Hearing the call of God? 5 Biblical Truths to Encourage You

Hey Friend!

Are you wondering how to answer the call of God on your life? Here are 5 biblical truths from the book of Haggai to help you accept God’s calling so you can take action on your God-led calling, in confidence.

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Sometimes we know we are called, yet we are too busy, afraid, distracted, or even too self-conscious to answer…

We wonder if we are hearing God right, if He is really choosing us. We wonder if now is the right time or if we should wait just a little longer… you know, til’ things settle down. Or, we think we are too busy… and we continue to delay obedience.

We learn in the book of Haggai that this predicament isn’t new. We also learn that delayed obedience means disobedience. That not taking immediate action on God’s calling means missed blessing and protection.

Instead of making excuses for why we can’t answer God’s call, we need to leap in excited anticipation of the glory that comes from faithfully serving Him.

Let’s glean some wisdom from Haggai and be encouraged to answer the call of God.

Here are 5 biblical truths from Haggai to encourage you to take action on God’s call:

1.     God’s Calling you to Do Something

You are called by God to do something. We are not born purposeless and there is a reason we are all here! In Haggai we learn that sometimes our call from God feels uncomfortable, the timing feels off, or it feels inconvenient. This is how obedience is tested. As chosen people of God, we are to make sure our priorities are in check and have a willing spirit. (Jer 7:23)

2.     You are to Take Immediate Action on whatever God’s calling you to do

Instead of waiting on the right time, a booming clear GO from God, or continuing to delay answering the call, we are directed in scripture to take immediate action. When God asked Simon Peter to join him as a fisher of men, Simon Peter immediately got out of his fishing boat and began to follow Christ.

He didn’t know the outcome. He surely didn’t know ‘how’ all he knew was that God’s leading was the next right thing. Let’s put aside our excuses and follow God’s lead so that we can work faithfully to glorify Him instead of ourselves. (Col 3 23:24)

3.     You Will Experience God’s Encouragement

Following God’s calling isn’t going to be easy. that is clear from the many brave men and women of scripture who followed the Lord. However, He promises us that we won’t be alone. God is an encourager and He is with us on our journey. (Romans 15:5)

4.     You Will Experience God’s Blessing & Future Blessing

Your immediate action and perseverance will bring favor, blessing, and most importantly closeness to God. Come close to God and He will come close to you. God promises that His chosen children will be blessed and their children and their children. Walking in obedience and answering God’s calling will reap Heavenly rewards and change the path of your life. (Deut 28 1:2)

5.     You Are Promised Protection

When you are faithfully serving God, you will be persecuted. You will be different than most people in the world. You will experience opposition, and it will all be worth it. God promises to protect His chosen ones and honor them. (Deut 31:6)

I pray you open your heart to answer God’s call and know that He is with you, encouraging you, blessing you, and protecting you on your journey. That walking out of God’s plans for you will be the greatest honor of your life.

You can find an in-depth summary of Haggai at one of my favorite sites, Got Questions.org.

My bible study on Haggai came from The Daily Grace Co.

I pray this blesses you,

Download or Print the Spiritual Battle Plan Workbook Here!

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

(00:00):
Hey, friends! Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today, we are gonna go take a little journey into the book of Haggai. I was doing a Bible study from one of my absolute favorites, The Daily Grace Co, highly recommended.

And I dug into this very short book of Haggai. And it’s just a couple of pages long, but wow. Does God’s word come alive? And does He show you the most incredible lessons and meaning and depths inside of just a few short pages?

I felt led to share with you five biblical truths to encourage you to answer the call of God. And we’re gonna go through these five truths because I believe that each of you has a call. I know you do.

I think you have multiple callings over your life, but there’s this really one big core common denominator root calling as I like to call it that’s over our lives.

(00:56):
And it’s something that was written about us before birth. There are books in heaven about us, and God has a specific, beautiful, incredible plan for each of us to fulfill. And it’s our responsibility.

We are called to take action. We really have to inventory our priorities to make sure we’re not delaying obedience that we are saying yes to God.

And when we do that, we see so many of God’s promises and his protection become a big, incredible, amazing reality in our lives. And that’s really kind of a foreshadowing of what we’re gonna go through today in the book of Haggai.

So I can’t wait, definitely grab a pen and a piece of paper. You’re gonna wanna dig into this book right after we’re done with today’s episode so that you can gain and glean God’s wisdom over the calling of your life. Let’s do it.

(03:07):
All right, friends, we’re gonna be digging into these five biblical truths to encourage you to answer the call of God. We are gonna be kind of going through and just following along with the book of Haggai.

So lemme give you a quick summary of this book, and then obviously I want you to go read it yourself.

And one of the cool things I’ve learned from The Daily Grace Co is they have you read the entire book and then you go through and you break it down, basically line by line.

And then you go back and you read the book again at the end of your Bible study.

(03:38):
It really kind of helps everything come full circle and really have depths and meaning to the words that you’re reading. And of course, praying over God’s word before and after you read.

And it just allows the scripture to kind of come to life and really plant seeds of wisdom into your heart. So here’s a quick summary.

(03:58):
Basically, the people of Judah said it wasn’t time to rebuild God’s temple. Yet they were living in luxury for the time, I’m sure it’s subjective, and God’s temple was in ruins.

So God sent a message to his servant, Haggai and Haggai spoke to the governor of Judah. Hey, we gotta get some timber. We gotta rebuild God’s temple. So that’s kind of the first whole beginning of the book.

(04:30):
Then secondly, the people basically made excuses and they said, why they couldn’t. Does that sound like any of us? Does that sound like the world today?

God really made a lot of examples of how their delayed obedience was causing them to not experience the fullness of heaven.

God said, because of them heaven withholds dew and no matter how hard you’re trying with your own strength, you keep failing.

And it gives lots of examples of you’re planting all of these amazing crops and yet you’re not reaping what you should be reaping from the crop. Why? Cuz it’s in your own strength. And this is happening in Haggai 1-6.

(05:13):
So then in this third phase here, it took them almost a month. So they actually have dates throughout the book of Haggai, which I think is pretty cool, showing us the reality of delayed obedience, how long it takes us sometimes to listen to ot God’s call, to listen to His leading.

(05:31):
And almost a month later, they finally decided to listen to God. And he’s giving them lots of examples of why they should listen, which you think, oh my goodness, this dude straight up hearing from the Lord, speaking to the governor, who’s speaking to us like maybe we should listen.

I don’t think so Joe, I gotta mow my lawn. I’m kind of busy over here. Anyways. So it says, because they feared him, which fear is reverence. They begin to think of God and say, oh man, we are not in partnership with God. We are absolutely not running with God. We’re running against God. They begin to rebuild the temple. This is Haggai 12-15.

(06:16):
Then the next section of the book talks about God then spoke through Haggai again and He told them by encouraging the people to get to work. I am with you. My spirit remains with you. Because as they were working, as they were building, it just began to feel like so much.

And it was hard and their rebuilding process was long. And it wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the original temples. They were feeling very discouraged with themselves, feeling less than, and God just poured out his encouragement over the people. Then God gives a prophecy of Jesus’ coming.

And he talks about the future Glory of the temple will be greater than its past glory. And he was using visualization of them rebuilding this physical temple to really symbolize us becoming the temple of God. Right. Jesus is coming and how our bodies would become temples, living, breathing temples for the holy spirit.

(07:22):
And then lastly, He gives promises for protection and he says, I’m about to shake up everything. Everything’s about to get really hard, but you are chosen and I will honor you.

That is really my own words. My summary of the book of Haggai, you’re gonna have to read it on your own, but here are the lessons, the five lessons I’m gonna pull for you out of this incredible book.

(07:48):
First is that God is calling you to do something. I truly believe even in every single phase of my life, I’ve had a call every step, every moment. From having a baby. That was the call that was over my life at that moment to move into entrepreneurship. That was a call.

And then the next thing is, you guys have heard my story. God called me to start a podcast and there’s been little many leadings and promptings from God all throughout this process. But there’s constantly going to be a call.

(08:27):
We were not born purposeless. You have a purpose in your life. And I know that all of our purposes are to glorify God, but we glorify Him through our callings. We glorify Him through our marriages and our parenting. Also, through our leading and our teaching and our ministries and our spiritual giftings and the things that we are called to do.

So the first thing, the first biblical truth is that there is a call right now over your life. Now I don’t know in which area I have no idea what’s going on over there. But there is a call.

(09:05):
The second biblical truth is that we are called to take immediate action. If you look back at the story, the people of God, even though they were people of God, they had delayed obedience, they made excuses. They had their priorities all out of whack.

Now, God was so good, and in Haggai 1-4, “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains in ruins?”. And so he did such a beautiful job of really putting things in perspective. And I think as we pray to God when we think about what our calling is and what he is asking us to do, and we’re afraid of that, or it’s inconvenient. Is God’s calling ever convenient?

Of course not. That’s part of the test, we have to push through the strange timing or the confusion of like now God? Ugh, I don’t think so. We will validate and we will come up with all these reasons why now is not the time.

(10:11):
But in Haggai 1:5-6 Now this is what the Lord says “Give careful thought to your ways, you have planted much, but have harvested little, you eat, but never have enough, you drink, but you never have your fill. You put on clothes, but you’re not warm; you earn wages only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

And I encourage you to think about is that what your life feels like? You’re just trying and you’re trying, and you’re doing, and you’re hustling and you’re striving and it’s just never enough. You can’t seem to reap the blessing. You can’t seem to experience the fruitfulness in the business or in your efforts.

And I think it’s because your priorities, potentially, just an idea, might be outta whack. Maybe there’s this delayed obedience happening in your life. God is leading you to either lay down the stuff, lay down the idols, lay down your ways, and exchange them for His ways.

Or He’s asking you to take action at all to begin, to go to leap, to move forward.

(11:14):
And so through that, it brings us to the third biblical truth, which is they began, they took action. And so take immediate action instead of delayed action. So we’re gonna take immediate action. That’s what God wants from us. And biblical truth three is that you will experience God’s encouragement on your journey.

So as your journey through the call and you guys have heard me talk about the four phases of God’s calling in episode 433. But when you walk the journey, it’s not easy. So hard for God’s people when they begin to the temple, it was nothing like the original temple of God.

It didn’t feel as beautiful, as magnificent. It was hard work in a season where they were really called to be focused on God.

(12:06):
This message from the Lord through Haggai came on the seventh month of the 21st day. I told you about this is from the Bible study. This likely means nothing to us. It was very significant.

This is the last day of the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Tabernacles, which is one of the most important feasts on the Jewish calendar. It’s as if we were told that this was taking place on December 25th, Christmas day. So it likely means that the people had not gotten very far.

They were probably feeling super discouraged and they were feeling like this is gonna go on forever. This is gonna go on for years. But right then right at the beginning of their journey, they started to get confirmation from God.

God showed up and he poured into the people and he gave them encouragement on their journey. He reminded them that they were doing good work.

(12:54):
Biblical truth number four is that you will experience God’s blessing now and in the future. And I know from my own life and from scripture and from the book of Haggai. There is physical blessing. There is emotional blessing, spiritual blessing. There’s realized promises.

And we know that we can rest secure in God’s promises. He just abundantly pours out His favor and love over us when we faithfully serve Him. And this doesn’t mean money necessarily.

Sometimes it does, but blessing in Hebrew actually means to grow close to, to become intimate with God, to know Him more deeply. And another translation for this is a gift or present.

And I just envision God with His arms out wide, wanting to hug us and love us and grow close to us and pour out whatever it is that brings us joy, true heavenly joy while we’re here on earth. So we can experience heaven on earth.

(14:03):
And then last the final biblical truth is that you are promised protection. You are promised protection. God talks about it all going down. He’s talking about everything getting harder and the world getting shaken.

He says you are chosen. I will honor you. So how incredible is it for us to know when we’re called, that we can take immediate action. We are allowed to feel frustrated. We’re allowed to know that the journey’s going to get hard.

Often we are promised it’s gonna be hard, but through the hardships we learn lessons. When we go through hard things, our hearts learn perseverance. We become stronger, more faithful.

We lean on God more. God’s gonna encourage us through the journey. He’s gonna pour out blessing and love as we continue faithfully serving Him.

(14:58):
And lastly, He promises to protect us as we move forward through our call.

So I hope that all of this has encouraged you to answer the call of God, whatever the thing is, whatever the knocking is on your heart, whatever holy spirit is leading you to do that you say yes, that you pray that the Lord would show you the way.

That He would walk beside you, that he would prepare all of the steps. He would encourage you as you stumble and fall, as it feels hard, when it feels like you can’t.

When we make excuses as to why we can’t possibly do it now, or we can’t possibly continue, that God removes all of that confusion, all of that frustration, all the obstacles and just moves them, sweeps them right out of your path.

And makes clean away for you to walk with Him forward, straight into His promise, blessing over your life, over the future generations, over your kids’ kids and over all of the beautiful glory that He has prepared for you in our forever home heaven.

(16:01):
I pray that this blessed you, I’ll meet you guys back tomorrow for a quick tip Tuesday episode. God bless you and I’ll see you soon.