Call of Duty

Duty — a moral or legal obligation; a responsibility to action that someone is required to perform.

Often in life, we are called upon to engage in a decision or perform a duty we would otherwise like to ignore or run from entirely. Unfortunately, life is not saturated in gumdrops and lollipops. In fact, when a person decides to get married or have children or take on a leadership role within their respective communities or church, they will, by the nature of those roles, be on call for duty. To perform our duties with clarity and conviction, to answer the call to lead in times of crisis, calls for men and women to respond to those needs with absolute assuredness and confidence, and to be willing to face adversity and even death for that noble cause.

C.S. Lewis once stated, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” So, do will power and true grit.” When I became a Christian, I knew that with the decision to follow Christ, I would be called into active duty, expected to stand in the gap.

Ezekiel 22:30 states, “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.” Judah was a nation in absolute disarray, both spiritually and politically. The prophets preached a message based on a false sense of security. Dr. Jim Smith writes, “The priests were just as corrupt. They had done violence to the law of God by their self-serving interpretations.” The people of the land had forsaken the laws of God as well. What we see taking place in the land of Judah is a moral and spiritual famine. Throughout the land, God searched for a man who would answer the call of duty and stand in the gap on His behalf. A wall in biblical times served as a defense between a city and its enemy. A breach in the wall meant the enemy could come in at will and destroy the inhabitants.

In contemporary terms, that is exactly what was happening in the United States with our unsecured borders to the south. God did not need the physical wall repaired in Judah, but the spiritual hole plugged by a man led by His Spirit. A man who would preach a message of revival and repentance. Notice God shares these most troubling words, “I found no one.” Wow! How disappointed God must have been. Not one person would stand between God’s judgment and the associated wrath and the people of the land.

Be aware of the danger of maintaining silence in a time when we need to shout. Mark Batterson shares this insight, “The sin of silence takes a wide variety of forms. Sometimes it seems as innocuous as political correctness. We live in a culture where it is wrong to say something is wrong, inaccurate, or sinful and destructive. Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, which takes tremendous moral courage. He did not tell us to turn and run the other way.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote, “To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards of our men.” We cannot sit idly by while our nation’s families, schools, and communities self-destruct under the burden of complacency and moral depravity. We have been commissioned by God Himself to stop, or at least retard, the spiritual spoilage taking place all around us.

I love working for the CRA as the Associate Director of Church Ministry and Development. That is a fancy way of saying I travel to churches and help develop leaders and aid with vision casting within the local church. One concern I hear from many preachers is that they are having a tremendous difficulty in finding and developing men who desire to serve as elders. In other words, men in their churches are biblically qualified to serve but struggle with answering the “call of duty” or are complacent when challenged to “stand in the gap.” The office of the elder is not easy, nor should it be treated flippantly. However, if our congregations don’t raise elders who hunger to lead God’s flock, it bodes ill for the future of the church.

Let us change the arc of our story to one that includes answering God’s call to follow Him, then leading with passion in our homes and churches. Then, when God looks down on His church today, He doesn’t have the disappointed response as He did during the days of Ezekiel.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people.” Church, listen. God has sounded the bugle. He is mustering His army from the four corners of the world. Will you hear the call? Will you answer the call? Remember: not making a decision is making a decision.

James C. Book is the Associate Director of the CRA and serves on the board of directors for the Advance Center for Ministry Training. He is a former minister with Kissimmee Christian Church, Kissimmee, FL. Contact him at jim@thecra.org.