Chapter 6: Calling
Updated: 1/20/20
When forty years were past, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw the fire, he marveled at the sight; and as he approached to look at it, there came a voice of the Lord, saying, ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.’ Moses trembled and did not dare to look. The Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have certainly seen the suffering of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them; now come, I will send you to Egypt’ (Acts 7:30–34).
This is Stephen’s account of God’s call to Moses to represent Him before Pharaoh. Stephen had been appointed by the elders of the church in Jerusalem to be a deacon (Acts 6:5). He had performed his task mightily (v. 8). He was an evangelist. He gained the attention of Jewish leaders. They arrested him and brought him before the Council. The Council did not have the authority to punish him physically. That was an exclusive monopoly of the Roman Empire. But the Council presumably could have excommunicated him, cutting him off from the congregation.
Acts 6 says that false accusers had brought charges against him. They said he opposed worship at the temple. This was not true, and Stephen sought to show why it was not true in his testimony, which is recorded in Acts 7. He offered a survey of the careers of three leaders of Israel: Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. If we read this testimony carefully, we find information about a distinction that I have been writing about since 1981: the difference between a person’s job and his calling in life. His job is what enables him to feed himself and his family, to clothe them, and to put a roof over their heads. A calling is different. I define it as follows: the most important thing that you can do for the kingdom of God in which you would be most difficult to replace. The classic example is Jesus’ work as a carpenter vs. His work as Redeemer. Similarly, Paul worked as a tentmaker (Acts 18:3), but his work as an apostle who wrote letters to churches helped to establish Western civilization.
Stephen began with the story of Abraham. Actually, it was the story of Abram, who then became Abraham. God renamed him Abraham: “father of nations.” Initially, he lived in Ur of the Chaldees. He was clearly successful, as the story in Genesis reveals. He owned sheep. He owned portable wealth. When he was called to leave Ur, his father was still alive. They moved to a new place called Haran. Then, after his father died, they moved to the promised land of Canaan. He owned no land there. It was there that God promised him that his offspring would multiply greatly. Yet he had no children at the time, and he was 75 years old when he left his original home (Genesis 12:4). With respect to a job, he had a great economic career in Ur of the Chaldees. He had no land in Haran, but he had sheep and portable capital: silver and gold (Genesis 13:2). In Canaan, he was given a promise by God, but he was not given any land. “He gave none of it as an inheritance to him, no, not even enough to set a foot on. But he promised—even though Abraham had no child yet—that he would give the land as a possession to him and to his descendants after him” (Acts 7:5). It was there that Abraham fulfilled his calling. He had no calling back home, and he had no calling in Haran. There was a sequence: from job to calling.
Next, Stephen gave the story of Joseph in Egypt. We know the story from the Genesis account. He was the designated heir of his father, Jacob. Jacob gave him the famous coat of many colors (Genesis 37:3). This enraged his older brothers (v. 4). They sold him to a traveling caravan (v. 28), which in turn sold him to Potiphar (v. 36). It appeared that his calling was to serve as an heir in Canaan, but then he was forcibly removed from that inheritance. He had a good job initially in Egypt. He ran the business owned by Potiphar. Then Potiphar’s wife attempted to seduce him, and he fled (Genesis 39:18). She blamed him. Potiphar put him in prison (v. 20). In prison, he took over the management of the prison (vv. 22–23). He had another job. He also occasionally interpreted dreams. That led him to his calling (Genesis 40). Pharaoh brought him out of prison. He asked him to interpret a dream, which Joseph did. Pharaoh then placed him second in command in Egypt to begin to prepare the nation for the seven years of famine that Joseph derived from the dream (Genesis 41). He later fed his father and his brothers, bringing them into Egypt (Genesis 42–45). He gained back the inheritance that his brothers had attempted to steal from him. He had a high calling in Egypt as an Egyptian ruler, and he also had back his original calling. He had two jobs in between.
Stephen then related the story of Moses. Moses was removed from his family as an infant. He lost temporarily his calling as an Israelite. He was adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh. He was raised in her household, and he was trained to rule as an officer in Egypt. “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and works” (Acts 7: 22). He fled Egypt when he was 40 years old (v. 23). He fled to Midian. There, he was a sheepherder for 40 years (v. 30). That was his job. More important, it was preparation for his calling, which was to herd the rebellious sheep of Israel for 40 years in the wilderness. He could not have gained this experience in Egypt. The Egyptians resented sheepherders: “for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians” (Genesis 46:34b). That is why the Hebrews resided separately in Goshen. When a successor Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrews, this ended their callings and their jobs as sheepherders. Moses did get training as a leader in Egypt, which prepared him for leadership in the wilderness. But in terms of the years spent in training, his job as a shepherd was far more important.
These three stories illustrate a point: a person’s job should prepare him for his calling. It should not be contradictory to his calling. In the cases of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, the jobs preceded the major calling of these legendary leaders of Israel. It was different with the apostle Paul. We are told that he earned his living as a tentmaker (Acts 18:3). We are told nothing else about his occupation. Yet we know from the history of the early church that he was influential as an evangelist and as a preacher. We know that he wrote a series of letters. As it turned out, these letters became the historical foundation of what became Christendom, both Western and Eastern. That was his calling. Some of it was done simultaneously with his job. Later, he was a prisoner in a Roman jail. He continued his calling from that location. In neither case was his job contradictory to his calling.
With this is background, you are ready to read an article that I wrote in early 1981. It resulted from a discussion that I had with the man who printed the monthly newsletters published by the Institute for Christian Economics. I wrote it for a bi-monthly newsletter, Christian Reconstruction.
The Bible teaches us that there is a special calling of God to His people. He calls them to faith in Jesus Christ. This involves a turning away from the evil life style of the past. God calls men to a new way of life. He restores them to full ethical sonship (John 1:12). This is the doctrine of adoption. “Call upon the name of the Lord,” is a familiar biblical phrase. Christ said, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw [literally: drag] him: and l will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44). God calls His people to faith in Christ. This is sometimes called the “effectual call,” and it is also referred to as the “special call.” It is a call to eternal salvation.
The general calling refers to men in general. Each man is called to subdue the earth to the glory of God (Genesis 1:28). This is a call to labor under the general sovereignty and providence of God. It is man's assignment to exercise dominion. The general calling is a man's vocation ("vocal" or "voice"). A man's vocation is his life's work, a form of service to God, whether he recognizes that he is under God or not.
The general calling took on great significance during the Protestant Reformation. Luther and Calvin stressed that all godly, honest labor is acceptable to God, and that there should be no distinction of an ethical nature between the minister and the farmer. There are functional distinctions, of course, which is why the Bible establishes certain personal requirements for men to serve as church leaders (I Timothy 3), but there is no ethical distinction. No man is more holy in the sight of God because of the kind of job he has.
This doctrine freed men from the psychological suppressant of feeling inferior because of their work. If any man's labor is acceptable to God, then it pays a man to work as well as he can. God honors competence, and grants more competence, to those who humble themselves before Him and who try to improve their performance. A good plumber gains more respect from his work than a lazy preacher. The question relates to diligence, not the kind of work performed.
This is clearly a liberating doctrine. It calls all men to labor hard and honestly. It teaches men that no matter what they do for a living, it is worth doing well. This, in turn, increases economic output, for men strive to work more intelligently and less wastefully. They strive to give a good account of themselves before God, and in doing so, they give a good account of themselves before men. This means greater wealth for all members of the market, for everyone is a beneficiary of efficient labor—everyone except those who are inefficient, lazy, or incompetent, who face greater competition than before. They deserve what they get.
The general calling is universal. All men will be held accountable for their work, and they will be rewarded in heaven, or cursed in hell, in terms of their general callings (Luke 12:47–48; l Corinthians 3). This kind of moral obligation to work hard and honestly pressures men to improve their performance. It is a form of self-government, and society does not have to impose direct sanctions on men in order to reap the rewards of self-government. The widespread conversion of men to a form of Christianity that preaches the binding nature of the general calling will produce increased wealth per capita in that society. People work harder, and people work smarter.
I have been economically successful so far in my life. Because of my outward, visible success, I am often asked by men, especially younger men, what I think are the rules of financial success in life. The Christians who ask me this question sometimes ask me what I think they ought to do for a living.
I have a stock answer. It relates to the biblical doctrine of the calling. It is not a complicated answer, and most Christians see the truth of my advice. The astounding thing in my mind is that they never have heard anything like it before. No pastor has counseled them. No parent has sat down with them to talk to them about these basic rules of thumb for a Christian's occupation. Here they are:
1. Evaluate your capacities accurately.
2. What is the most important job you can perform?
3. What is the most important job you can perform in which few men can replace you?
A man who has even a vague idea of the answers to these three surveys has a good grasp of what he ought to do with his life. It is not easy to conduct such a survey, but it is vital. God calls each man to make this survey.
Capacities: The more you have, the harder the decision. The man with limited capacities except for one skill has a much easier time of it. He knows what he ought to be doing. But someone who has multiple talents—and this includes most men—has some hard evaluating to do. “What kinds of work appeal to me? What are the ones I do best? What are the ones I would be willing to do for the remainder of my life? What are the ones that I could not stand to do for very long. What skills should I seek to improve, if I am given the opportunity?”
You must be rigorously honest here. You should probably consult others: teachers, parents, pastor, employer, and even a professional testing service, if necessary. You must come to grips with yourself. You must also come to grips with other people's evaluations of you. You will be serving a market, after all. Get used to the idea of having to take seriously other people's opinions of your talents.
Job importance: If a man can do several things well, he will then have to face the problem of meshing his skills with an occupation. If he can speak five foreign languages fluently, what should he do with his talent? Teach school? At what level? Translate for a multinational corporation? Translate for a government bureaucracy? Do book translations for a publishing company? Join a Wycliffe Bible translating team? There are several possibilities. Salary levels are only one way to make the decision. There are others.
I tell people to use this rule of thumb in making a decision. Try to peer ahead 40 years, or whenever you think you will be too old to work at this job. When you look back at your life, what will you think of your work? Was it God-honoring? Did you leave a large inheritance behind for your children? Did your children grow up with the moral training to handle their inheritance in a godly way? Did you give a lot of money away to charity? Did you give your life away in service rather than money? Was it a good decision when you accepted this calling as your life's work? If you even try to answer these questions in advance, you are far more likely not to be disappointed when you ask them again in 40 years.
Replaceability: This is something few men consider in advance. They should never stop considering it. It is not enough to select the most important job you can do. You have to ask yourself this question: "If I were to quit, or die, would the job be rapidly filled by someone just as effective as I am, and at the same wage?" If the job is easy to fill rapidly and at the same wage, then the person who now holds it has not distinguished himself by the level of his performance. If a humanist could do a Christian's job just as well, then there is something wrong with the Christian's work. If his work is good, then there is probably some other job that he could do that God wants to have filled by a Christian.
Today, few Christians operate in terms of the doctrine of the calling. They do not think about how important they are, as Christians, in their calling. They do not understand how they should provide unique, exclusively Christian services to their employers. In short, they do not think as Christians.
The job a man does may be important in his own eyes, or in the eyes of others, but if by remaining in what appears to be the most important job, when God could use the same skills to far better advantage in another job, then the employee is wasting his talents. Any man who cannot say that he, as a Christian worker, is not uniquely suited to his job, should consider finding new employment. If he is easily replaceable, then he had better look around and see if there is some other important job available to him in which he would be more difficult to replace.
In short, go where there is not much competition. Go where your presence in the field will elevate that field. Go where you, as a Christian, will generate imitators, even among non-believers. Go where you will have an opportunity to train others in their callings. If you are not now in such a position, but you could be, then you are not in the proper calling. Replaceability is one way of testing your place in life. You do not want to be just another cog in a vast, impersonal economic machine.
No Christian should work only 40 hours a week unless he is physically impaired in some way. Few men ever get rich or famous working only 40 hours a week. Few people ever become outstanding in their professions working only 40 hours a week. Six days shalt thou labor—and not 7 hours a day, either. Work 9 or 10.
Now, I think that under normal circumstances, salaried people should work no more than 40 hours for an employer. Since so few men will work 60 hours a week, you are giving your time away (selling it too cheaply) if you work for a salary over 40 hours a week. That extra 10 or 20 hours should be invested in church service, or in the establishment of a family business, or in getting a better education, or in community service. I am not speaking of men who work on commission, or junior men in a professional establishment who may be able to become partners if they work hard enough. But a man who is willing to work 60 hours a week should work at least 20 for himself. Use the salary to feed the family; work the extra 20 to build up a capital base, either for retirement, or for launching a family business. I became financially independent by doing just this. I strongly recommend it.
A salaried job is seldom a full calling. It may be a means to a calling. A man may be a skilled craftsman in a field that does not pay well enough to support him full time. He uses his 40-hour a week job to support him in his calling. That is what I do with my economic newsletter, Remnant Review. The income from that venture allows me to donate most of my time and energy to the Institute for Christian Economics, from which I receive no salary or other compensation (except psychological). My calling is my Christian economic work. My source of income is my economic newsletter. I distinguish the two jobs.
Only in those rare jobs, such as pastorate, where a man is salaried, yet called upon to give more than 40 hours a week, should such a calling be considered. Even in this case, the man is really giving those extra 20 hours to God. He is not giving them to some employer who is converting that extra labor time into profits for himself or the corporation. No one with good sense works a 60-hour week for someone else, just for the money. There are better ways to make a buck: more productive, more rewarding, and more profitable. Also, more pleasing to God. Never give away to an employer what you should be giving away to God, especially time.
In retrospect, the article that you just read was probably the most significant article for my personal calling that I ever wrote. It has shaped my thinking ever since. I think it is a clear statement of the position that I have been developing ever since. Once again, here is my basic concept of the calling: it is the most important thing that you can do for God’s kingdom in which you would be most difficult to replace. This is easy to describe, but it is not easy for most people to determine what their calling is.
For a handful of geniuses, their calling is clear. Johan Sebastian Bach was a musical genius. He was not just a genius composer; he was a genius performer on the organ. There was no question in his mind or anybody else’s mind that the most important thing he could do was to compose music. He was able to earn money by performing as an organist, but he was primarily a composer. But there are not many people in any generation whose talents are so overwhelmingly visible, and also overwhelmingly important, that they can understand the importance of their talent from a young age. For those few people who can do this, they can then spend the rest of their lives developing their skills. They can focus on these skills. In other words, they can specialize. This is a great advantage, but it is rare.
I was converted to saving faith in Christ in the summer of 1959. I was 17. This was in between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college. I decided at the age of 18 in the spring of 1960 that I wanted discover the relationship between what the Bible teaches about economics and what economists teach about economics. I was convinced that such a relationship does exist. But I did not know how I was going to find out. There was almost no guidance on this from Protestant Christians. Politically conservative Roman Catholics appealed to the logic of Thomas Aquinas, not the Bible.
Most economists regard unaided human reason as the criterion of truth, not the revelation in the Bible. I rejected this premise, since I trusted the Bible’s revelation. When I first decided that I wanted to find correlations between what the Bible says about economics and what economists teach, I knew that I would have to do a great deal of study of the Bible on my own. I also knew I would have to do a great deal of study of economics on my own. I knew that the economic approach taught in my university was not the economic system that I believed is accurate. I came to economic theory by way of what is known as the Austrian school of economics. The most skilled economist in the school of thought was Ludwig von Mises. The most prominent economist was a man tutored by Mises, F. A. Hayek. I knew that I would have to read the works of Mises and Hayek. In June 1960, I bought a copy of Mises’ 900-page book, Human Action (1949), and Hayek’s 570-page book, The Constitution of Liberty (1960). I wrote down the date that I bought each book on the inside front cover page. I doubted that any of the economics professors at my university had heard of the first book, and I doubted that any of them had heard of the second book, which had only recently been published. I knew that I would have to teach myself economics. I began to do that in the summer of 1960. I spent my college years studying history in clasrooms, and I taught myself theology and economics. I had no guidance. This culminated in the summer of 1963 when I spent three months as a paid intern. I read the basic literature of Austrian economics. R. J. Rushdoony got me that job. I used that money to attend Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
In my first week at Westminster in the fall of 1963, I was invited to speak briefly at an evening meeting of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church I attended. It was across the street from the seminary. Incoming seminary students who were attending the church were invited to make a brief presentation about their primary motivation in attending seminary. I told the audience that it was my goal to work on developing an explicitly Christian economics. I quit after one year and returned to graduate school, where I studied history, economics, and sociology.
I did not know how long it would take me to become sufficiently competent in the field of economics to get anything published. As it turned out, it was less than four years. My first nationally published article appeared in The Freeman in February 1967. But this publication was not explicitly Christian, although from time to time I published articles in it that were clearly Christian in the framework. The editor was a Presbyterian.
When my wife in 1973 suggested that I begin writing an economic commentary in the Bible, I had no idea how long that would take. It had never been attempted before. I began that project in February 1973. I had just turned 31 years old. The first installment, on Genesis 1, appeared in the April issue of the Chalcedon Report, the newsletter published by the organization set up by Rushdoony, now my father-in-law. Shortly thereafter, my first book on Christian economics was published by the Craig Press: An Introduction to Christian Economics. (http://bit.ly/gnintro) I explained one passage a month for the next four years.
I knew that I would never get through the Bible at this slow pace. So, in September 1977, I began a new program. It was not based on output. It was based on input. I began to devote ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year to researching the topic, and writing as much as I could. I set a final deadline: February 11, 2012. That was the day I would turn 70. As it turned out, I finished about five months after the deadline. The complete set of books was published in PDF format in 2012. I had set a final deadline regarding output. In order to achieve this, I had weekly deadlines in terms of input. I needed every minute, plus a few more. That was only to complete the basic research. I then had to write the final volumes. In 2013, I began to organize the Ron Paul Curriculum, and I produced 1,250 video lessons for my share of the curriculum. The curriculum has around 8,500 lessons. It was complete in 2017. I also finished the first edition of The Covenanal Structure of Christian Economics (2015). In 2017, I produced the first two volumes of this series. I hope to finish it by 2020. That would mean that the project took me exactly 60 years. That will have been my calling. That was the most important thing I could have done in which I would have been most difficult to replace.
I founded the ICE and ran from 1976 until 2001. The ICE was the institutional means that I created in order to pursue my calling more effectively. I structured in such a way that it could not become a job for me. I did not take a salary. I did not receive any book royalties. I understood that the ICE was an aspect of my calling, and I wanted to make certain that people understood that I was not running it to make a living. I usually devoted at least 20 hours a week to running the organization. This was in addition to the ten hours a week working on the commentary. I used the ICE primarily to generate money to publish what became a 31-volume project, plus supporting books and newsletters. When I finally realized that I could publish books and articles free of charge on the World Wide Web, I shut down the organization. I did not want to take money from people to publish books and newsletters any longer. I began publishing exclusively online.
This volume is the third volume in what I hope will be a four-volume series on Christian economics. This series is the culmination of my life’s work. I began posting chapters on my website in 2017. Until the fourth volume, the scholar’s edition, is published, my life’s work will be incomplete. My plan was partially disrupted when I was diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer in June 2017. But this has not fundamentally changed my writing schedule or my vision. I knew what I had to do early in my adult life, so cancer is merely a reminder that I am running out of time. I knew that anyway.
I recommend that you consider carefully what your calling may be. You may not know. You may not have been told about the necessity of identifying your calling. You may not understand that your calling is unlikely to be the same as your career. In your career, you are probably replaceable. A month after you die or retire, the organization you work for will have replaced you. Employees you work with on a day-to-day basis will occasionally remember you, but they will soon adjust to the new conditions. They will have no choice but to adjust.
In contrast, if you are successful in identifying and then implementing your calling, and you bring it to fruition before you die, other people will adjust to the results of your calling, despite the fact that they may not even know who you are or what you did. You do not have to receive recognition in order for your calling to be a success. There is an old saying that I regard is true: “If you don’t care who gets the credit, you can achieve a great deal.”
Begin to work on identifying your calling with point one of the biblical covenant economic model: providential purpose. What is your most important purpose in life? Do you know? If not, you had better find out.
Once you have identified this purpose, you can begin to set goals that are likely to enable you to achieve this purpose. Goals are a subset of purpose. As you might expect, I recommend that you identify these goals in terms of the five points of the biblical covenant economic model. One goal for your calling has to do with point five: inheritance. This is the issue of your legacy. The book you are now reading is clearly part of what I regard as my legacy to the Christian world. Writing it and publishing it constitute a form of service. Service is point two of the biblical covenant model. My life’s calling has been devoted to explaining the biblical foundations of economic law. Law is point three of the biblical covenant model. My theory of economics rests on the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, which is point one. You will have to judge whether my effort has been worthwhile in your life. Judgment is point four. It is my prayer that God has imputed high-value to my effort. If he has, then he is in a position to promote my work within the institutional church. Imputation is a crucial concept in modern economic theory (post-1870). Imputation has to do with rendering judgment.
If you are having trouble identifying the central specific purpose for your life, I suggest that you take a series of specific steps to help you narrow down the most likely candidates in your life. You must identify the following:
1. Your unique skills
2. Your main interests
3. Your previous successes
The more skills you possess, the more difficult it is going to be to identify your unique skills. The skills to focus on our skills that have to do with service. Do you have a unique gift for serving other people? Is there some area of your life in which you think you would have a competitive advantage in making life better for other people?
Second, what are your main interests? What you do in your spare time that is not related to entertaining yourself? Do you have a hobby? Are you good at this hobby? Could this hobby in some way be used to make other people’s lives better? If you really like to do something when you are not being paid to do it, then you should consider this carefully as something suitable as your calling. The reason for this is clear: if you really like to do something, you are less likely to quit when the going gets tough. In any major project, the going is always going to get tough. There will be aspects of this project that you do not like to do. You may not be good at them. It would probably be easier to abandon the project than to complete it. Do not start major projects that you are unlikely to complete.
What about your previous successes in life? Where have you gained a competitive advantage? People who can do something better than others have a tendency to want to do this again and again. They like the experience of success. If you can find an area of your life in which you have repeatedly been successful in a variety of circumstances, and if this area would be suitable as an area of lifetime service, then you should consider it carefully in terms of your desire to identify your calling in life.
This process of self-evaluation is sometimes called taking your personal inventory. When you take inventory in a business, you have to know all of the assets in the business. If you can sell something that will generate money, then this needs to be in the inventory. I am not talking about selling anything. I am talking about giving it away. More than this: I am talking about giving it away year after year.
Once you have identified the most likely candidate for your lifetime calling, you must then begin to identify the goals of this calling. You will have internal goals for your calling. Far more important are the external goals. You must identify the following.
1. Beneficiaries
2. Services needed
3. Needed services not being supplied
If you are not going to waste your time pursuing your calling, you must be able to identify specific beneficiaries of your efforts. When you are offering something at zero price or at a discount, it is easy to generate willing recipients. You will have to screen these people. This is not a profit-seeking venture. In a profit-seeking venture, you screen in terms of profitability. Somebody is paying for a service. If he is paying more than it costs you to deliver the service, you are likely to continue to deliver the service. That is rarely true of a calling.
The beneficiaries should be a group of some kind. You cannot identify all of the individuals who would like to receive a subsidized service. But you can identify a class of individuals who would like to receive such services. You must be able to identify them. You must be able to inform them of the existence of the service.
A profitable business seeks to identify what people want and are willing to pay for. It is far easier to sell people what they want then sell them what they need, unless what they need is vital. The richer that people are, the more they spend on what they want. So, if you want to persuade people to change their minds, you will find it very difficult to do this. They may need to change their minds, but they do not believe this, and until they do, they will resist your attempt to persuade them. Think of people’s resistance to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They need to be persuaded, but they choose not to be.
There may be cases where people want needed services, but no one is supplying them. If you can identify such services, and if you can find ways to deliver them on a cost-effective basis, then needy people will respond favorably to your offer. If you can identify such cases, then you may have identified your calling. Then your main challenge will be to generate donations that will enable you to deliver these services to those really in need.
This raises another series of questions that I categorize under the general category of barriers to entry. What is keeping these needed services from being delivered? Here are some possibilities.
1. Poor communications
2. Insufficient funding
3. Lack of cooperation
Poor communications may apply to the delivery side of the transaction. This problem may apply on the supply side of the transaction. Needy individuals may not know that the services are available. Alternatively, people who are willing to donate to deliver such services may not know that there is an effective way to do this. If you can solve either of these communications problems, you can make a difference in the lives of the recipients and the donors. Insufficient funding is always a problem with nonprofit organizations. There is always more that the organization wants to do, but it cannot raise sufficient funding. If you devote yourself in some way to a lifetime of service, you will at some point face the problem of funding. You will have to set priorities of what you plan to do. You cannot achieve all of what you want to do because you do not have sufficient money to do this. This is the inevitable problem of budgeting. This is the problem of resource allocation.
If you make this project your life’s calling, you will have to solve these problems.
We see lack of cooperation in all kinds of organizations. People employed by the organizations resist cooperating with each other. There are many reasons for this. Somebody wants more credit, and other people do not wish to share it. Sometimes people do not agree on a particular institutional goal. They will not dedicate themselves to achieving this goal with the same degree of dedication displayed by somebody who strongly believes in it. When these limitations exist, they were retard the extension of the division of labor. Yet it is the expansion of the division of labor that, more than anything else, makes organizations more efficient. They can achieve more with whatever resources they own or at least control temporarily. If you have the ability to persuade people to cooperate with each other, this is a unique skill. You can put this skill to work in many areas of your life. You should consider doing this with respect to your calling.
In making an inventory of your skills, you probably cannot be sure about your capabilities in all of these areas. You should be aware that these problems do exist, and if you pursue your calling actively for several decades, you will have to overcome these psychological and institutional barriers.
Once you have some idea of one or more potential candidates for your lifetime calling, it will be time for you to begin planning how you are going to do this. Point one of the biblical economic covenant is purpose. Point two has to do with planning. Remember this slogan: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
E. Counting the Cost
A wise person counts the cost of his decisions. He makes plans, but only after he is first counted the cost. This is the principle set forth by Jesus in Luke 14:28–30.
There is a simple strategy which will enable you to begin to count the cost. It is rarely taught, and yet it is universally useful. You must ask yourself three questions.
1. What do I want to achieve?
2. How soon do I want to achieve it?
3. What am I willing to pay?
With respect to the first question, the more specific you are, the more likely you are going to able count the cost accurately. You may have a long-term goal. This will require a long-term plan. But the plan should be broken up into steps. For each of these steps, you must first ask and then answer these three questions. You should write them down in some kind of a scheduling system. You should review your progress on a regular basis.
A crucial cost that you should attempt to estimate is this one: the value of the money you will not earn when you are working on your calling. This is the economist’s definition of cost: the highest-value item that you must forego. I began my calling in 1960. The only time that I was paid to work on my calling was when I was on the payroll of the Chalcedon foundation from 1973 to 1976. I was always on somebody’s payroll until late 1979, when my newsletter publishing business became highly profitable. Always before that, I had rolled any profits back into the business. When I devoted ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year to researching and writing my economic commentary, that was time I could not use to promote my newsletter. Furthermore, I had to devote at least 20 hours a week in addition to the research and writing time to build up the Institute for Christian economics, which funded the publication of the books.
It was slow going at first. I began writing my economic commentary in early 1973. The first volume was not published until 1982: Genesis: The Dominion Covenant. It took three years for me to write the commentary on the first 19 chapters on Exodus. It was published in 1985: Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion. It took a year for me to write the commentary on the Ten Commandments: Exodus 20. It was published in 1986: The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments. It took four years to write Tools of Dominion (1990), a 1,300-page commentary on the case laws of Exodus, chapters 21–23. It took four years for me to write a four-volume commentary on Leviticus, Boundaries and Dominion, plus a one-volume summary, Leviticus (1994). It took three years for me to write a one-volume commentary on Numbers: Sanctions and Dominion (1997). That was not a long book. I wrote the four-volume commentary on Deuteronomy in two years: Inheritance and Dominion (1999). It was published only as a digital PDF. That was a total of 13 volumes. After that, things sped up considerably. I wrote commentaries on Matthew, Luke, Acts, and Romans by the end of 2000. I wrote the commentary on First Corinthians by the end of 2001. I wrote the commentary in First Timothy in 2003. Then I backtracked: commentaries on the historical books, Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets. Then I finished the New Testament. Every book was typeset and available for download in 2012. But, for 20 years, I was not certain I would be able to finish the project. I was never attempted to quit. I just kept devoting ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year. That was when I was committed to, and that is what I did.
In most rural societies throughout history, family training has been an important means of educating the next generation. Girls learn how to run a household from their mothers. Boys learn how their fathers make a living. The parents actively teach the children. But there are limits to the specialized knowledge the parents possess. If they want their children to have more successful lives than they have had, they must seek out teachers. Historically, one of the common ways for parents to achieve this is to make a contract with skilled craftsmen to take their children into their businesses. The children began at a low level. They may not be paid much at all. In some skilled trades in Western history, young men have been required to guarantee to stay on the job for several years. There are still remnants of these old apprenticeship programs in modern society. But they have been replaced generally by classroom education. Only in graduate school do a handful of students in the natural sciences and engineering participate in organized research programs that employ these students as low-paid technicians. The students learn the basics of academic research from professors who agree to let them be part of a research program.
An alternative to a formal apprenticeship program is an internship program. These are becoming more popular with university students. Businesses hire students temporarily at a low wage. Perhaps they are hired in summer, when university students normally have a vacation of three months. This is a good way to introduce students to the basics of a particular business. It is also a good way for business owners to recruit students who work for low wages. Among these students, there will be a small percentage who are above-average performers. The businessman who hire interns is able to expand the pool of part-time employees from which highly talented young people can later be offered full-time management positions. This is a good way to recruit students with above-average performance standards.
If you are considering a calling that has institutional support, working full time for one of these nonprofit organizations for several years is a good idea. If you do this, observe how the organization functions. At the end of the working day when you go home, start a notebook or a digital note taking program that deals with what you saw during the day. In the future, you may want to consult some of the specifics that you have written down or typed in. You should ask questions during the day, although not so often that you become a pest. Take notes on the answers. Write down these notes at the end of the day. Do this on your own time. Do not assume that your employer should pay for this. If you do this on your own time, you will own the information. You may not be allowed to share it, but you can implement it on a small scale if you start your own organization after a few years.
This plan is consistent with the general biblical principle: dominion through service. It is specifically a program based on this principle: subordination produces dominion. These are important principles in life. Most people do not learn them early in life. I am not certain that most people ever learn them.
If you spend your spare time volunteering in an organization like this, you will get some idea of what it takes to be successful in this field of service. Use your time wisely. Use this as a means of gathering practical information that you may be able to put to productive use when you finally decide on what your calling is.
My biggest problem with my calling was that nobody had ever attempted this before. Nobody had ever sat down with the Bible and had gone through it, passage by passage, in terms of one theme: economics. No one has done it with respect to any other social science. There were no working models. There was no one to mentor me. That is why I am devoting one volume of this series to activism. I am attempting to do for readers what no one was capable of doing for me. This has been my single greatest motivation since 1973. Clearly, this is point five of the biblical economic covenant: inheritance. It is my primary legacy. I hope.
Before you begin thinking about your career, you should be clear on what your calling is. You should shape your goals for your career in terms of your calling. The calling is more important than your career. The calling is the most important thing you can do for the kingdom of God that nobody else is likely to be able to do. You are replaceable in your job. If you select the right calling, you will not be replaceable in your calling until you begin to recruit and train disciples.
Because I knew what my calling would be in the spring of 1960, I never lost sight of what was primary in my life. I did not come up with the distinction between job and calling until 1981, but I instinctively understood the difference. I recognize that my primary task would have something to do with developing Christian economics. I was not sure how I would do it. I was only sure that I was going to attempt to do it. That decision changed my life. I doubt seriously that I would have been known nationally and internationally if I had not made this decision. I had a Wikipedia entry before most people did. This was because I was a Christian economist.
I have found that the money always seems to come in. Even in tight times, which I have only experienced for six months in the first half of 1976, enough money is come in to keep me going. I stayed out of debt. I had money in reserve. My wife and I cut expenses drastically. We got through it. I suppose it was a good experience for both of us. But I never stopped working on my calling.
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To read the entire book, go here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department197.cfm.