Calling: Awake, O Sleeper

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve been looking at what has often been called the “golden chain of salvation” in Romans 8:30. I was trying to stress on Monday that if we use that expression, we need to remember that it’s the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who is the gold and not lose sight of Him in the big words: predestination, calling, justification, and glorification. But today, our word is calling.

It’s a word that, right from the beginning, indicates God’s sovereign grace. Remember how earlier in Romans 4:17, Paul described God as the One who “calls into existence the things that do not exist”? Theologians have sometimes distinguished between what they’ve called the “general call” and the “gospel call” and the “effectual call” of God. Psalm 19, for example, describes this general call:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge. (Ps. 19:1–2)

It’s the teaching that we find in Romans 1:18 and following: God has so sufficiently revealed Himself in the created order that through it, we are summoned to know Him, to trust Him, to love Him, to worship Him.

By “gospel call” we mean the proclamation of the good news about Jesus as Savior and Lord. Just as Jesus Himself said, “Come to Me,” we continue to issue His call, His summons, His invitation to come in faith to the Lord Jesus, to trust Him as Savior, to live for Him as Lord. Sometimes, as you know, the much-loved words of Revelation 3:20 have been used to express this very reality. In the gospel call, Christ stands at the door and knocks, seeking our response of faith and repentance. If anyone opens the door, Christ will come in and sup with him, and he with Christ. Now of course, these words were first addressed to professing Christians, but of course it’s still legitimate for us to use them as a presentation of the gospel to those who are not yet Christians. But we always need to remember that according to Ephesians 2:1–2, all those to whom that call is addressed are dead in trespassers and sins, or to put it bluntly, Christ calls us, but we are unable to hear, or to get up, or to open the door.

So, this call, this gospel call, on its own doesn’t necessarily prove effective. It needs to be accompanied by the work of the Holy Spirit enabling us to respond, to resurrect us from the dead as it were, to enable us to open the door and to welcome the Lord Jesus. That’s what theologians mean when they speak about the “effectual call.” And it’s clear, I think, that this is what Paul is talking about in Romans 8:30: those God predestined, He also effectually, effectively called to Himself.

Now, it’s not that there are two different messages—a gospel call and an effectual call that is very different. No, it’s one message. But what theologians have thought about is that apart from the work of the Spirit, the message of the gospel call falls on deaf ears and blind eyes, and it will therefore be ineffectual. Except that in a sense the Scripture makes clear, it’s always effectual in the sense that rejected, it creates callouses and hardens hearts that are hardened against it. But how, then, do we experience the effectual call?

Our spiritual forefathers like to use a biblical picture here. They spoke of being awakened. It’s a picture that Paul uses in Ephesians 5:14, maybe quoting the verse of an early hymn:

Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.

It’s a great picture, isn’t it? We’re spiritually sleeping the sleep of death, but there’s a voice calling us in the proclamation of the gospel, a voice that is the same voice that called to Lazarus when he slept in death, and this voice is so powerful that the dead begin to hear it. It brings back memories of your mom or your dad waking you up in the morning by calling your name. And sometimes they’d been doing it for some time before it penetrated your ears, and you began to hear it. The voice then wakened you up. You recognized your name, you opened your eyes, and your mom’s face was looking at you. A new day had begun.

It’s like that when we are effectually called. There is a call, perhaps it’s been repeated in our hearing again and again, and then, wonderfully, we are awakened. We realize it’s Christ who’s calling us, calling us by name to come to Him. Then we can sing, with my favorite Scottish hymn writer, Horatius Bonar:

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Come unto Me and rest;
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
Thy head upon My breast.”
I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary and worn and sad,
I found in Him a resting place,
And He has made me glad.

I hope that you’re among the awakened, and that you’ve heard that voice, and that its call has been effectual in your life too.