"For the Sake of the Call"

I miss spiritual songs. Back in the day there was more than mere “worship music” in church and Christian life. Christians used to write songs about the Christian life, about God, and about truths we needed to hear. Many popular Christian songs functioned like little sermons, sung theology meant to shape how we thought and lived. We need more of this kind of truth sung to one another, and fewer songs that orbit almost exclusively around our individual emotional experience of God. The rise of that inward focus has mirrored our culture’s broader obsession with expressive individualism.

One of the earliest and most influential examples of those older “spiritual songs” in my own life is Steven Curtis Chapman’s 1990 album For the Sake of the Call. The album is not primarily about worship moments or private spirituality. It is about discipleship. It is about obedience, trust, and faithfulness over time. And it begins where any serious account of discipleship must begin, with a sober look at the cost of following Jesus.

The title track functions as the album’s theological center of gravity. It is not subtle about what it is asking of the listener. This is a song about abandonment. About obedience without calculation. About responding to Jesus with something approaching holy recklessness.

Chapman roots the song explicitly in the calling of the first disciples. Fishermen leaving their nets at the water’s edge. Ordinary lives interrupted by an unqualified command. “Come, follow me.” The song emphasizes how little they knew. No applause. No promise of recognition. No explanation of where the road would lead. Only the fact that Jesus had called them by name.

That framing matters. Calling here is not discovered through self-reflection or personal fulfillment. It is received. The disciples do not weigh options or explore their passions. They respond to a voice outside themselves. In an era when Christian talk about calling often sounds like baptized career counseling, the song’s insistence on an external summons feels almost jarring.

The chorus presses the claim even further. “No other reason at all but the sake of the call.” Obedience is not justified by outcomes. Not by effectiveness. Not by visible fruit. Not even by personal growth. The call itself is sufficient. Or at least it is meant to be.

The bridge makes this explicit. “Not for the sake of a creed or a cause. Not for a dream or a promise. Simply because it is Jesus who called.” That line quietly resists a great deal of Christian activism. It refuses to ground obedience in ideology, vision statements, or even theological systems. The authority of the call rests entirely on the caller.

There is something bracing about that. In a religious culture intoxicated with strategies, metrics, and success stories, the song insists that faithfulness precedes fruit. It echoes Hebrews 11 more than the book of Acts. People obeyed without seeing where their obedience would lead, and some never saw what it produced.

At the same time, the song deliberately idealizes the moment of decision. The abandonment is clean. The obedience is immediate. The nets are left behind once and for all. That is faithful to the gospel narratives, but it is not the whole story. The disciples left their nets, but they did not instantly become saints. They misunderstood Jesus repeatedly. They argued about status. They fled when obedience became dangerous.

The song is not wrong. It is selective. It captures the purity of the call, not the long ambiguity of living it out.

That selectivity reflects the evangelical moment in which the song emerged. In the early 1990s, calling was often framed as a decisive act rather than a lifelong posture. The emphasis fell on surrender more than perseverance, on saying yes rather than continuing to say yes when obedience no longer feels heroic or clear.

Even so, the song has aged better than many of its contemporaries precisely because it refuses to attach the call to success. There is no promise here that obedience will work. Only that it will cost. “Wholly devoted to live and to die.” That is not the language of triumph. It is the language of allegiance.

What the song gets most right is its refusal to justify obedience. If obedience must be justified, it is no longer obedience. The moment we demand guarantees we quietly reclaim authority for ourselves. This song understands that danger and resists it. We abandon it all not because it makes sense, but because Jesus has called.

For those who have lived long enough to discover that calling rarely feels clean or dramatic, the song still serves as a needed correction. Faithfulness is not sustained by clarity. It is sustained by trust. Not trust in our discernment, but trust in the one who speaks our name and says, “Follow me.”

In that sense, For the Sake of the Call is not ultimately about going somewhere else. It is about relinquishing the right to decide what obedience must yield. The call does not promise outcomes we can measure. It promises only the presence of the one who calls, and that, the song insists, must be enough.