Looking for a job? If so, what are your qualifications? Are you proficient with Microsoft Office? Are you tech savvy? How well do you know the various social media platforms? What are your skills and do you have experience? And by the way, are you a team player or are you more of a loner?

Normal questions for a job interview, right! Each is designed to help determine whether or not a person is the “right fit” for a particular job. The worse thing that can happen is to be hired for a job without the needed qualifications and skills to succeed!

What qualifications do you think God looks for when he calls a person? Do they have to have knowledge of Scriptures, or a certain amount of faith? Does God offer a job only to men? Does he call only adults? Do they have to be a least somewhat religious? What are the qualifications God to uses to call a person for his purposes?

This weekend we start a four-part series on God’s Call with the story of a young boy with hardly any qualifications other than the fact that he’s sleeping in the right place. He has little knowledge, experience or skills (at least on the surface.) Yet, God calls him to difficult and challenging task – carrying a message of condemnation of the corrupt and dysfunctional religious leaders of the day!

Wow! God calls a child to such a task? If this is so, then what might God be calling me to do? And before I start giving the many reasons why I don’t think I’m qualified the story of Samuel’s call silences all my objections.

It is both challenging and encouraging, to realize that God has just one qualification when he calls a person – a willing heart like Samuel’s whose only response to his call is this: “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening!” As we gather this week may we learn Samuel’s response to whatever God may call us to do!