The Rising Underdogs

​Underdogs. Little excites us more than watching an underdog rise to the top from impossible circumstances. Hearing success stories of disadvantaged individuals rise in the business world, athletics, Hollywood, and academia quickens our pulse and leaves us cheering them on. We can’t help it. We adore rooting for David in his conquest over Goliath.
Our love for the underdog originates largely in our identification with them. Most people aren’t born into privilege and astounding wealth, so when we see fellow comrades rise to the top it’s as if we’re right there with them. The impossible becomes possible and our sense of connection with them imputes their excitement to us.
Samuel is a great underdog of the Old Testament. Life dealt him a harsh stack of cards. His mother dedicated him to the Lord at a young age, which meant leaving his family and living at the tabernacle with a priest and his family. Priests in that day were priests by blood. Samuel didn’t fit in. Priests exercised specific responsibilities as ministers to the Lord; Samuel was their errand boy.
To make matters worse, the priests Samuel lived with left much to be desired in their persons. Eli’s sons were particularly of the scoundrel kind—taking advantage of God’s offerings, sleeping with tabernacle prostitutes, and a host of other gross sins. Their guilt before God transferred to Eli when Eli refused to rebuke them or take action against their behavior. Not only did Samuel not fit in, he had no role model to aspire to—no mentor to guide him in the ways of God or any other moral platitude.
Nothing about Samuel’s life inspired any thought of possible success. Like so many of us, meager existence and survival seemed to be his only destiny.
But God had other plans. He always does.
One night God decided to make His presence known to Samuel. In a familiar story, God calls Samuel twice before Eli realizes it’s God and tells him to answer if He called again. Samuel obeys and finds himself communicating with the God of eternity.
In a twist of events, the words spoken weren’t ones of butterflies and roses. Instead, God pronounces a prophecy of judgment on Eli and his sons for their unrelenting sin. Great. The first and only time God speaks to Samuel is to condemn the only family he really knows to doom and disaster!
Such a prophecy was unexpected and undesired. Little did Samuel know this prophecy would be the inaugural word to begin his calling as a prophet. A mere errand boy living among a family that wasn’t blood and didn’t care had just been ordained by God as His prophet to the people of Israel.
Thus Samuel grew and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fail. All Israel from Dan even to Beersheba knew that Samuel was confirmed as a prophet of the Lord. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, because the Lord revealed Himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.
1 Samuel 3:19-21
From that point on life would never be the same and it all began in a blink of an eye.
Many of us resonate with Samuel more than we realize. We may never reach fame like Samuel or live in dazzling lights of popularity, but each of us is endowed with a specific calling from God. We may not receive it in a vision or face-to-face, but it’s no less real and tangible in our lives.
How do we discover our calling? The answer is two-part:
He already told us. 
In cosmic terms, we are well-equipped to know and live out His calling for our lives because it’s found in His Gospel recorded in His Word. We’re the underdogs in God’s story—the ones who never had a chance, yet through His incredible grace and unbelievable sacrifice we find ourselves immersed in His mercy and empowered with His might. For reasons still mysterious today, He chose us to carry out the plan of redemption Jesus inaugurated with His first coming. Our role now is to get intimate with the Gospel and pour ourselves into its truth daily. We’re to become practically who we already are positionally in Jesus.
Not discovered; revealed. 
Any and every specific calling on our lives (like the Gospel) isn’t discovered by us, but revealed to us. Just as we have no part in the Gospel other than the reason we need it in the first place (sin) so we aren’t capable of discovering the specific role of divinity He’s orchestrating in our lives. Like Samuel, we’re to live in accordance with what He has revealed in Scripture (a.k.a. the Gospel) and let Him reveal more when He deems necessary.
Ironically, when our eyes are fastened to our Heavenly Daddy, we won’t really care about the specifics of His call in our lives. His glory radiating in and through our lives becomes an organic reaction, not a controlled manipulation.
We’re underdogs rising into His glory by the fuel of His grace. Samuel didn’t manipulate circumstances to hear God’s call on his life, he merely lived by the truth he knew and left the rest to God. Let’s mirror that posture. Let’s concentrate on what He’s DONE and let Him work out the DOING. Let Him be the mastermind behind your underdog story.