knowledge,
\n07:17 but he comes to us in such ordinary ways.
\n07:20 If God is evangelical, then it makes sense
\n07:22 that he is incarnational.
\n07:24 It also makes sense that he continues to come to us,
\n07:27 sacramental.
\n07:30 keep this analogy going if God is evangelical and incarnational and sacramental.
\n07:37 It also makes sense that He would be vocational.
\n07:42 That is, He would continue to use ordinary means to accomplish extraordinary feats.
\n07:51 Now what we think is extraordinary does not always line up with what God thinks is extraordinary.
\n08:00 of classifying people.
\n08:03 The senator is up here and the janitor is down here and the teacher is here and then
\n08:09 the electrician and the carpenter.
\n08:10 It depends on how much money you make or it depends on what college you went through.
\n08:14 But God doesn't see it that way.
\n08:16 All distinctions fall away because God cares about all of us.
\n08:21 He knows how many hairs are on our head.
\n08:23 He knows when a sparrow falls to the ground.
\n08:27 God wants a clean bathroom at the gas station.
\n08:30 thoughtful lesson plans in our classrooms. Of course he does. He loves us and he is concerned
\n08:36 about these small details. He uses the ordinary to accomplish the extraordinary.
\n08:44 But even the things that we think are extraordinary, he also uses ordinary means.
\n08:51 Just think of motherhood for a second, this beautiful thing. That God would create a body and a soul,
\n09:00 with value made in his image, something better than the squirrels, as we have said,
\n09:07 somebody made for epicness and wonderment and grandness and purpose,
\n09:12 that he would use a woman to do that, to create not just a body but a soul,
\n09:18 to create a person.
\n09:21 It's a remarkable thing, and yet pregnancy and labor couldn't be any more gritty and real
\n09:30 down to earth, and yet through this very gritty down to earth thing,
\n09:35 God is something extraordinary, rightfully called the miracle of life.
\n09:42 And so when God uses the ordinary for the extraordinary,
\n09:47 what He does is He becomes intimate with us.
\n09:52 Through ordinary means, He's very close to us.
\n10:00 people like you and me that he uses in these vocations, he lifts us up to borrow a phrase
\n10:06 from Gene Edward V. Jr. to a startling degree. We are lifted high above ourselves. I would
\n10:16 go so far as to say that the bus driver doesn't deserve to be a bus driver, and the bus boy
\n10:21 doesn't deserve to be the bus boy, because that is God's work that they are doing. It
\n10:30 we are lifted high no matter what occupation we find ourselves in, because we're doing God's work,
\n10:37 it is something above us. And so notice what that means about how we look at our jobs,
\n10:43 ourselves, our value, and the value of other people. There is nothing beneath us. It is always
\n10:52 above us when we understand that God has called us in his economy of love. Martin Luther King,
\n11:00 Channel, lean, Martin Luther, when he famously said that all labor has dignity.
\n11:07 You bet it does, because it is God's work.
\n11:12 Luther famously said that the angels sing in heaven every time a father changes a dirty
\n11:18 diaper.
\n11:19 Why?
\n11:20 Because God wants clean rear ends, of course he does, because he loves us.
\n11:30 We are lifted high above ourselves in vocation to a higher honor than we deserve.
\n11:37 God respects us even though we didn't do anything to earn that respect.
\n11:42 And that reminds me of the last day.
\n11:47 When Jesus paints a picture of the last day in Matthew chapter 25, we are told that Jesus
\n11:53 himself is going to return.
\n11:54 There's a resurrection of the dead and there is a separation between the sheep and the
\n12:00 faith and those who are attempting to be righteous by law, by their own accomplishments here on earth.
\n12:09 And I'll paraphrase Jesus in chapter 25. He seems to say to the sheep, to the faithful,
\n12:15 well done, good and faithful servants. And I imagine this inner dialogue going on
\n12:20 with ourselves, we who are the sheep who have been faithful by Christ's righteousness. And we
\n12:30 people, did you not see what we left undone in the things that we did do?\"
\n12:35 And I suppose in this inner monologue that I imagine that Jesus then says, \"But you were
\n12:41 great to me when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink, when I was hungry you
\n12:45 fed me, when I was without clothes you gave me clothes, when I was in prison you came to
\n12:49 visit me and we'll say, 'I still think you have the wrong people, when were you ever
\n12:53 in prison, when were you ever naked and we clothed you, when did we ever feed you?'
\n13:00 But whatever you did to the least of these brothers of mine, you did to me.
\n13:07 And I imagine what comes flooding back is all the vocational actions that we accomplished in our life,
\n13:13 all those times that we were unselfish in the family, that we did things out of pure love,
\n13:18 all the times at work, when we worked the extra hour and went the extra mile
\n13:24 without any recognition at all or even desire for recognition.
\n13:30 flooding back, but what will also come flooding back, of course, is all the times we were selfish.
\n13:39 All the times when we became embittered at work because we didn't get the recognition,
\n13:44 because the person that we were doing the work for got all the credit, and we'll still
\n13:49 say, \"I think you have the wrong people, Jesus.\" But of course then it dawns on us what we
\n14:00 righteousness, which is no righteousness at all. But we stand before God with Christ's
\n14:06 righteousness, well done good and faithful servants indeed. But we stand not just because
\n14:13 we are righteous on account of Christ, but that righteousness is not wasted. He made
\n14:19 us righteous and then he worked through us so that we did serve the least of Jesus brothers.
\n14:30 of Jesus Christ as his co-worker, as he put us on as his masks.
\n14:36 Until that last day, we should think about vocation, our myriad of callings in the world,
\n14:42 as Christological endeavors.
\n14:45 Vocation is a Christological endeavor, Christ to you and Christ to me.
\n14:51 When I serve somebody, I am serving Christ, as Jesus said in Matthew chapter 25.
\n15:00 It is Christ serving me, putting on the mask of the plumber,
\n15:05 of the teacher and the firefighter.
\n15:09 Let's think about an ordinary day.
\n15:11 You go out to dinner with your family
\n15:13 and the waiter comes to you
\n15:14 and literally gives you a cold glass of water to drink.
\n15:18 This is Christ wearing a mask serving you.
\n15:23 And from that waiter's point of view,
\n15:30 He is doing this to the least of Jesus brothers.
\n15:34 And that means he is doing it to Christ, Christ to you and Christ to me.
\n15:41 And isn't that wonderful, this ordinary thing that becomes extraordinary,
\n15:47 that the waiter is lifted high above himself to do Christ's works?
\n15:51 Does that not lead him to take more honor and work and pride in his work?
\n16:00 who is the waiter, I bet you tip, bigger too, right?
\n16:04 This beautiful interaction.
\n16:07 Now I know in a fallen world
\n16:08 that this doesn't always happen, but it's still there.
\n16:12 And even though we messed it up, it's still God's work.
\n16:14 And when you go to the gas station,
\n16:16 and don't worry, God will get his work done.
\n16:18 When you go to the gas station and the clerk there,
\n16:20 is totally zoned out and has no care
\n16:22 for customer service at all, it's still God doing that,
\n16:26 even if he messed it up and had no idea
\n16:30 and you still have a full tank of gas.
\n16:33 And when you're sitting alone in your cubicle wondering if you even matter, that if you
\n16:37 didn't show up to work one day, if anybody would even notice that God reminds you, yes,
\n16:42 you're still doing my work.
\n16:45 Even if your heart's not in it, my heart is in it.
\n16:51 And so this has a lot to do with purpose.
\n16:53 It has a lot to do with human dignity.
\n17:00 We look at our own jobs in a different way as well.
\n17:04 Every job matters.
\n17:07 Every job deserves our best because it is divine work.
\n17:15 I think this is where we find our true self-esteem.
\n17:19 I would argue that we who are created in the image of God
\n17:24 and have this desire to be justified,
\n17:30 you justified that we want to be right, we want to be righteous, that will never be
\n17:38 satisfied with the mere adulations of mankind, because we were made for something bigger.
\n17:46 I think this is why the NFL quarterback who already makes obscene amounts of money
\n17:51 doesn't need another dime, still wants more millions in his next contract.
\n18:00 He wants to be valued.
\n18:02 I think it's why Hollywood seems to throw itself
\n18:05 an award show just about every other week.
\n18:07 I know that if I won 30 Nobel prizes in a row,
\n18:12 that I would want 31.
\n18:15 Because even if we climb to the top of the mountain
\n18:18 of our profession, when we get there,
\n18:21 we will look around and say, that's it.
\n18:24 Now what?
\n18:26 Because we were made for perfection
\n18:30 that we were epic, that we were made for something better than this.
\n18:37 And so we look for love in all the wrong places.
\n18:41 We look for promotions. We look for raises.
\n18:44 We look for praises from men that will never, ever satisfy.
\n18:50 But when we know that we're doing God's work,
\n19:00 We need that. We need a reason to get out of bed in the morning and God provides it.
\n19:06 One of my favorite professors used to say this all the time. He would say, \"God chooses to need you.\"
\n19:12 We have another oxymoron to talk about. How can you choose to need something? Nobody wakes up and
\n19:18 says, \"I choose to need water to survive today. I choose to need to breathe air.\" You don't choose
\n19:30 different. And he chooses to need us. So said my favorite professor. But how
\n19:39 could that be? How could God choose to need us? It sounds so backwards. But this
\n19:47 is how God operates. He's giving us reason. He's giving us purpose. He's
\n19:52 giving us an avenue to have the proper pride and honor and work, the proper
\n20:00 He's saying, \"I got a problem here.
\n20:04 I got someone that needs to be loved.\"
\n20:07 He says, \"I got children out there that need to be educated,
\n20:11 and I'm calling you, dear teacher, and principal and parent, to do it.
\n20:15 I need you to do this.
\n20:17 I'm counting on you. I need you to do this.
\n20:20 I choose to need you for this grand and high task.\"
\n20:24 And so we are lifted above ourselves.
\n20:30 from God. We're given a purpose, a grand and divine purpose, that we will not find anywhere
\n20:38 else. That favorite professor, I only gave you half the quote, \"God chooses to need us.\"
\n20:46 His full quote was this, \"God chooses to need you so that you're not a waste of space.\"
\n20:52 He understands that we were made for something great, that we need that purpose and God
\n21:00 in vocation. And even if the rest of the world looks down upon that vocation, God doesn't.
\n21:07 He gives you a divine purpose. Let's go back to another story from King David's life,
\n21:14 when he was a young shepherd boy. Samuel, at this time, was still alive. If you remember Samuel,
\n21:21 was the prophet, the last great judge of Israel. You could say he was the heart and soul of Israel.
\n21:30 had turned away from God, and so God had told Samuel we need a new king. He sent Samuel
\n21:39 to the town of Bethlehem to the estate of Jesse to anoint a new king, not just the new
\n21:45 king to follow in Saul's footsteps, but the king of kings, the Messiah, that would come from
\n21:51 the line of David, from that very town, Bethlehem. When Samuel got there, Jesse lined up his boys,
\n22:00 men, we are told, it seems that they had that kind of leader look. They had that Kennedy look.
\n22:06 They just looked like leaders. These, one of these certainly would be the new king of Israel.
\n22:14 And Jesse put his first boy, his eldest up there, but Samuel said, no, this is not the one God
\n22:19 chose. And then there's a second one, but Samuel said, no, this is not the one God chose, and all
\n22:25 the way down the line. And Samuel said to Jesse, is that all the boys you have? And Jesse says,
\n22:30 I got one, he's out tending the flocks because somebody had to do it while we were here at this great event.
\n22:36 And Samuel says, \"Go bring him.\" It's young David.
\n22:40 And David is anointed as the new king of Israel.
\n22:45 And we are told this line in the story that God does not look at what man looks like.
\n22:53 God looks at something different.
\n23:00 We look at awards. We look at promotions. We look at celebrity.
\n23:06 But that's not what God looks like. Looks at.
\n23:10 Not everybody gets to be a senator. Not everybody gets to be
\n23:14 quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys or shortstop for the New York Yankees.
\n23:19 Not everybody gets to have those jobs, and that's okay.
\n23:24 There still needs to be people that staple and collate.
\n23:30 bathrooms. In fact, if those people did not do what they did, government would stop.
\n23:36 It would run to a halt. Disease would run rampant if we don't have garbage collectors
\n23:42 and janitors and all the rest. And God knows that. And so all distinctions fall away.
\n23:49 And God's work is done both on the garbage truck and in the halls of Congress. Maybe
\n24:00 God knows.
\n24:03 And I just imagine, I may be wrong, but I just imagine, on that last day, when the sheep
\n24:07 were separated from the goats.
\n24:09 And when Jesus says, \"Well done, good and faithful servants,\" whatever you did for the
\n24:13 least of these brothers of mine you did for me, I have this feeding lean that all those
\n24:18 vocational actions will come flooding back, not with self-righteous pride, but with honor
\n24:30 [MUSIC]
"}How shall we live? What is the good life? What is the value of a person? What is my place in this world? Is God active in this world?
The Doctrine of Vocation Uniquely Answers These Questions.
From the Hebrew concept of Shalom (wholeness/well-being) to the Greek concept of Eudaimonia (happiness) and even to the American notion that all people have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, great thinkers have pondered what it means for humans to flourish. A certain level of security, prosperity, and freedom are essential components of human flourishing. God provides each of these through Vocation.
Join Michael Berg–assistant professor of theology at Wisconsin Lutheran College and author of the 1517 Publishing book, Vocation: The Setting for Human Flourishing–as he explores the topic of Vocation and the myriad of ways that God uses Vocation to serve his people.
Topics Covered in the Course
- Vocation as the Setting for Human Potential (Introduction)
- Vocation as the Setting for Spiritual Warfare
- Vocation as the Setting for Sanctification
- Vocation as the Setting for Purpose
- Vocation as the Setting for a Wider Liberality
- Vocation as the Setting for Human Flourishing
Let's Get Started
This course contains seven sessions, each containing a video lesson, course notes, and a quiz. You are also invited to join the discussion throughout the course as you watch these videos. You can complete this course at your own pace. So we encourage you to work through it at whatever pace is most comfortable for you.
At the end, you will receive a 'Course Completion Certificate' via email.
