Welcome to our Together on Mission podcast, where we seek to be with and like Jesus, as we begin a conversation with Jesus in the morning, scripture, prayer, and meditation, and then continue that conversation with them throughout your day, your hopes to strive to find you, the pastor at the Inland Vineyard Church in Corona, California. In this season of the podcast, we're going to be talking about scripture as in heaven, an epic that invites unique men and women to play their crucial role within the unfolding story. That is the case with Esther, Isaiah, Mary and Paul, and you and I. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Daily Together on Mission Podcasts is Travis, and the reason why I do this podcast is because it's a wonderful thing to start our day with Jesus.
I probably shared this before, but when I was a young boy, I would come downstairs and I would see my dad, you know, praying or listening to worship music or reading his Bible or whatever. And often when I came from school, I'd go upstairs and I'd see my mom in her room. Dad had to study downstairs. Mom was usually in her room, and she was playing the guitar or praying or reading scripture or whatever.
And I knew that they were having what is called a quiet time, but as I later reflected on the model of my mom and my dad, I realized that it wasn't that they were having a quiet time. Although they were, it was that they were on a journey with Jesus and friends of Jesus. And so that involved having a quiet time and prayer and scripture and worship and whatever and they started their day with Jesus and then sought to be friends of Jesus throughout the day. I didn't start this podcast so that we all might have a regular quiet time.
I started this podcast so that we would understand the gospel as an adventure, the great adventure with Jesus. And of course that involves a quiet time. So let's see today as an adventure with Jesus. And speaking of Jesus, we are in Luke chapter four.
This is part three of at least a four part podcast on Jesus being called into God's story. And part one was about the general call and baptism of Jesus and Jesus said, yes, and part two was about the attack, the general attack on the identity of Jesus to try to thwart him and take him off course so that he would not play his part within the story. And now part three, speaking of playing a part in the story, the title of the podcast today is specific call. So know this, there's a general call and then an attack and now there's a specific call.
We all eventually, if we continue to travel the terrain with Jesus, we'll experience a specific call. Here for verse 16, let me ask you a question. Have you experienced that specific call yet? That part, that role that you must play.
There's that general call where we are called into the kingdom of God and there's that general attack and then there's the specific call. So chapter four verse 16, he went to Nazareth, Jesus went to Nazareth where he had been brought up and on the Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue as was his custom and he stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him and unrolling and he found a place where it was written, the spirit of the Lord is upon me, he's anointed me to proclaim good news, he sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners, sight to the blind, release the oppressed and proclaim the favor of the year of the Lord. Now Jesus goes into the synagogue as was his custom and what did he do in the synagogue? He preached, he taught, he read from scripture, he announced the kingdom of God, he announced the favor of God, the good news of God, the freedom of God, sight for the blind and this is the year of God's favor.
Jesus loved to preach about the kingdom of God. Was he nervous? Of course he was. Was it always easy?
No, of course it wasn't. Jesus loved to preach about the kingdom of God. That was a specific call for Jesus. He had to do it or he was going to just implode and we don't often think about Jesus and his specific call in his ministry to announce the reality of the kingdom of God.
Jesus was a preacher and Jesus was a teacher and he loved content and he loved truth and he loved to express that truth with words and he loved to see when the light bulb went on in people's hearts and in people's minds. Jesus had a general call which we read about earlier and this is a specific call. I accepted Jesus when I was four years old and maybe more specifically accepted Jesus when I was in sixth grade and got baptized when I was four in the spa in my backyard and I was actually baptized again in sixth grade at a summer camp and I think that's in sixth grade was when I kind of felt like, okay, I'm called in a general sense into the kingdom and I want to be a follower of Jesus. But man, at 18 and a half years old or so maybe at the early part of my 19th year I was called to study the Word of God and to live it in a community that I was leading and to preach it, to preach it and that was a specific call and that didn't come right away.
I mean, 19 sounds kind of young to get a specific call but I wasn't aware of that specific call from four years old until 19 and then it just hit me like a ton of bricks, like a locomotive, like if I do anything else with my life, I won't feel like I'm really living life. And so the same thing happened to Peter. Peter at the beginning of the gospel, if you remember, Jesus said, follow me, follow me, Jesus said, follow me to a lot of people, right? Follow me?
Peter, follow me? Peter said, yes, that's the general call. And then of course there was some attack on Peter and everything and Peter fell and floundered and like we all do and so forth. And then upon resurrection, Jesus and Peter are walking on the sand at the end of the gospel of John and Jesus looks at Peter and doesn't say Peter, he doesn't say the same thing that he said to Peter early on in the story.
He looks at Peter and he says, Peter, feed my sheep, feed my lambs, ten my lambs. It's a preaching and a leadership call. It's a specific call, a specific calling. We're not ready for a specific calling at first.
We need a little bit of time, a little bit of mileage. And Jesus' specific calling is not your specific calling. It's all kinds of specific callings, but the specific calling is what you must do. It's the result of what breaks your heart.
It's what you've got in your gut. It's what you must see done. As Frederick Buckner famously said, your calling is where your desire and the world's deep hunger meet. It's what you've got to work on or what you've got to pursue, what you've got to say.
And I think it takes some intentional, sold-out following of Jesus as a result of the general call and fighting through all that general attack in order to begin to arrive at what we see in most every character in scripture, whether it's Paul says, I've got to go to Spain with this message or Nehemiah says, I've got to build this wall or Esther says, I've got to make an argument before the king, or Isaiah says, or Mary says, or Paul says, or whatever, Gideon. I mean, that specific call, and so I just want us to ponder that, and it seems to be the pattern. And so Jesus had to do this. He had to live this way.
He had to go for this specifically. And so maybe just let's begin to pray into that today and think about it and search our heart. And I don't think we should worry if something doesn't come clear. Maybe it's already clear and we just can't see it clear.
Maybe we're already doing it and we're just not calling it a specific call or maybe it's not time yet. And so the best way to arrive at that specific call is just to continue to live faithfully the life of the kingdom that was embedded in that general call and trust that God will open our eyes to that specific call when it's time for our eyes to be opened to it. We'll talk soon. Thanks for listening to the Together on Mission podcast.
We truly hope that you were blessed and encouraged by it today. If you had any questions about the Inland Vineyard Church, our ministries, or our Sunday services, feel free to connect with us on our brand new app, which you can find in the Google Play and the App Store, and check out our social media pages like Facebook and Instagram, or even check out our website at inlandvignard.org.