Vocational Bible Quotes

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.

The horizon changes but the sun does not.

What the Bible offers is not a “works contract,” but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator’s purpose for his world.

In the world of the Bible, one’s identity and one’s vocation are all bound up in who one’s father is. Men are called “son of” all of their lives (for instance, “the sons of Zebedee” or “Joshua, the son of Nun”). There are no guidance counselors in ancient Canaan or first-century Capernaum, helping “teenagers” decide what they want “to be” when they “grow up.” A young man watches his father, learns from him, and follows in his vocational steps. This is why “the sons of Zebedee” are right there with their father when Jesus finds them, “in their boat mending the nets” (Mark 1:19-20). The inheritance was the engine of survival, passed from father to son, an economic pact between generations. To lose one’s inheritance was to pilfer for survival, to become someone’s slave.

Because this is an urban church in a downtown neighborhood, it is not so easy to avoid the presence of the poor. We see them. I wonder if that is not part of our vocation, to see the poor, to be the Lord's eyes - because the Lord sees the poor, and he loves the poor, and he sends his people to serve the poor. That is a message that pervades the Scriptures from end to end. There is something seriously out of balance in American Christianity. I am personally opposed to abortion, but there is nothing explicit in the Bible about abortion. There is nothing explicit in the Bible about prayer in the public schools; there is nothing explicit in the Bible about the American flag or the right to have a gun. There are, however, thousands of explicit words in the Bible about justice and compassion for the poor. There are thousands of words in the Bible about defending those who are defenseless.

For the sake of the gospel, women must speak—and teach and minister and prophesy, too. For the sake of the gospel, a woman must be free to walk in her God-breathed self as the ezer kenegdo in whatever vocation and season and place of her life. And she does all of this alongside her brothers, as the ezer warrior of Creation’s intent, to see God’s Kingdom come and his expressed will done.

One helpful way of identifying these kingdom features is to examine closely the "preview" passages in the Bible. Pop a movie into your DVD player, and you'll first see previews of coming attractions. Similarly, throughout the Bible are previews of the "feature film": the kingdom of God in all its consummated fullnness. These texts offer us glimpses into what live will be like in the new heavens and new earth.

Life with God will overflow any attempts to compartmentalize or contain it. It is not just for those who are 'spiritually inclined.' We are made to live with God at the very center of our lives, transforming our thoughts, actions, decisions, relationships, vocations, communities, and social structures.

the word prophet (a compound from the Greek word for “speaker”) does not mean in the first instance someone who predicts the future, but one who speaks out on behalf of God—not one who foretells, therefore, but one who tells-forth (which often also includes, of course, foretelling the future). The primary and defining characteristic of the biblical prophet, then, is to be sought in the divine vocation and mission of telling and speaking in the name and by the designated authority of Another.

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen.

I think it is hard for intellectually brilliant people to make leaps of faith regardless of their vocations. Highly analytical minds want to take everything apart, see all the pieces, and understand them. There is a certain pride that comes with total understanding, and a simultaneous fear of the unknown. That combination of pride and fear too often leads great scholars to belittle people of faith as weak, wrong, silly, and useless. “But it works the other way too. Too many Christians take pride in their extrascriptural beliefs, fear science they interpret as contradicting the Bible, and belittle scholars as weak, wrong, silly, and useless. No one trying to learn about creation is any of those things. Christians should engage with scientific discovery, be awed by God’s work, and pray that everyone will see Him in the "atoms as massive as suns, and universes smaller than atoms.

the fatal tendency to divide Christians into two groups-the religious and the laity, exceptional Christians and ordinary Christians, the one who makes a vocation of the Christian life and the man who is engaged in secular affairs. That tendency is not only utterly and completely unscriptural; it is destructive ultimately of true piety, and is in many ways a negation of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no such distinction in the Bible.

The Bible teaches us to be persistent, to never give up, to keep asking, seeking, and knocking. We can use our work or our vocation to spread joy, love, and hope.

Prayer must not be our intermittent work but our daily business, our habit and vocation

The answer is that the kingdom of God has been launched ‘on earth as in heaven’, and that, by the Messiah and the spirit, the creator God has renewed the original image-bearing vocation.

The vocation of Abraham (1) contrasts with the viciousness of Sodom, and (2) provides occasion to ask about Yahweh’s righteousness. The righteousness and justice of Abraham are not simply moral obedience. They are also a passion for the well-being of the very ones who have violated God. Calvin says of Abraham that in this passage he has a “sense of humanity.” As a result, Abraham calls into question the sense of humanity operative in the sinful city and on the part of Yahweh. Yahweh’s sense of humanity is no more acceptable to Abraham than is the practice of Sodom.

A man may not be a vocational theologian, but in his home he must the resident theologian. The apostle Paul, when he is urging women to keep silent in church, tells them that "if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home" (1 Corinthians 14:35). The tragedy is that many modern women have to wonder why the Bible says they should have to ask their husbands. "He doesn't know." But a husband must be prepared to answer his wife's doctrinal questions, and if he cannot, then he must be prepared to study so that he can remedy the deficiency. This famous passage is not such a restriction for wives as it is a requirement for husbands. If he doesn't know, he must find out.

He found himself in the Old Testament Scriptures. He understood himself, and his role, his vocation, and his future from his Bible. He was content, later, to say: ‘The Son of Man goes as it is written of him’ (Matt. 26:24). The pathway was laid down in the Word of God, and he set himself to walk in it.

The term generally given this sickness in the Christian tradition is “sin,” a multivalent term that points to the myriad ways in which humans –individually, collectively, and systemically –neglect, deny, and refuse simply to be human –that is, to embrace and live out their vocation as creatures made in the image of God.

Marriage is a unique vocation in which we model Christ for one special person.

Notice how not even once were we told to just bow down and worship God via song for our entire lives. Yet our churches are nearly addicted to making this the high point of spiritual formation and worship. And let me be clear, this is important and true. But, at least in Genesis, it's not primary. Or another way to put it is, yes, we are called to sing to God but that singing happens through our vocation, not our mouths. Worship at the beginning of the Bible primarily was centered around the job God gave us. Our job was to make, cultivate, create, build, steward, and tame. That is the original mission, the original mandate.

Perhaps missionaries, like practitioners of other vocations, can be guilty of malpractice, and for the same reason: people under our care can be hurt by our negligence and lack of professionalism just as they could be hurt by the amateurism of untrained medical professionals, marriage counselors, or mechanics. A burning heart and a Bible are not enough.

He noticed the children less and less. He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded.

Unlike the Old Testament, in which singleness was not a good, the New Testament—or, more properly, the coming of Christ—opens up, for the first time in redemptive history, the possibility of viewing marriage completely as a freely chosen vocation. It is not necessary in the way that it once was, and singleness is now an equally (or more!) honorable calling. But,

My definition of Theology My proverb of theology is a doctrine study of overall foundation of biblical notions, transcendence, an scriptures relativist, researcher and conservative of the Word of God with sensible and measured pursuit of infinite growth, a marriage of the spiritual knowledge (Gnosis), and unutterable love for the faith in constant pursuits and mission for truths with devoutness to prowess faith and love from faith’s vocation and noetic that’s flamed within that gives us the calling (vocation) of theologian. For theology pursues and endless journey of the Lord’s knowledge while maintaining the faith and is the strength hold of creed that manifest purpose, ontology and guardianship of the soul and wisdom, in a relation, a sound mind for divinity. . .

You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit. And when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done - whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies - will stand, will last. The fact that we live between, so to speak, the beginning of the End and the end of the End, should enable us to come to terms with our vocation to be for the world that Jesus was for Israel, and in the power of the Spirit to forgive and retain sins.

every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, [which] will “turn the necessity to glorious gain.

Here is a point that must be noted most carefully. Paul does not say that God punished Jesus. He declares that God punished Sin in the flesh of Jesus. Now, to be sure, the crucifixion was no less terrible an event because, with theological hindsight, the apostle could see that what was being punished was Sin itself rather than Jesus himself. The physical, mental, and spiritual agony that Jesus went through on that terrible day was not alleviated in any way. But theologically speaking—and with regard to the implications that run through many aspects of church life, teaching, and practice—it makes all the difference. The death of Jesus, seen in this light, is certainly penal. It has to do with the punishment on Sin—not, to say it again, on Jesus—but it is punishment nonetheless. Equally, it is certainly substitutionary: God condemned Sin (in the flesh of the Messiah), and therefore sinners who are “in the Messiah” are not condemned. The one dies, and the many do not. All those narrative fragments we saw in Luke and John come into their own. “This man has done nothing wrong.” “Let one man die for the people, rather than the whole nation being wiped out.” But this substitution finds its true meaning not within the normal “works contract,” but within the God-and-Israel narrative, the vocational narrative, the story in accordance with the Bible.

It is in embracing an unwavering adherence to Biblical principles that we will find a sustainable argument for the conviction that ‘sacrifice is the only sensible vocation.’ And it is the irresistible nature of that argument that can lift us above the incessantly gnawing desire to make ourselves the only vocation.

Sacrifice is the only sensible vocation.

Because the work itself matters to God, we should give our best to whatever vocation God has called us to. The sanctuary at church is not the only place where He exists. Your workplace is also His domain.

Biblically speaking, a prophet isn’t a fortune-teller or soothsayer who predicts the future, but rather a truth-teller who sees things as they really are—past, present, and future—and who challenges their community to both accept that reality and imagine a better one. “It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination,” wrote Brueggemann in his landmark book, The Prophetic Imagination, “to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

abandoned our plans to church plant in this context, at least in the way we had been taught to do it in America. Instead, we embraced a new understanding of church and community, of vocation and ministry, of organic faith and missional living. We were lonely. And then we began to heal, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

So Davy went on reading the Bible, and I went on not reading it much. I read other things, novels and mysteries, which she didn’t have time to read. No longer in loyalty to our love were we reading the same books. How could I say: Stop reading Isaiah and read Margery Allingham? Besides, if she did, I’ d have to read Isaiah. And the old sharing was going in another way. She was becoming wifely. She was accepting St. Paul on women and wives. She seemed to want to be domestic and make things in the kitchen. I was afraid she might actually obey me if I issued a command. There was something very humble and good in her attitude towards me as well as towards Christ. A humble vocation. But it wasn’t like her. I almost wanted a fight.