Jim shared a great message this morning. He and I are sharing the same topic, so of course there is going to be a lot of overlap. But I think it is very important to get these aspects and the truth of these matters down: called, chosen, and faithful.
I am sharing from a slightly different angle, perhaps, but really much of the same thing. The Lord has called us, He has chosen us, and He wants to teach us how to be faithful. May the Lord help us as we are together in these times.
Glasses have leaks in them, you know. Did you notice? Okay, here we go.
Ascending Calling Mountain—that is what we are going to talk about tonight. I know you know a lot of things and a lot of Scriptures about calling, but I want you to get a feeling for it. Something wonderful happens when you come into your calling: there is a spiritual ascension in your life.
Of course, we all started out, before we were saved, under the sun, where the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity under the sun.” Under the sun is just our typical three-dimensional perspective.
Who would have thunk that we human beings had a fourth dimension to our life? That is to say, our heavenly calling. But, having never heard anything from heaven, we were living within three dimensions. And you know what? It gets very tiresome in three dimensions. You run around in circles, make money and lose money, grow old and fat, and, you know, I mean, it is just a terrible cycle of things.
But what if you suddenly came into the fourth dimension? That is, of course, where we come to. One day, there you are, lost without God and hope in this world, wearing those sunglasses because you are living under the sun. Then one day, you hear a heavenly calling:
Come unto Me,
all ye that labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Never were there words of more mercy than those which Jesus spoke: “Come unto Me.”
When we first hear from the Lord, it is some kind of invitation for us to come unto Him and find salvation. What a wonderful moment that is in our lives.
The calling, even as our brother Jim shared last night, is just like the saints of old. Abraham was an old man when he heard God speak from heaven. I want you to understand that the Christians in the Bible truly lived by following the voice of God.
We Christians need to have a primary relationship to God in which we hear His voice. The same thing goes with Moses. He was standing by the bush when he heard God speak. The same thing happened with Samuel when he was a little boy and asleep. Jeremiah heard God speak too. He said, “I’m too young. Count me out.” God said, “Right, you’re in, Shorty.”
Paul also had a heavenly calling, as did Peter—Rocky. Men and women in the Bible heard the heavenly calling, brothers and sisters, and it changed their lives. As soon as the fourth dimension enters in, it is a different life.
You can often recognize a heavenly calling by several signs. There are others, but here are five things you may notice when somebody is being called by God.
The timing is not coincidence.
When God calls you, it is not a coincidence. There is something about the timing of it.
Your life is at a crossroads.
Many times God calls when you are graduating from high school, getting ready for college, about to move, starting a new job, or when a relationship breaks down. You may have to leave home, or something changes. You are at a crossroads, and you do not know what to do. Often, this is a time when God calls.
The call seems impossible.
Of course, God’s call is impossible unless you believe. How do we receive salvation—the call to salvation? By faith. You believe.
“My son, I want you to go and preach to the Gentiles.” Paul says, “How could I possibly do that? I hate Gentiles.” But he got saved, and bada bing, bada boom—Shorty is preaching to the Gentiles.
There is an inner conviction.
There is a growing unrest in you. The devil is on your right shoulder saying, “Be bad. Stay in the world.” The angel is on your other shoulder saying, “Be good now. Be good. Follow God.” Your conscience is bothering you day and night.
When somebody is really being apprehended and called by God, it is a haunting experience. You go to bed, put your head under the pillow, and hear, “Here I am.” You pull the pillow away, turn on the rock-and-roll music, and still hear, “Here I am.” You cannot hide from the call of God.
Indecision begins to plague your life.
We are always afraid of change. Let us assume you are in high school, doing your homework, and everything is fine. Suddenly, you begin to sense that you are a sinner, that you really need God, and that Jesus is the only way to salvation. The next thing you know, you can hardly study because that is all you are thinking about.
It begins to take first place in your life until you make a decision. If you say, “No, get out of here,” then you go back to doing your homework. Hopefully, you stop wrestling and say, “Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord, speak; Your servant hears.” Thus, your life changes.
There are five signs right there. It is so wonderful when we are saved by grace. He says, “Come unto Me.” You know the words the Lord loves to hear more than anything else? “Yes, Lord.”
Simple. You do not have to make up a huge prayer or something. It is like that crazy song some kids sing: “Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, yes, Lord. Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, rah, rah, rah.” Well, that pretty much gets Him.
This is salvation by grace. Anybody know Ephesians 2:8-9?
For by grace are ye saved through faith;
and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
not of works, that no man should glory.
Saved by grace—just because out of heaven came a fourth-dimensional call: “Come unto Me.” And you said, “Yes, Lord.”
Why do I say “Calling Mountain”? Because here is the deal, ladies and gentlemen. I do not know if you believe this, but it is a reality in your life if you are a Christian and have been following the Lord.
When you accept the calling of Jesus, it is a heavenly calling; it is an upward calling. What you find is spiritual ascension in your life. That is to say, you begin to rise above this world, slowly but surely, as you begin to seek eternal things.
One of the great realities of our life is that, when you accept the call of God, it is an upward call. That is why the writer of Hebrews says:
Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling,
consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, even Jesus.
Do you want to go up in your life and get out of the mud puddle and the problems of this world? Then consider Jesus. Fix your eyes on Him, and you will find your calling is an ascension.
The first calling, of course, is the call to salvation. You have to go through that narrow gate. You go through the narrow gate and go up to heaven, where Jesus is sitting up there near that little church building in heaven, as you can see.
If you go by the wide gate down at the bottom, of course, we know that is Broadway and the wide gate, and that leads to New York—I mean, that leads to hell.
Then, I do not know, only the Catholics could draw yet a third way. In between the narrow gate and Broadway, there is that other way that looks like the way to the men’s washroom. I have no idea what their theology is on that one. But there you go: the narrow gate, the way that leads to life; Broadway, which leads to destruction; and the in-betweeny way, where you are walking on a snake.
But that was our first calling. From our first calling, we go to our second calling. The Lord says, “Now that you have come unto Me, follow Me.”
The next stage in your call is Koinonia Canyon. What is this? The Lord says, “My dear friend, I not only want you to come unto Me. I want you to come into fellowship with Me. I want you to walk with Me and talk with Me. Ask Me questions—and I will answer some of them. I want you to get to know Me, and I want to get to know you.”
You are called into fellowship. Oh, man, this is a wonderful aspect. We see this in 1 Corinthians 1:9:
God is faithful, through whom ye were called
into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
You have just been connected by your cell phone to Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the greatest Person ever to walk on this earth. God says, “I want you to get to know My Son.”
Ladies and gentlemen, nothing will lift you higher and bring you ascending up Calling Mountain like fellowship with Jesus. I hope you do that. I know it is a struggle for some of you to read your Bible and get up early in the morning, all this kind of stuff. But I am telling you what: there is nothing as wonderful as, “He walks with me, and He talks with me. He tells me I am His own.”
There is nothing as beautiful as that. And you are called to it. He says, “I want you to do it.”
Man was created to have fellowship with God. You have an empty spot there. I like the way one fellow wrote it. There was a medieval Christian mystic who really turned around the life of A. B. Simpson, a great preacher and man of God. Simpson read his book, and here is what the fellow said:
Every morning when you wake up, God is already waiting to meet with you in your heart.
Now you are busy doing this and that, brushing your teeth. God is still waiting. You are eating breakfast—God is still waiting.
Think how much He wants to have that kind of fellowship. Jesus wants you to spend time with Him. This calling lies at the heart of ascending upward on Calling Mountain. At the heart of your spiritual growth is this call to fellowship.
There is another call. Not only, “Come fellowship with Me,” but, “Come apart with Me”—the call to holiness. Ho, ho, we are getting heady now. It is getting thin up on Saints Peak.
How do we get up on Saints Peak? He says, “You be separate from the world. Come on up just a little bit. Come on, come on, you can do it.” He throws those ropes at you, clicks those things onto your belt, and gives you all that gear.
From Koinonia Canyon, we go up to Saints Peak. Listen: you are called to holiness. It is not optional. It is a very important part.
Paul says to Timothy:
[God] saved us, and called us with a holy calling,
not according to our works,
but according to His own purpose and grace,
which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal.
We are called to live by a new and living way. A lot of people make a mistake when they are going up to Saints Peak: they try to become holy by themselves. But I am telling you what—you cannot do it.
You try to go up to Saints Peak by yourself, and you will end up bludgeoned in some kind of carnal crevasse. It does not work. You have to find the life of the Lord to take you up.
It is like the Lord says, “Come up, come up, come up to holy ground.” You say, “Lord, I can’t. I can’t.” He says, “Here, take the lifeline of My life. I’ll pull you up by My life.”
That is the secret. Big secret. But I just want you to know that you are called into that thing. As you go up that mountain, the Spirit sanctifies you, and we begin to breathe clean air.
That is what I love about New York City: clean air. I come out here to Toronto and immediately start sneezing because there is real air out here. I live on carbon monoxide, you know what I mean? I am not familiar with this clear air.
Imagine getting up in those mountains. You hear all these stories about the people who go out to Mount Everest, and you just about run out of oxygen. It is clean, but it is also thin.
You start out as a gargoyle and become an angel. Oh yes, the call to holiness. It is a very high calling.
Then there is a fourth calling. Can you believe you are going up Calling Mountain? It is getting higher and higher. The Lord says, “Be one in the Spirit,” because the fourth calling is assembling yourselves together.
This is Ecclesia Ridge. Ecclesia is the Greek name, of course, for church. We are called to assemble together. It is important—not just, “I am going to sit there with other people.” I am going to fellowship with them, one in the Spirit together.
Colossians 3:15 says:
And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,
to the which also ye were called in one body.
You were called into the unity of the Spirit. He has called you to be one with everybody else who knows the Lord. It is a tremendous calling.
We are called to live in a new creation. Second Corinthians speaks of the new creation: you have died, and your new life is found with other people in a new creation. God is creating something brand new with people together, one in Spirit.
Because we are born of that one Spirit, we are to maintain the unity. This is an important calling as far as the church you go to is concerned. What is your calling there? To maintain the unity of the Spirit. Do not do things that are divisive. Recognize your oneness with one another.
If you have somebody in your youth group who is a particularly disgusting person, by faith accept the fact that you might not like them, but God loves them, and so you love them too.
Listen, in the body of Christ, we have to love a lot of people we do not particularly like. That is the deal.
When you move to a new place, you see new faces—shiny faces—and say, “Oh, this is heaven itself. Look, everybody is perfect.” Ah, yes. After you have done the wash with these folks a few times, you start to realize there is not a person in the assembly who was not erratic in some way. God tells you to love them anyway.
Maybe that calling sounds mighty high, but it is mighty blessed. We have got to go that way.
Now we go up to the fifth level: “Serve in My name.” The little red dot climbs up to Ministry Precipice. You have to watch out when you are serving the Lord; you are at a precipice. You could fall off. The wind could knock you down. Yet you are called to serve.
You are called to serve. That is one of the aspects of calling. We see it in many passages, but here is just one:
And as they ministered to the Lord, and fasted,
the Holy Spirit said,
Separate Me Barnabas and Saul
for the work whereunto I have called them.
We are called to minister to the Lord first, and then to one another.
Saul and Barnabas were there in Antioch, ministering to the Lord. That is how they understood that they were to minister to other people. Ministering to the Lord is very important.
Oh, Lord, I wish that in your worship times, more of you would go, “Beep,” say a little prayer, ask for a little song, and minister to the Lord. Enter His presence and satisfy the Lord. That is your first job here.
My job at the retreat is to try to rewrite all my messages after Jim uses everything I was going to say. Your job is to minister to the Lord before this time when I speak, or Jim speaks, or something like that. That is your job. Did you think of that?
Somebody can say, “Beep.” That is just a little offering of ministry to the Lord. “Could we sing ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’?” Whatever. Let us just come on. That is part of your calling. What are you doing sitting around? Are you trying to find out whether somebody is timing the longest gap tonight between songs or prayers?
Come on, let us go here. We are ministering to the Lord.
We move from the fifth calling to the sixth calling: “Seek My kingdom.” The sixth calling is to the kingdom. Ah yes, the Kingdom Pinnacle.
I am talking about being willing to go out and witness to the world, and to be those of whom it can be said:
Seek ye first His kingdom, and His righteousness.
God loves people who are seeking His kingdom. That means seeking His kingship, seeking His will: “Oh, I am Your servant, Lord. What do You want me to do? I am willing to do it.”
Seeking His kingdom means that you cannot be as self-centered as you used to be. When you start serving God in His kingdom, you are really serving by denying yourself and taking up your cross.
We see this in 1 Thessalonians 2:12:
To the end that ye should walk worthily of God,
who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory.
“Come into My kingdom. Live in My kingdom. Serve in My kingdom.” The Lord is calling.
Among other things, when we gather together to pray, we are called to pray:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
This should be our prayer.
Those who are called to the kingdom have a new dynamic in their lives. Those who truly enter into their ministry in the kingdom serve with a sense of His soon second coming.
Those who serve in the kingdom have this main prayer, besides, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”: “Come, King Jesus. Come, King Jesus.” That is a very important ministry in the kingdom.
How soon do you think Jesus is coming back? Do you care? Is that why there are long delays between the songs? You figure maybe He will come between one of them? He just may, if you make it long enough—but hopefully you will not die.
Nobody knows the time or the hour, but it is probably not one of those gaps when it is going to happen. So come on. Serve in the kingdom.
Kingdom living has higher motives. It is not serving self. It is really saying, “Jesus, You are the King, and I am more interested in what You want than what I want.” It is a wonderful calling, the kingdom calling.
Then comes the seventh calling: “Enter into My glory.” Oh, there we go. We are called into glory—Glory Summit, the peak, the top. Called unto His glory. What an amazing thought that is.
Immediately, when you talk about being called into His glory, you have already swept out of your calling and gotten into your chosen—but we cannot go there yet. That is tomorrow night. Jim has to steal all my stuff first.
First Peter 5:10 says:
And the God of all grace, who called you unto His eternal glory in Christ,
after that ye have suffered a little while,
shall Himself perfect, establish, strengthen you.
Our last stage of calling enters us into the heavenly realms, in the New Jerusalem. In glory, what will our job be then? To continue to glorify the Lord Jesus as a trophy of His grace.
Ephesians 2:7 says:
That in the ages to come He might show
the exceeding riches of His grace
in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
We will show the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ—how He saved us, how He redeemed us, how He perfected us. What a wonderful, glorious calling.
That is all I want to say. It is very simple tonight: the different levels of calling in our life. Yet I realize that even this matter of calling can make some people feel as though they are not worthy of the calling.
Jim had those excuses for why not to respond to the call, and this is pretty much the same thing, the way it filters through my demented mind. But the point is simply this: brothers and sisters, may everybody here in this room know God’s calling.
It is absolutely life-changing. You will never live completely under the sun again. There is something heavenward, something higher, something ascending in our calling.
But who is qualified to hear God’s call? Nobody. Okay, that is the answer. But I will show you the rest anyway, just to further vex you.
The kind of person God can call is a needy and broken person, like Mary Magdalene. What a mess: a demon-possessed woman, out of her mind, and who knows what else? She was needy and broken-hearted. The rabbis did not know what to do with her. She was out of her mind.
But it does not matter what kind of sinner a person is. They have some kind of hunger in their lives. Despite Mary Magdalene’s desperate situation, she had a thirst for healing and wholeness.
Many people you see who are really messed up still have a longing for healing and wholeness. Without the Lord, Mary Magdalene would have remained codependent and a continual victim.
Today in our world, many people are not living normal, decision-making lives because they are absolutely bound in codependency and are victims of everything that comes along. Such a person is a person whom, by the grace of God, God calls.
As you go to school and meet people like this—even people who are messed up—Jesus loves them, and He is the only One who can satisfy their thirst. He is the only One who can make them whole again.
Who else is qualified to hear God’s call? How about guilty, conscience-stricken people? Think of the apostle Paul. After he saw the stoning of Stephen, he became more and more guilt-ridden and conscience-stricken that he had done something wrong.
Without Jesus, it makes you a guilt-driven fanatic. It is amazing to me that there are children who grow up in Christian homes but do not accept the Lord. It is almost as though they get a demon in them, and they become driven people. Yet under their lives, many times, there is guilt that is driving them.
Really, they want, just like everybody else, approval and righteousness. That is what Saul the Pharisee was trying to gain: approval with God, a sense of righteousness. But he could not do it on his own.
There are people in this world who actually have a conscience. It is amazing. They actually have a conscience, and it is very guilty. What they need to find is that Jesus is the One who can save them and relieve them of the conscience that haunts them night and day with their sense of not measuring up.
So who is qualified? The guilty and the conscience-stricken.
How about the timid and fearful? We saw this morning with Gideon and Timothy. Timid and fearful people hear the calling and say, “Oh, I can’t do it. I’ll never be able to. I’ll never make it. I’m afraid. What is God going to make me do?”
They think He is going to make them work a checkout counter for the rest of their life, or become a missionary to the headhunters, or something like that. People are always timid and afraid.
What do they need? They need security and confidence in their lives. Without Jesus, they will never find it.
Timid people become continually frustrated and bound by circumstances, which makes them negative people. Fearful people become negative people because, without Jesus, they are too afraid to do anything, but all they do is criticize. It is the one thing they can do.
Oh, that the Lord could deliver us from fearfulness, even God’s people. It is an amazing bondage. Yet such a person is qualified to hear God’s call.
How about the questioning, searching kind, like Thomas—Doubting Thomas—or Nathanael, who wondered whether anything good could come out of Nazareth?
These people have a thirst for reality and truth. On the college campus, you will meet some people who are not believers, but they truly are seeking and searching. I hope you can share a Jesus with them who can satisfy that thirst.
Otherwise, they will keep wandering around and become disillusioned, trying this and that and the other thing. Have you met a real seeker, a non-Christian real seeker? It is amazing what they have been through.
They say, “Well, I tried a little Buddhism, then I went into something else, then I tried crystals, and now it is just meditation.” They have been through all kinds of weird stuff. They tried Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while, then became a Mormon for three months. It is crazy. They are searching and searching.
They will never be satisfied until they come to Jesus. I know it is hard not to be intimidated when you see somebody searching who is intelligent. A lot of intelligent people are searching people. But you should not be put off by that, because they have a heart looking for reality and truth.
They may have a lot more questions than you can answer, but when you show them the truth that is in Jesus Christ, they will find satisfaction in their soul. Such people are qualified to hear God’s call.
How about defeated, helpless people? Think of Elijah. He was such a powerful prophet, but there was one problem: he hated queens.
Jezebel said, “I am going to kill Elijah by nightfall.” It completely did Elijah in. He went into a great depression. He ran away from Jezebel. Forget Ahab—he was not afraid of Ahab. He was afraid of women.
There he was, sitting under the juniper tree, hiding in a cave, all dejected and everything. But he did not really want to end his life.
What really happens is this: a person like that needs a reviving of spirit. How did Elijah hear God’s call? He was in the cave. Did he hear it in the wind, in the earthquake, or in the fire?
He heard a, “Psst.”
“Elijah.”
A still, small voice. That is what revived his spirit.
He had just come from a mountain where he saw fire come down, they killed a whole bunch of prophets, and he saw all the hocus-pocus of that stuff. But he needed reviving inside.
Sometimes you can be serving the Lord, doing a lot of stuff on the outside, but you need help inside. You need that breath of the Spirit to revive your heart again. These people can hear God’s call.
Then there are restless and busy people. These are the Type A’s. These are movers and shakers. These are Davids and Solomons. They are looking for meaning and worth.
That is why Solomon, when he went away from God and everything was under the sun, said it was all vanity of vanities. It does not matter how many wives you have, how many concubines, how many castles or palaces you build. It makes no difference. It is meaningless.
Oh, how a person like that needs the fear of the Lord to bring fulfillment into their life and a sense of meaning and purpose.
There are people out there making millions of dollars, and they are so dissatisfied—just so dissatisfied. We have a gospel of a Lord Jesus who can put purpose into a person’s life when otherwise they are completely unfulfilled.
How about critical, negative people? Yes, God calls them too, like the Samaritan woman. Oh boy, this woman was really tough. She had been through the mill. She argued with Jesus. Can you imagine arguing with Jesus? The cheek of that woman.
What did Jesus do? Did He spit in her face? Did He say, “Okay, woman, go to hell”? What did He do? He kept offering her water:
Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him
shall never thirst.
Jesus was offering the Samaritan woman kingdom sushi. Every time she argued, He said, “Yeah, try this roll.” She said, “No, no, no, I don’t like eel.” “Try this roll.”
This woman was so dirty, so nasty, married a bunch of times, not happy living with a man, and complaining about him. But what she really wanted was a sense of cleanness.
There are a lot of people in this world who feel filthy. They just feel filthy. They do not feel there is anything that can possibly clean them up.
When I go to Russia, I meet so many broken, busted-up people. I go to rehab centers where dear children have been shooting heroin, now have HIV from the needles, have been prostitutes on the street, and alcoholics. It is just absolute wreckage.
Only God can heal them, change their lives, and turn them into ministers of God. That is what the Lord does by His grace and mercy.
If people like this do not find Jesus, they are going to be full of self-hatred. After you have hated everybody else, it just comes down to you. She needed to hear God’s call.
How about idolaters like Abraham, trying to find some mechanism to prosper, some kind of god that would produce prosperity? What Abraham needed to do was hear the voice of God in order to find the reason for his life.
Otherwise, a person looking for these power things just becomes superstitious. I knew this fellow, a charismatic Catholic out on Long Island. He loved the Lord, no doubt about it, but he came up to me with all kinds of crazy things because, as well as being a Christian and believing the Bible, he believed in numbers.
He said, “Hey, Dana, what do you think this means?” I said, “What?” He said, “I was driving here, and I saw on a billboard, ‘724.’ Then I got a statement from some company, and their address was 724 Incline Parkway. What do you think?”
I said, “What do I think? It means nothing.”
But he would base financial decisions on groupings of numbers. The last time I saw him, he was bankrupt. All of these ways to get ahead—you need Jesus. Become a steward of things in His name.
Finally, there is the rebellious—Jacob, and Onesimus, who ran away from Philemon’s household. All Jacob ever wanted was freedom: freedom from his brother, freedom from his kids, freedom from his four wives.
But a rebellious person ends up being a wanderer. You can rebel, go anywhere, and you will not be happy. Then you get in trouble again and run somewhere else. Jacob’s whole life was like that until he wrestled with God. That was Jacob’s call, and wow, how it changed his life.
All of this is just to say: what are you like in your soul? Needy, fearful, questioning, restless, negative, rebellious? Big deal. Who is not?
There is an old gospel hymn that says, “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult.” Tumult is noise. Through all the noise of our lives, all the restless agitation and things thrown up in the air, Jesus calls us through the tumult and speaks to us:
Come. Come unto Me.
Next time, we will look at chosen—to celestial heights of predestined appointments. As soon as I go home tonight, I am going to look up those words to see what they mean.
But you are already climbing Calling Mountain, are you? Have you thought about coming to Jesus? Has He shown you that He is the only way to salvation, the only way to peace in your life?
Unless you come to Him and find salvation, you cannot climb the other parts of the mountain. It does not work. You have to come.
I am the way, and the truth, and the life:
no one cometh unto the Father, but by Me.
The call starts when you hear Jesus speaking in your heart at the crossroads of your life, and you say, “Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. I will come to You.”
Let us pray that, because there may be somebody here in this room tonight who needs to make that kind of change. Even as they have been living under the sun, they are hearing something from the heavens. May it truly be from the heavens—a voice calling from heaven.
Let us pray for our friends who are here this week.
Lord, we come unto You, and we are so thankful that we do not just have to live by a secondhand experience. As we study Your Word and come before You, You speak to us in ways beyond our understanding. Surely, You lead us, and You save us.
From that moment, when we accept and go through the gate and come to Jesus as Savior, we start to ascend in a life—a life of fellowship, a life of holiness, a life of oneness, a life of discipleship in the kingdom, and a life that eventually goes to glory.
Oh, what a life it is. What a calling. What a noble calling. There is nothing small about the Christian calling. But first, we need to come to You.
I pray for my dear friends who are here and who are hearing Jesus say, “Come unto Me.” I pray that they would have in their hearts a desire to know Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and that they would find faith in their hearts to say, “Yes, Lord, I will come unto You.”
This is the call to salvation and the beginning of a call that ends in glory. We pray that You will work in the hearts and lives of Your people here tonight.
Now, while we pray, everybody keep praying. If you are here tonight and want to accept Jesus—if this call to salvation is a yes to the Lord tonight, and you have never done that before, or you are not clear that you have done it before—I want you to raise your hand.
The calling is always free will: to accept or reject. But is there somebody in this room tonight who wants to say, “Yes, Lord, I will come unto You”? He gives you this opportunity. You know it is true in your heart. Your conscience convicts you that it is true. But still, you have to say, “Yes, Lord. Yes, I’ll come.”
Would you just raise your hand so I can see you? Everybody else is praying. People are not looking around. I just want to see if anybody is ready right now to come unto salvation and come unto Jesus.
Brothers and sisters, you remember how that moment came in your life. So do pray for our friends who are here among us, that everybody here would be found climbing up Calling Mountain by the time the week is over.
So we pray that, Lord, and we thank You, in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.