September 28, 2026
by Clinton Dix
This week’s passage includes three visions that God gave Amos. These are:
This blog, however, will not concentrate on the visions but on Amos’ famous statement: “I was no prophet, nor a prophet's son…” (Amos 7:14) We will look at God’s Call on Amos and by extension God’s call on each of our lives.
In various places in the Old Testament it speaks of prophets in a collective sense. They are principally called the "sons of prophets" (I Kings 20:35; 2 Kings 2:3) or a “company of prophets” (I Samuel 10:10). The sons of prophets were a professional guild of prophets. They were trained in the profession. In today’s terms we could say that they were graduates of a Theological Seminary with a post-graduate degree in Prophecy. They would be card carrying members of the union that could be called the International Brotherhood of Prophets.
But…Amos was not a graduate. He was not a union member. Yet he was called by God.
Amaziah was an institutional priest whose primary duty was protecting the king’s authority and preserving political stability, not proclaiming divine truth. Serving at the royal sanctuary in Bethel, he led a state-sponsored system established by King Jeroboam I, who placed golden calves in Bethel and Dan to prevent Israelites from traveling south to worship in Jerusalem (I Kings 12:28-29).
This cult was not the worship of foreign gods—an outright violation of the First Commandment. Instead, it was an improper attempt to worship the true God, Yahweh, through visible, carved images. Jeroboam presented the calves with the same declaration Aaron used at Mount Sinai: "Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28, Exodus 32:4).
By reducing the invisible God to a physical image people could see and touch, this practice directly violated the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4–5). While Baal, Astorah, and Molech worship introduced completely false deities, the golden calf tradition corrupted true faith by redefining how God was worshipped. As a result, Amaziah functioned less as a shepherd of truth and more as a government official, paid to maintain a politically convenient, theological compromise.
So here comes Amos. No formal training, no credentials, going up against a PhD in prophesy! From the human perspective, Amos was showing up without the tools necessary to accomplish what he set out to do. Humanly speaking, this was career suicide. There is no way that he would be able to successfully confront Amaziah. So, why did he do it? What made him go confront Amaziah? This is where calling comes in. That is what we will look at in this blog.
Throughout my 30 years of ministry with Wycliffe, I used the phrase,“I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son…” many times. I was a missionary administrator and my father a missionary pilot. Wycliffe, as a Bible translation organization, properly highly valued linguistic and translation skills. But neither I nor my father had any. In 2004 I was asked to lead the newly begun translation work in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. Not being a linguist, I felt the anxiety that Amos must have felt when he showed up to the gun fight! But the difference is the biblical truth: God equips those He calls.
We can see three instances in the Old Testament where there was doubt when God called. Moses (Exodus 4:10-11), Gideon (Judges 6:14-15), and Jonah (Jonah 1:3). The New Testament states, however, that it is not us, but God, Who is working through us.
Another aspect of calling is that sometimes God calls a person to a ministry that matches their natural talents and abilities. Sometimes His call makes human sense. Take for example, Bezalel and Oholiab, the craftsmen that built the Tabernacle (Exodus 31:1–6, 35:30–35), or Paul, who was a rabbinic scholar and articulate speaker (Acts 22:3; Galatians 1:14).
Yet sometimes it just doesn’t. It is obvious that God calls seemingly unqualified people. Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the calling and the natural talents of the person. This is easily seen by both Amos and Jesus calling the Galileian disciples.
In Brazil we had one missionary who was initially rejected from being a missionary because he was deemed unqualified. After appeal he was accepted and was sent to Brazil. He was not a gifted linguist or translator. He was not a team player. He was constantly going against the flow. Yet, it was obvious that God had called him! He finished translating the New Testament for the language group that he was assigned to. His enthusiasm for the Lord was contagious and a strong indigenous church sprung up. So strong, in fact, that they sent their own missionaries to neighboring groups taking the Gospel to them. The seemingly unqualified missionary was obviously called by God. Many times I said of him, “He’s an “administrator's nightmare, but God please give us a dozen more just like him!”
Spiritual gifts, and calling, are not simply self-generated upgrades of human talent. They are supernaturally given by God to accomplish His purposes through our lives. Through it, God provides us with the what and why of our lives.
In his book, Discovering our Spiritual Identity: Practices for God's Beloved, Trevor Hudson proposes that each believer is given a unique message from God to give to the World. While the message of the Gospel is unchanging, the way that God works through each of us produces a different way of expressing the Gospel. It is important to note that what Hudson is proposing is that all believers, not just clergy or missionaries, have a call.
During my time in Guinea-Bissau I was tasked with changing the rules of how Bible translation was to be accomplished. I researched innovative strategies of Bible translation from around the world and came up with a strategy for the context in Guinea-Bissau. I found myself debating with a PhD in Linguistics on how Bible translation should be done. Like Amos, I came to the gun fight with a pocket knife. But like Amos, I came because of God’s call and it was He who worked through me and my team. The organization that we established is now flourishing and accomplishing the task of Bible translation within its country. God’s call makes a difference, not only in our lives, but in the world that we interact with. Some of us may be professional prophets, and some of us aren’t. Yet God’s call is on each of us. Are we, like Amos, ready to obey and show up at a gun fight with a pocket knife?