If you want to hear about some fascinating experiences, ask various evangelical ministers, including missionaries, how God called them to the ministry. I did this in my younger days, and I was shocked in a good kind of way at the richness and diversity of the responses. You will be amazed at what ministers will tell you about how God touched their hearts in calling them to the ministry or to a specific mission field.

In my case, I was an unsaved 15-year-old who was under conviction of the Holy Spirit to become a Christian. My mom had brought home a Gideon’s New Testament that someone had handed her, and she gave it to me to read. As I read the first 14 verses of John 1, my heart was gripped with wanting to know this Son of God whom the Bible spoke about. At the time I didn’t understand how or what it meant to become a Christian, but God had begun working on me.

A few weeks later, sitting on my front porch, New Testament in hand, reading those same verses again and again, God spoke to me loud and clear for the first time in my life. He said, “It is my will for you to become a preacher, like Billy Graham is a preacher. Do you understand me?” I knew the Lord Himself had just spoken to me. In fact, it felt like He was standing right next to me. Shocked and in utter awe, I finally responded, “Yes, Lord, I understand.”

I found out later that a generation earlier, my great-grandmother had been quite a prayer warrior, and she had prayed for God’s work to be done through her descendants. She had prayed that God would raise up ministers of the gospel through her family line. God called my grandfather to become a minister, then several of his sons, and then me. That was some fruitful praying she did!

It is God’s business to call people into the ministry and to become missionaries. And it is His business how He calls them. Yet, did you know it is our business as Christians to ask Him to do it? Jesus made this very clear in Matthew 9:37-38 when He said, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.”

Yes, there are plenty of other areas to pray about when it comes to missions, and we need to pray for those as well. However, nothing else matters much if God doesn’t have a person on the ground sharing the gospel with the lost. It all starts there. All around the world there are unreached areas and people groups needing Christ and someone to share the good news with them.

Friend, will you do your part and begin asking the Lord of the harvest to send out more laborers into His harvest field? If you will pray, God will answer. In response to your prayers, He will call, equip and send more workers into His harvest, and many souls will come to Christ because of it. How’s that for exciting?

Let’s pray!

Did you like what you read today?  Why not subscribe to the blog and have new posts go straight to your email!