Author Archives: Andrew Thompson

Reaction in Relationships: The Power to Forgive by Andrew Thompson

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

That is Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. It explains how birds fly and fish swim. Jump on a trampoline and you’ll experience the third law firsthand: You force the bounce mat down, and it springs back to throw you up into the air. Newton’s law applies to actions and reactions in the physical world. But we can also see a similar law in human relationships. When you act emotionally toward someone else, he or she will always react back toward you.

Offer love to another, and you expect to receive that love back again. But lash out in anger, and the response will be different. Just as with Newton’s law, the character of the emotional reaction is determined by the initial act itself.

This isn’t so much the law of motion as it is the law of the heart. We’re made with it stitched into our souls. Human relationships work on an action-reaction dynamic. So wouldn’t it be great if we always acted out of love? And wouldn’t life be simpler if our loving acts were always interpreted as we meant them to be?

Unfortunately, the analogy between the law of motion and the law of the heart does have a limit. A bird’s wings beating against the air or a body’s weight on a trampoline are impersonal forces. There is no moral quality to motion.

Human relationships are very different. With us, the impersonal becomes very personal! Every one of our relationships has a moral character to it. We don’t, in fact, always act as we should. Even when we do, our actions and attitudes are not always interpreted as we mean them to be. The sinful and broken reality of life intrudes on every relationship we have.

Instead of love, we act in anger. Rather than gratitude, we experience greed. Given the opportunity to show compassion, we show cruelty instead. The clarity we wish existed in person-to-person interactions is missing; in its place we find the fuzziness of mistaken intentions and plain misunderstandings.

The law of the heart—as it turns out—is more like the law of the broken heart. The presence of sin within us ends up affecting our interactions at every level—a vicious cycle of hurt and revenge. Husbands and wives experience it in marriage. It thrives both in the workplace and the marketplace. Politics is rife with it. It’s the reason wars are fought in every age.

We don’t have to be convinced that love should be met with love, and anger with anger. We just don’t seem to know how to choose love rather than reaction consistently. Sometimes we don’t even know how to interpret love when it comes our way. We act out of anger and hate and resentment, and we react in those ways when others provoke us. And so we feed a monster whose appetite is endless.

From Reaction to Forgiveness

Our dilemma is that we ought to act and react in love; but instead, we find ourselves doing the contrary. The Christian faith has a solution to the cycle of hurt and revenge, though, and it lies at the heart of the Gospel. That solution is found in forgiveness.

We first must realize that there’s nothing natural about forgiveness. To practice it, we have to react to others in ways that are not equal and opposite to the actions upon us. “Where there is hatred, let me sow love,” the Prayer of Saint Francis puts it, and this is exactly the counter-intuitive commitment that forgiveness requires. It’s so difficult that we cannot do it on our own.

The need for forgiveness to be at the center of human relationships is demonstrated by the fact that forgiveness was at the very center of Jesus Christ’s ministry. He came into the world claiming the power to forgive sins. It was this very act that caused the religious authorities to oppose him saying, “It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7)

We see in the crucifixion how the Son of Man who came to forgive sins finally becomes the agent of forgiveness through his own body. His sacrifice upon the cross mediates God’s forgiveness to the whole world. As the Apostle Paul puts it to the Corinthians, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). We are all called to receive Christ’s forgiveness. We come to know it through a sure trust and confidence in him and the power of his atonement for our sin.

Learning to forgive is the only path to truly loving relationships with others. And Jesus shows us that to acquire the forgiving heart which allows us to forgive each and every day, we must first come to know what it means to be forgiven.

Forgiveness and Sanctification

We are reconciled to God when we receive forgiveness in Christ. That is a monumental spiritual experience! But we haven’t fully overcome our problem just by being forgiven. We need both pardon for sin and the power to overcome its corrupting effects as we move forward in our lives. Without the power added to the pardon, I could hear the message of the cross with joy as it pertains to God’s forgiveness of me, while going right ahead and dealing out vengeance on all those I think have wronged me.

So where can any of us find that power?

John Wesley’s account of how the power of forgiveness is conveyed into the lives of believers is helpful on this point. Wesley’s view on the power of forgiveness is full of deep spiritual insight—especially as it is related to the way that forgiveness can transform us inwardly. Take for example the familiar story of Wesley’s experience on Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738. Sometimes we can sentimentalize Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed” and confine its importance it to a moment of his personal spiritual journey. But Wesley’s narration of the Aldersgate story in his Journal makes a statement about the profound importance of forgiveness within the experience of salvation for all of us. Here’s how he describes what happened to him that evening:

“I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Wesley is sharing one of the primary convictions of heart-warmed Christianity in this testimony: God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ is meant to be received personally by every child of God. This is what it means to know God as Father, and it is the way we are adopted into God’s family. The reconciliation we find in forgiveness is such a dramatic experience that it gives us new birth.

In Wesley’s view, though, the power of forgiveness extends beyond the moment of our reconciliation to God. Forgiveness is a part of our ongoing spiritual growth as well. To be redeemed—fully redeemed—means to be transformed by the love of God.

So when the Apostle Paul writes to the Colossians that Christ Jesus is the one, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:14), Wesley writes in his New Testament commentary, “forgiveness is the beginning of redemption, as the resurrection is the completion of it.” He links the pardon of the cross with the power of the resurrection, not wanting us to diminish any part of the fullness of redemption.

On the other hand, Wesley also understands that forgiveness continues to work in us as a special kind of power, forming the very virtues that will nurture a forgiving heart. Later in Colossians, Paul says we should embrace compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience—and finally love. And in the midst of that counsel, Paul emphasizes the need for Christians to forgive one another. “Just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you forgive” (Col 3:13), he writes.

Wesley adds in his New Testament commentary that those who have been renewed by Christ’s forgiveness are none other than the elect of God. He writes, “holiness is the consequence of their election, and God’s superior love, of their holiness.”

So God’s forgiveness begins a renewal—a healing—in the soul. And the character of that renewal is a soul filled with God’s love. This is what it means to be made complete, as Wesley points out using the New Testament’s language of “perfection”: “The love of God contains the whole of Christian perfection, and connects all the parts of it together.”

The power of forgiveness is rooted in the fact that it is an act of God’s love. So forgiveness cancels our sin and then begins to heal us of that sin entirely, all the while enabling us to begin forgiving others. Forgiveness, in this sense, is the very rhythm of redemption – our redemption and the redemption of all our relationships.

“We love him because he first loved us,” Wesley tells us in the sermon, On Family Religion. That love is, fundamentally, the “love of a pardoning God.” It’s a love that “may admit of a thousand degrees” (for not all of us are at the same place in our journey).

But it always makes us thankful for Christ’s gift to us and compassionate toward all others for whom Christ died. “Gratitude to our Creator will surely produce benevolence to our fellow-creatures,” Wesley tells us. “If we love him, we cannot but love one another, as Christ loved us.” Then he goes on: “And toward all the children of God we put on ‘…kindness, gentleness, long-suffering, forgiving one another even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven us’.” We learn to forgive in love, because the loving forgiveness we have received makes us into new creatures.

While life in this world makes it easy for us to react to others with a hard and self-centered temper, the forgiveness we receive through Christ teaches us a better way. Knowing mercy, we are made merciful. Having been forgiven, we learn to forgive. And then we are welcomed into the company of Jesus’ true friends, where we begin, “steadily walking in all his ways, [and] doing his will from the heart.”

This is the power of forgiveness—the power that will save us and the power that will ultimately transform this world.

 

A version of this originally appeared on Wesleyan Accent in 2014.

Andrew C. Thompson ~ The Virtue of Pastoral Leadership

Note from the Editor: This week at Wesleyan Accent, as we scan, with grief, ongoing news from seeker-sensitive Protestant megachurches and Roman Catholic dioceses, we are reaching into our treasure trove of archives to reexamine different aspects of leadership. Our contributors over the years have written thoughtful, challenging reflections on leadership from a variety of perspectives. 

 

I returned recently from a trip to the beautiful hill country of north Alabama. While there I spent a day in conversation with Methodist clergy from there about leadership in the church.

The questions we were grappling with are important for the future of any church in the Methodist family: What does Wesleyan pastoral leadership look like? Is there even such a thing?

I’ve been pondering these questions for a few years, since I first taught a seminary course called, “Models of Wesleyan Pastoral Leadership.” The idea of Leadership Studies is, of course, very much in vogue right now. That’s true for many different fields of endeavor — business, higher education, government, athletics, and non-profit work. Within the Wesleyan tradition, writing about church leadership has been going strong for several years. In 1999, Lovett Weems wrote Leadership in the Wesleyan Spirit, which examined the leadership traits of John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and other early Methodists. Since then, books on church leadership written by self-conscious Wesleyans have proliferated: William Willimon’s Calling and Character: Virtues of the Ordained Life (2000), Adam Hamilton’s Leading Beyond the Walls: Developing Congregations with a Heart for the Unchurched (2002), and Kenneth Carder & Laceye Warner’s Grace to Lead: Practicing Leadership in the Wesleyan Tradition (2011), just to name a few.

So is there anything we could really identify as Wesleyan Pastoral Leadership? I think we can identify a leadership approach that is distinctively Wesleyan, even if not uniquely so.

Think about this issue from the standpoint of conventional approaches to ethics. Duty ethics is focused on doing the right thing or making right decisions — ethics from the standpoint of rules. Consequentialist ethics emphasizes reaching the right outcome or emphasizing decisions and actions that are focused on achieving the most desirable ends. Virtue ethics shifts the focus away from decisions and outcomes, and toward the person involved in decision-making. This approach is most interested in the character of the decision-maker, believing that the most important factor in good ethical decision-making and action is the person him or herself.

If we look back at the example of John Wesley and the early Methodist movement, we will find some expressions of each of these major ethical approaches. The approach that might leap out at us immediately would be duty ethics. The early Methodists were, after all, great lovers of rules. The General Rules established the baseline expectations for how every Methodist would live within a local society. Wesley himself set down rule guidelines for everything from the regulation of the bands to the expectations of his preachers. All of this evidence might suggest that perhaps Wesleyan understandings of pastoral leadership are most closely related to duty ethics (at least if we tie the Wesleyan tradition to its origins in the 18th century).

There is, however, some reason to consider the place of consequentialist ethics in the early Methodist movement as well. After all, early Methodism was highly adaptable. Many of the institutional structures that developed (the class meeting, the conference, etc.) emerged in the context of the revival as opposed to being planned in advance by anyone. And the reasons for many of the structures coming into being at all were to serve the needs of the revival — such as local society organization, the deployment of preachers, or the needs of the poor. These early Methodists were mostly interested in salvation, understood as the redemption of both bodies and souls. They made all sorts of decisions based on that overriding interest in the end of salvation. So perhaps we should think about Wesleyan leadership as more tied to a consequentialist approach to ethical decision-making and action.

Then there is the approach of virtue ethics. Were Wesley and other early Methodists interested in the subject of character formation?

It turns out that this is very much the case. The formation of virtues within the soul was a topic that John Wesley was deeply interested in. His early sermon, “The Circumcision of the Heart” (1733) is a meditation on the progress of sanctification towards Christian perfection with reference to the virtues of humility, faith, hope, and love. For Wesley, a Christian account of the virtues ultimately becomes a description of sanctification itself.

When he was addressing the preachers under his authority in the “Large Minutes,” Wesley counseled them to emphasize the kind of habits in their daily lives that would build them up in the right way. Of course, they were to engage in the daily acts of ministry — “preaching and visiting from house to house.” But they were also to take time for spiritual disciplines, as he put it, “in reading, meditation, and prayer.” He understood that a good minister had to be truly good inwardly.

The similarity between the virtues and sanctification becomes especially clear when we grasp the connection between holiness and happiness. Holiness is a synonym for sanctification, which in the Wesleyan sense is seen as that state whereby our character comes to be defined by holy love. Happiness is a virtue concept — it is the eudaimonia of Aristotle, which is best described as that condition whereby human life is flourishing at an optimum level. For Wesley to link the two together — as he does explicitly — is to suggest that we only find true happiness when our lives have become marked by the holy virtues of faith, hope, and love.

There are some evidences of leadership via the approaches of duty ethics and consequentialist ethics in early Methodism. Those approaches were only ever utilized in an ad hoc way, though. What really counted for Wesley and other early Methodists was the formation of character in a leader, and right character can only come about through the kind of disciplined practice that leads to a virtuous life. A sanctified life. For leadership, a rightly formed character is what is truly foundational.

Like all institutions in our culture, the church is in a period of difficult transition. The tendency is to focus our energies on the institution, thinking that if we just get some type of organizational reform right then the church’s health will be restored. The early Methodists would point us in a different direction, though. Wesley once asked his preachers, “Why are we not more holy?” The answer he gave: “Chiefly because we are enthusiasts; looking for the end, without using the means.”

Leadership is a high calling, and it is a difficult calling. Those who are called to lead are also called to submit themselves to the kind of discipline that renders them worthy of being followed. If we want the church to be led well, we must press on in pursuit of those virtues that leadership requires.

 

Read more from Dr. Andrew C. Thompson here.

Andrew C. Thompson ~ The Word and the Spirit

“Whate’er his Spirit speaks in me, must with the written Word agree.”
~ Charles Wesley

Many of the more contentious arguments in the church today are over social issues. That has certainly been the case for the United Methodist Church — the church I call home. Nowhere have the UMC’s internal debates over such issues been on clearer display than during its recent General Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The General Conference is the representative body of the 13+ million-member UMC. It meets once every four years. General Conference equips the general church for ministry by ordering its life and funding its ministries. It is also the body within the church that has the authority to write or alter canon law, which for Methodists is held in our Book of Discipline. So at least theoretically, the General Conference can vote to change everything from the church’s doctrinal understanding of the Trinity to how a local congregation handles estate bequests (though in the case of core Christian doctrine the bar on any substantive change is much higher and more complicated than a simple majority vote).

Recent sessions of the General Conference have tended to be galvanized by debates around how to understand various expressions of human sexuality and sexual practice. Because of some specific language used in the Book of Discipline, the presenting issues are almost always related to either the definition of marriage or the qualification for candidates seeking ordination as a deacon or elder. The language preferred by left-leaning reformists in these debates centers around advocacy for “full inclusion.” It is a somewhat vague term that certainly implies changes to the church’s teaching on marriage and ordination but could also relate to any number of other issues.

The General Conference of 2016
Following the proceedings of the General Conference of May 2016 via live video stream, online news portals, and a variety of social media outlets, I was struck at a particular element of the public conversation that kept cropping up: partisan claims about the role of the Holy Spirit in the conference proceedings.

Pentecost Sunday did fall in the middle of the 10-day General Conference session, so a certain sensitivity to the work of the Spirit might have been expected. Yet there was an undercurrent of Spirit-language that went much beyond the understandable (and much-needed) prayer of invocation, Come, Holy Spirit, come.

The kind of language used about the Spirit by many people both serving as delegates to the General Conference and simply observing the proceedings was at once much more familiar and much more assertive. It ran along the lines of, “Get ready because the Spirit is about to do a new thing” or “the Holy Spirit would be able to work here if everyone would just get out of the way.”

Such statements were widespread, but they were nowhere as ubiquitous as on Twitter. Take this example:

tweet

A laudable piece of advice! Yet it also raises an important question: how would we know the voice of the Holy Spirit if we heard it?

I think a reasonable person evaluating particularly bold claims about the Spirit’s impending movement could be forgiven if he began to suspect that the assumptions and assertions about the Holy Spirit in such comments are actually just stand-ins for the commenter’s own agenda. Take this tweet, for example, where the defeat of a proposed procedural rule is equated with fear or hatred of the Holy Spirit:

tweet 2

Pneumatophobia — “fear of the Holy Spirit.” And that charge was leveled because the delegates chose not to adopt a particular procedural rule, of all things.

Delegates pray following the statement from Bishop Bruce R. Ough about sexuality and the church from the denomination's Council of Bishops on May 18 at the 2016 United Methodist General Conference in Portland, Ore. Photo by Maile Bradfield, UMNS
Delegates pray following the statement from Bishop Bruce R. Ough about sexuality and the church from the denomination’s Council of Bishops on May 18 at the 2016 United Methodist General Conference in Portland, Ore. Photo by Maile Bradfield, UMNS.

The one thing that these and similar comments share in common is that the people making them assume that the Spirit is in 100% agreement with them. No one says “the Holy Spirit is about to do a new thing” believing that what the Holy Spirit is getting ready to do will be at odds with that person’s own fondest wishes.

It might be a good exercise in prudence (and perhaps even an aide to ecclesiastical conversations) to reflect on how it is that we can discern the Spirit’s movement apart from, say, an individual’s heartfelt desire, or shifting cultural mores, or the movement of one’s own digestive system.

The Harmony of the Word and the Spirit
A central theological conviction throughout Christian history about the work of the Spirit is that God the Holy Spirit’s work is always tied to the work of God the Son as revealed in Scripture. That is, the Word and the Spirit always agree. It’s an affirmation which is grounded in Scripture itself, where Jesus Christ promises us that “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26).

Thus, the Spirit is always in harmony with the Word. This harmony exists in a double sense. There is, first, an eternal harmony within the inner life of God between the second and third persons of the Trinity. And secondly, there is a harmony between how the Word is revealed to us in Holy Scripture and what the ongoing work of the Spirit looks like in the world.

The Christian theological tradition after the end of the apostolic age has affirmed the harmony of Word and Spirit over the course of two millennia, dating back to the writing of Clement of Rome around the end of the 1st century A.D. Writing to the church in Corinth, Clement states, “Look carefully into the Scriptures, which are the true utterances of the Holy Spirit” (1 Clement 45:2). In Clement’s view, the authority of biblical revelation is absolutely tied to the Spirit’s inspiration of the text and ongoing illumination of the reader.

This view of the harmony between Word and Spirit extends through the church fathers and up to the time of the Reformation in the 16th century. The Reformation period’s greatest theologian, John Calvin, speaks of the way in which the Holy Spirit “inheres” in the truth of the Word of God as expressed in Scripture (Institutes, 1.9.3). Because of this, Calvin writes, “we ought zealously to apply ourselves both to read and to hearken to Scripture if indeed we want to receive any gain and benefit from the Spirit of God” (Institutes, 1.9.2).

We can also look to John Wesley, the evangelical theologian of the 18th century and founder of the Methodist movement. Wesley writes, “For though the Spirit is our principal leader, yet He is not our rule at all; the Scriptures are the rule whereby He leads us into all truth. Therefore…call the Spirit our ‘guide,’ which signifies an intelligent being, and the Scriptures our ‘rule,’ which signifies something used by an intelligent being, and all is plain and clear” (Letters, Telford edition, 2:117). While this affirmation may not equate exactly with Calvin’s sense of the Spirit inhering in the Word, it certainly posits the Spirit’s work as directing Christian believers toward God’s truth specifically as expressed in Scripture. In other words, the very purpose of the Spirit’s guiding work is to lead believers into Scriptural truth.

Given the uniformity of this witness about the relationship of Word and Spirit throughout the Christian tradition, the present tendency of Methodists to make extravagant claims about the Holy Spirit seems more than a little suspect. In John Wesley’s own terms, such claims would fall under the heading of “enthusiasm” — which in the 18th century was not a compliment. Enthusiasts are those who believe they have gifts or knowledge that they do not actually have, to the point that they become “a law unto themselves.”

Wesley was well aware of the true spiritual power that could accompany the Christian life. Yet he also believed that the Spirit who conveyed that power through God’s grace always acted in ways that could be understood, exactly because the Spirit’s work would conform to the witness of the Word. Wesley warns those who tend toward enthusiastic pretensions that they should keep in mind the way in which Word and Spirit define the Christian life together: “Trust not in visions or dreams, in sudden impressions or strong impulses of any kind. Remember, it is not by these you are to know what is ‘the will of God’ on any particular occasion, but by applying the plain Scriptural rule, with the help of experience and reason, and the ordinary assistance of the Spirit of God” (“The Nature of Enthusiasm,” ¶38).

The Spirit does not work apart from the Word, nor does it work in contradiction to the Word. Rather, the Word and the Spirit are always in harmony. By them we may know the will of God for us. So if we want to make claims about what the Spirit is doing or is about to do, we need only to look to the Word that is given to us in Holy Scripture — for there we will find the true character of the Spirit’s work revealed.

Andrew C. Thompson ~ Our Sort-Of Free Will: How Relationship with God Happens

I wake up on a Saturday morning. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out and flowers are in bloom. Should I go to the zoo and watch the animals, or would I rather work in my garden? Am I even free to decide?

Most people would say, “Yes, of course you are free to decide.” And I am. In fact, I’ve got more freedom than the freedom of choosing between the zoo and the garden. I could choose to do something else entirely. I could even choose to lie in bed all day with the curtains drawn—as wasteful as that might seem.

But what if the choice is on a different level entirely? How about if the choice is whether or not to love God? To believe in Jesus Christ?

Do we have the ability to choose our salvation?

That is a much trickier question. Christian theology has traditionally approached it by considering the character and abilities of the human will. At issue is whether our will is free, and if so, to what degree. You can think about this on a spectrum. On one pole is the view that the will is entirely constrained and unfree. This view is sometimes called predeterminism, and it is akin to the idea that we are all like marionette puppets dangling from a set of strings. Every action we take—even simple ones like whether to go to the zoo or work in the garden—is decided by a power beyond ourselves.

The opposite pole would be the position of radical free will. According to this view, human beings have complete moral autonomy with the ability to choose freely whatever they judge to be right. On the radical free will view, human beings can choose anything—including salvation. This view rests on the larger understanding there is really nothing in the human condition to prevent a person’s moral discernment and action. And that is as true from choosing the zoo on a Saturday morning to choosing salvation for all eternity.

Two primary factors affect how we understand the degree of freedom human beings enjoy. First, how do we understand God’s sovereignty over the world? Does God’s position as Lord of creation mean that his will controls everything? If not, to what extent does God allow freedom to his creatures, and how compatible is that freedom with God’s will?

The second factor has to do with the influence of sin upon the created order—and especially upon mankind. How constrained are we by the corrupting influence of sin? To what extent does sin impede the human ability to choose, to act, or to love?

The Work of Grace in a Calvinist View

In a Christian worldview, the questions about God’s sovereignty and human moral freedom must be engaged with reference to the nature and work of God’s grace.

John Calvin was one of the greatest Christian theologians ever to put pen to paper on the subject of the depravity of the will due to sin and the need for God’s grace. Calvin points to the words of Jesus Christ in John 8:34 (“Truly I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin”) and concludes, “We are all sinners by nature; therefore we are held under the yoke of sin. But if the whole man lies under the power of sin, surely it is necessary that the will, which is its chief seat, be restrained by the stoutest bonds” (Institutes 2.2.27).

For Calvin we do have some limited freedom of action even in the face of sin’s depravations (e.g., I really can choose between a trip to the zoo or a day in my garden). This is because all human beings are the beneficiaries of common grace, or what Calvin calls “the general grace of God” (Institutes 2.2.17). Common grace is what explains how we manage to build houses and learn Spanish, to train horses and do algebra.

Yet Calvin is unwilling to admit that our will—even regenerated by grace—has any real power to cooperate with the Holy Spirit at work within us. We have no ability (even a grace-enabled ability) to actively love God. Calvin rather insists that “believers act passively…seeing that capacity is supplied from heaven, that they may claim nothing at all for themselves” (Institutes 2.5.11). The technical term for this view is monergism, and it is characteristic of the Calvinist understanding of how God’s grace works.

The view Calvin holds about the powerlessness of the human will is a testament to both his view of God’s sovereignty and his understanding of the depravity of the human condition as a result of sin. He wants to reserve all of the glory of salvation for God alone. In the Reformed tradition, the view that grace works irresistibly and independently of human cooperation is considered to be necessary to preserve the majesty of God. This is part, though not all, of what is meant by predestination as Calvinists use that term. It isn’t the same thing as predeterminism, but it shares some significant characteristics with it.

The Work of Grace in a Wesleyan View

Is it possible, though, that there is a way to understand that God and God alone is the author of all salvation while retaining a role for meaningful human participation in God’s work?

There is, in fact, such a view. It is the view that God’s grace works to heal the human will to the point that a meaningful response to that grace is enabled. On this view, faith is made possible by grace and amounts to the response to that grace by a person whose capacity for relationship with God has been (and is being) restored. One figure who taught this view of a grace-empowered cooperation with grace was John Wesley.

For Wesley, a key passage is Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” How we understand the regeneration of the will is related to the meaning of the phrase, “it is God that work is in you, both to will and to do…” Those verbs “to will” and “to do” are, for Wesley, references to moral thought (or feeling) and the action that follows subsequently. As he puts it in the sermon, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” “‘to will’ may imply every good desire, ‘to do’ whatever results therefrom” (¶I.2).

Moreover, since it is God “that worketh in you” both for the motivation of the will and the action of the body, this means that God alone is responsible for “that energy which works in us every right disposition, and then furnishes us for every good work and work” (¶I.3) Wesley drives this point home with the language of breath that is so often connected to the work of the Holy Spirit: “God breathes into us every good desire, and brings every good desire to good effect” (¶I.2).

The significance of this dynamic view of God’s grace, as present and active at every stage of the moral life, cannot be overestimated. Whether we are responding in love to our neighbor or whether we are responding in love to God, it is the power of God’s grace that enables the thought, word, or action itself. This is not a free will so much as it is a regenerated will—and, of course, a regeneration that must be continually fueled by fresh infusions of grace.

Yet note the important difference in the way that regeneration is treated by Wesley (as opposed to Calvin). Just because God is at work in us, it does not follow that we are passive instruments of God’s will. God does not love himself through us; rather, God heals our hearts to the point that we can truly respond to God in love through a grace-empowered movement of our own wills. Wesley makes this point with reference to Scripture:

We know indeed that word of his to be absolutely true, ‘Without me ye can do nothing.’ But on the other hand we know, every believer can say, ‘I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me’ (¶III.5).

There is thus a certain dynamic always present in the Christian life—the knowledge that we are powerless to work absent God’s grace but powerful indeed to work when animated and guided by that grace.

In addition, Wesley argues that the presence of grace within one’s life multiplies with use. He uses a memorable aphorism to describe this aspect of the work of grace: “Stir up the spark of grace which is now in you, and he will give you more grace” (¶III.6). God’s grace burns like the coals of a campfire that has been tended for hours; it lies at the fire’s heart and is the force for combustion each time fuel is added anew. And when that fuel is added (or when the “spark of grace” is stirred), the power represented by that grace is grown and magnified. Loving God turns out to be a progressive experience whereby our communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit gains in depth and breadth over time. The relationship described here is the very essence of sanctification.

Interpreting the Biblical Witness

The Wesleyan view of the interaction of grace and the will offers an insightful interpretation of the Bible’s teaching on how grace works in human life. It also helps us to avoid two extreme positions mentioned earlier—both of which are fraught with problems. On the one hand, there is the position of predeterminism that would treat human beings as puppets on a string. Aside from simply disregarding the clear teaching of Scripture that human moral choices really do have meaning, the predeterministic view suffers from a fundamental flaw: it makes no room for the actual reality of love, which requires a relationship of two parties where one gives and the other receives (and vice versa). Puppeteers may enjoy performing with their puppets, but they don’t have true relationships with them.

While the Calvinist position of predestination does not go nearly so far as predeterminism, it suffers from a version of the same flaw. At its heart, predestination does not conceive of a meaningful part for human beings to play in their own salvation. If God’s grace acts unconditionally and irresistibly, then we are truly passive participants in the experience of salvation. That view of salvation contradicts the plain sense of Scripture at numerous points and also runs counter to lived experience. Where it comes closest to the errors of predeterminism is in its bizarre, one-direction view of love. God loves us, but we only love God in return insofar as God’s grace forces us to love. The problem, of course, is that love can never coerce or manipulate in this way. It must be freely given, freely received, and freely returned.

The other extreme position we charted earlier is the radical free will position, which holds to the view that we are the primary actors in salvation. Here the agency at work is just the opposite of that in predeterminism. We choose to believe, thereby obligating God to scribble our names down in the Book of Life. On this view, it is God that is passive while we bear sole responsibility for getting ourselves saved. It must be said that this view is one to which some Methodists have tended to fall prey throughout history, though it is every bit as out of step with biblical teaching as the Calvinist position. If both predeterminism and predestination fail to understand the character of grace as God’s love for us, then the radical free will position fails to understand the depths of depravity that sin leaves us in (with the corresponding need to be healed before we can grow into relationship with God). Ultimately faith is not a choice we make but rather a response to what God has done for us and in us.

Can I choose to either go to the zoo or stay at home to work in my garden? Sure I can. Can I choose to love God? I can respond in love to God, yes, but only after God has initiated a relationship with me first. “We love because he first loved us,” the Apostle John tells us (1 John 4:19). Grace is given freely to us by God; it heals us and thereby enables us to freely love God in return. Salvation is thus a relationship—a communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made possible by the triune God’s boundless love for us.

 

Andrew C. Thompson ~ A Pattern for Prayer (Holiday Archives)

Note from the Editor: This originally appeared on Wesleyan Accent in March 2015. Happy Labor Day!

What is the difference between praying and living a life of prayer?

Practically everyone prays now and then — even atheists, when they end up in foxholes. Offering an occasional prayer is much different than living a life of prayer, though. Biblical teaching suggests that a fully formed faith will express itself in a prayerful life. “Rejoice always,” the Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians, “pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” [1]

The practice of prayer was important in early Methodist spirituality and was encouraged by John Wesley. Wesley refers to faithful discipleship as “the Way of Prayer.” [2] About Paul’s counsel in 1 Thessalonians, Wesley says: “God’s command to ‘pray without ceasing’ is founded on the necessity we have of His grace to preserve the life of God in the soul, which can no more subsist one moment without it, than the body can without air.” [3]

So prayer is not only important; it is vital to all life!

It’s one thing to affirm the need for prayer, but it’s quite another to know what that looks like in practical life. We all follow routines and patterns in our lives — but few of us truly set those routines by our commitment to spiritual disciplines. We don’t live in a world very conducive to that sort of life, and it’s not clear that the church does a good job of teaching it.

So here I’d like to offer a pattern for prayer that can help any Christian begin to build a rhythm of prayer into daily life. For anyone who is only used to offering a brief grace before meals or a prayer at bedtime, this pattern offers a fuller approach to the life of prayer. On the other hand, this pattern is also basic enough that it can be incorporated into practically any one’s daily life. First take a look at the pattern itself, and then read on for an explanation about how to use it in your day-to-day life.

The Pattern of Daily Prayer

9:00 a.m.                                                                                                                                                        Pray for Self

New every morning is your love, great God of light,

and all day long you are working for good in the world.

Stir up in us a desire to serve you,

to live peacefully with our neighbors,

and to devote each day to your Son,

our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

12:00 noon                                                                                                                                                    Pray for Family

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name,

Thy kingdom come,

thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our trespasses

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever.

Amen.

3:00 p.m.                                                                                                                                                      Pray for Church

We give you thanks for this day, O Father in Heaven,

for our work and our rest, for our food and our fellowship.

Sanctify us through the grace of your Son,

our Lord Jesus Christ.

And direct us by your Holy Spirit,

to walk in the ways that lead to life,

to avoid all outward and inward sin,

and to glorify your name in all that we say and do. Amen.

Pattern of Daily Prayer: The How and Why

This pattern of daily prayer will allow you to punctuate your day with prayer to God. By pausing for just five minutes at three times each day, we can build a holy rhythm into our lives that draws us closer to God. As the Scripture says, “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you … Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” [4] John Wesley echoes this teaching where he tells us, “God hardly gives His Spirit even to those whom He has established in grace, if they do not pray for it on all occasions, not only once, but many times.” [5] It is no exaggeration to say that prayer is the beating heart of Christian discipleship.

The framework for this prayer pattern is Trinitarian. Jesus’ high priestly prayer to God the Father in John 17 includes prayer for himself, prayer for his disciples, and prayer for the whole church. So our own pattern here includes prayer for ourselves, prayer for our families (whether that be our own kin or our faith community), and prayer for the church universal.

We begin at 9 AM with a morning prayer that includes both adoration and petition. It exalts the love and providence of God, and it asks God to be at work in our lives throughout the day.[6] After we say this prayer, we offer up a prayer from our own hearts that includes our personal thanksgivings and humble requests.

Our midday prayer comes at 12 noon and begins with saying the Lord’s Prayer. This is the prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples, and it is the most precious prayer that we know. After we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we offer up a prayer from our hearts for our families. It is appropriate
to think of this prayer either as a prayer for our own blood kin or as a prayer for the church family to which we belong. Most days it will probably include both.

Our evening prayer follows at 3 PM and consists of a prayer to the Holy Trinity. This is a prayer that both gives thanks to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and also seeks the grace of God for our sanctification. After we offer up this prayer, we lift up a prayer from our hearts for the wider church — which will focus on those intercessions that we know are needed for that day.

Even when we add each written prayer to the personal prayer which will follow at 9 AM, 12 noon, and 3 PM, the daily rhythm will not take more than 5 minutes at each period. That means just 15 minutes in prayer — something which even the busiest among us can incorporate into our lives. The best practice would be to print out the prayer pattern and keep it somewhere that you will notice it throughout your day. Even after you learn the three written prayers by heart, you can use the printed copy as a visible reminder to pause and live up your heart in prayer to the God of love.

 

 

[1] 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18; NRSV.

[2] John Wesley, “The Means of Grace,” ¶III.1, in volume 1 of Sermons on Several Occasions (London: W. Strahan, 1746), 233

[3] Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Q.38.5 (Peterborough, UK: Epworth Press, 1952), 101.

[4] James 4:7-8a,10; NRSV.

[5] Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Q.38.5, 100.

[6] This prayer is adapted from the “Prayer of Thanksgiving” in the Order for Morning Praise and Prayer,United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: UMPH, 1989), 877.

Andrew C. Thompson ~ A Pattern for Prayer

What is the difference between praying and living a life of prayer?

Practically everyone prays now and then — even atheists, when they end up in foxholes. Offering an occasional prayer is much different than living a life of prayer, though. Biblical teaching suggests that a fully formed faith will express itself in a prayerful life. “Rejoice always,” the Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians, “pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” [1]

The practice of prayer was important in early Methodist spirituality and was encouraged by John Wesley. Wesley refers to faithful discipleship as “the Way of Prayer.” [2] About Paul’s counsel in 1 Thessalonians, Wesley says: “God’s command to ‘pray without ceasing’ is founded on the necessity we have of His grace to preserve the life of God in the soul, which can no more subsist one moment without it, than the body can without air.” [3]

So prayer is not only important; it is vital to all life!

It’s one thing to affirm the need for prayer, but it’s quite another to know what that looks like in practical life. We all follow routines and patterns in our lives — but few of us truly set those routines by our commitment to spiritual disciplines. We don’t live in a world very conducive to that sort of life, and it’s not clear that the church does a good job of teaching it.

So here I’d like to offer a pattern for prayer that can help any Christian begin to build a rhythm of prayer into daily life. For anyone who is only used to offering a brief grace before meals or a prayer at bedtime, this pattern offers a fuller approach to the life of prayer. On the other hand, this pattern is also basic enough that it can be incorporated into practically any one’s daily life. First take a look at the pattern itself, and then read on for an explanation about how to use it in your day-to-day life.

The Pattern of Daily Prayer

9:00 a.m.                                                                                                                                                        Pray for Self

New every morning is your love, great God of light,

and all day long you are working for good in the world.

Stir up in us a desire to serve you,

to live peacefully with our neighbors,

and to devote each day to your Son,

our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

12:00 noon                                                                                                                                                    Pray for Family

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name,

Thy kingdom come,

thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our trespasses

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever.

Amen.

3:00 p.m.                                                                                                                                                      Pray for Church

We give you thanks for this day, O Father in Heaven,

for our work and our rest, for our food and our fellowship.

Sanctify us through the grace of your Son,

our Lord Jesus Christ.

And direct us by your Holy Spirit,

to walk in the ways that lead to life,

to avoid all outward and inward sin,

and to glorify your name in all that we say and do. Amen.

Pattern of Daily Prayer: The How and Why

This pattern of daily prayer will allow you to punctuate your day with prayer to God. By pausing for just five minutes at three times each day, we can build a holy rhythm into our lives that draws us closer to God. As the Scripture says, “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you … Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” [4] John Wesley echoes this teaching where he tells us, “God hardly gives His Spirit even to those whom He has established in grace, if they do not pray for it on all occasions, not only once, but many times.” [5] It is no exaggeration to say that prayer is the beating heart of Christian discipleship.

The framework for this prayer pattern is Trinitarian. Jesus’ high priestly prayer to God the Father in John 17 includes prayer for himself, prayer for his disciples, and prayer for the whole church. So our own pattern here includes prayer for ourselves, prayer for our families (whether that be our own kin or our faith community), and prayer for the church universal.

We begin at 9 AM with a morning prayer that includes both adoration and petition. It exalts the love and providence of God, and it asks God to be at work in our lives throughout the day.[6] After we say this prayer, we offer up a prayer from our ownwesley quote hearts that includes our personal thanksgivings and humble requests.

Our midday prayer comes at 12 noon and begins with saying the Lord’s Prayer. This is the prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples, and it is the most precious prayer that we know. After we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we offer up a prayer from our hearts for our families. It is appropriate
to think of this prayer either as a prayer for our own blood kin or as a prayer for the church family to which we belong. Most days it will probably include both.

Our evening prayer follows at 3 PM and consists of a prayer to the Holy Trinity. This is a prayer that both gives thanks to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and also seeks the grace of God for our sanctification. After we offer up this prayer, we lift up a prayer from our hearts for the wider church — which will focus on those intercessions that we know are needed for that day.

Even when we add each written prayer to the personal prayer which will follow at 9 AM, 12 noon, and 3 PM, the daily rhythm will not take more than 5 minutes at each period. That means just 15 minutes in prayer — something which even the busiest among us can incorporate into our lives. The best practice would be to print out the prayer pattern and keep it somewhere that you will notice it throughout your day. Even after you learn the three written prayers by heart, you can use the printed copy as a visible reminder to pause and live up your heart in prayer to the God of love.

 

 

[1] 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18; NRSV.

[2] John Wesley, “The Means of Grace,” ¶III.1, in volume 1 of Sermons on Several Occasions (London: W. Strahan, 1746), 233

[3] Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Q.38.5 (Peterborough, UK: Epworth Press, 1952), 101.

[4] James 4:7-8a,10; NRSV.

[5] Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Q.38.5, 100.

[6] This prayer is adapted from the “Prayer of Thanksgiving” in the Order for Morning Praise and Prayer, United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: UMPH, 1989), 877.

Andrew C. Thompson ~ The Virtue of Pastoral Leadership

I returned recently from a trip to the beautiful hill country of north Alabama. While there I spent a day in conversation with Methodist clergy from there about leadership in the church.

The questions we were grappling with are important for the future of any church in the Methodist family: What does Wesleyan pastoral leadership look like? Is there even such a thing?

I’ve been pondering these questions for a few years, since I first taught a seminary course called, “Models of Wesleyan Pastoral Leadership.” The idea of Leadership Studies is, of course, very much in vogue right now. That’s true for many different fields of endeavor — business, higher education, government, athletics, and non-profit work. Within the Wesleyan tradition, writing about church leadership has been going strong for several years. In 1999, Lovett Weems wrote “Leadership in the Wesleyan Spirit,” which examined the leadership traits of John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and other early Methodists. Since then, books on church leadership written by self-conscious Wesleyans have proliferated: William Willimon’s “Calling and Character” (2000), Adam Hamilton’s “Leading Beyond the Walls” (2002), and Kenneth Carder & Laceye Warner’s “Grace to Lead” (2011), just to name a few.

So is there anything we could really identify as Wesleyan Pastoral Leadership? I think we can identify a leadership approach that is distinctively Wesleyan, even if not uniquely so.

Think about this issue from the standpoint of conventional approaches to ethics. Duty ethics is focused on doing the right thing or making right decisions — ethics from the standpoint of rules. Consequentialist ethics emphasizes reaching the right outcome or emphasizing decisions and actions that are focused on achieving the most desirable ends. Virtue ethics shifts the focus away from decisions and outcomes, and toward the person involved in decision-making. This approach is most interested in the character of the decision-maker, believing that the most important factor in good ethical decision-making and action is the person him or herself.

If we look back at the example of John Wesley and the early Methodist movement, we will find some expressions of each of these major ethical approaches. The approach that might leap out at us immediately would be duty ethics. The early Methodists were, after all, great lovers of rules. The General Rules established the baseline expectations for how every Methodist would live within a local society. Wesley himself set down rule guidelines for everything from the regulation of the bands to the expectations of his preachers. All of this evidence might suggest that perhaps Wesleyan understandings of pastoral leadership are most closely related to duty ethics (at least if we tie the Wesleyan tradition to its origins in the 18th century).

There is, however, some reason to consider the place of consequentialist ethics in the early Methodist movement as well. After all, early Methodism was highly adaptable. Many of the institutional structures that developed (the class meeting, the conference, etc.) emerged in the context of the revival as opposed to being planned in advance by anyone. And the reasons for many of the structures coming into being at all were to serve the needs of the revival — such as local society organization, the deployment of preachers, or the needs of the poor. These early Methodists were mostly interested in salvation, understood as the redemption of both bodies and souls. They made all sorts of decisions based on that overriding interest in the end of salvation. So perhaps we should think about Wesleyan leadership as more tied to a consequentialist approach to ethical decision-making and action.

Then there is the approach of virtue ethics. Were Wesley and other early Methodists interested in the subject of character formation?

It turns out that this is very much the case. The formation of virtues within the soul was a topic that John Wesley was deeply interested in. His early sermon, “The Circumcision of the Heart” (1733) is a meditation on the progress of sanctification towards Christian perfection with reference to the virtues of humility, faith, hope, and love. For Wesley, a Christian account of the virtues ultimately becomes a description of sanctification itself.

When he was addressing the preachers under his authority in the Large Minutes, Wesley counseled them to emphasize the kind of habits in their daily lives that would build them up in the right way. Of course, they were to engage in the daily acts of ministry — “preaching and visiting from house to house.” But they were also to take time for spiritual disciplines, as he put it, “in reading, meditation, and prayer.” He understood that a good minister had to be truly good inwardly.

The similarity between the virtues and sanctification becomes especially clear when we grasp the connection between holiness and happiness. Holiness is a synonym for sanctification, which in the Wesleyan sense is seen as that state whereby our character comes to be defined by holy love. Happiness is a virtue concept — it is the eudaimonia of Aristotle, which is best described as that condition whereby human life is flourishing at an optimum level. For Wesley to link the two together — as he does explicitly — is to suggest that we only find true happiness when our lives have become marked by the holy virtues of faith, hope, and love.

There are some evidences of leadership via the approaches of duty ethics and consequentialist ethics in early Methodism. Those approaches were only ever utilized in an ad hoc way, though. What really counted for Wesley and other early Methodists was the formation of character in a leader, and right character can only come about through the kind of disciplined practice that leads to a virtuous life. A sanctified life. For leadership, a rightly formed character is what is truly foundational.

Like all institutions in our culture, the church is in a period of difficult transition. The tendency is to focus our energies on the institution, thinking that if we just get some type of organizational reform right then the church’s health will be restored. The early Methodists would point us in a different direction, though. Wesley once asked his preachers, “Why are we not more holy?” The answer he gave: “Chiefly because we are enthusiasts; looking for the end, without using the means.”

Leadership is a high calling, and it is a difficult calling. Those who are called to lead are also called to submit themselves to the kind of discipline that renders them worthy of being followed. If we want the church to be led well, we must press on in pursuit of those virtues that leadership requires.

Andrew C. Thompson ~ Making Disciples in the Wesleyan Way

The church today puts a lot of focus on the need to make disciples of Jesus Christ. But do we take seriously what that work requires of us?

I’m not so sure. I am very sure, on the other hand, that we’re living in a culture that does us no favors when we even begin to approach the work of disciple-making.

Think about it. In the West, we live in a world where most things we want are within reach. We’re not good at delayed gratification. We think we have a right to gratify every felt need we have. We don’t like to suffer.

Discipline isn’t easy. That’s particularly the case when we’re talking about a discipline beyond what it takes to make it to work on time, get through the day, keep the kids fed, and pay the mortgage.

So what about the discipline required to become a disciple?

We’d like it to take about as long (and require about as much suffering) as it takes to warm up a HotPocket in the microwave. And that’s a problem.

We find the command to make disciples in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20. It’s one of the best known teachings of Jesus. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” Jesus says. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (RSV).

It’s the mission statement for the whole Christian church! It couldn’t be clearer what Christ Jesus wants his followers to be busy doing.

So how do we do it?

I want to ignore the cultural challenges we face in disciple-making for a minute and instead turn to the deep spirituality around faith formation in the Wesleyan tradition. I believe the latter offers a wonderful context for how to understand disciple-making.

Disciples are not made overnight, in truth. They’re made through a process of formation that takes a great deal of time and dedication. Here are four Wesleyan commitments that can help us think about that process—

1. Being comes before Doing

John Wesley explains in “The Character of a Methodist” what he thinks is distinctive about Methodist identity. He says that it has nothing to do with different opinions or customs about things that don’t strike at the heart of the Christian faith.

So what is a Methodist, then? Wesley says, “I answer: a Methodist is one who has ‘the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost given unto him’; one who ‘loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind, and with all his strength’. God is the joy of his heart, and the desire of his soul, which is constantly crying out, ‘Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee!’ My God and my all! Thou art the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever!” (¶5).

In other words, becoming a disciple is first about receiving new birth by the Holy Spirit. It is about being filled with the love of Christ—knowing that because of Christ you have been adopted into the family of God. It’s about receiving God’s saving grace and knowing yourself as forgiven. Discipleship is about being before it is about doing.

2. Holiness always moves from heart to life

Wesley’s favorite phrase to describe the life of sanctification is “holiness of heart and life.” There’s a lot wrapped up in those five words. We are made holy by grace, and this happens to us through an inward renewal of the heart. When that renewal begins, though, the experience is going to radiate outward into every aspect of our lives.

So “holiness of heart and life” is a kind of shorthand for describing a type of discipleship that is authentic and real just because it has taken root within us and then begun to express itself in our daily living.

In his sermon, “Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, IV,” Wesley describes the heart-to-life rhythm this way: “Love cannot be hid any more than light; and least of all when it shines forth in action, when ye exercise yourselves in the labour of love, in beneficence of every kind” (¶II.2). So there is a deep inward spirituality to true holiness, but that spirituality is ultimately directed outwardly through active form of discipleship. That’s also the logic of what it means to love both God and neighbor!

3. Trust that God’s grace will be found in the means that God provides

For Wesley, the practices that he calls the means of grace lie at the heart of practical Christian living. He calls the primary means of grace “instituted” because he sees them as instituted by Jesus Christ in the gospels. Prayer, Searching the Scriptures, Fasting, the Lord’s Supper, and Christian fellowship are given to us by Christ through his teaching and personal example. Thus, we can expect that Christ will meet us in them when we practice them faithfully in our own lives as well.

If we take Wesley’s counsel about the importance of the means of grace seriously, we will begin to see how revolutionary Wesleyan spirituality really is. He believes that the means of grace should be the defining pattern of daily life for a Christian believer. Not our consumer choices, not our workaday jobs, and not our entertainment or extracurricular preferences—rather, it is the daily and disciplined use of the means of grace that are the characteristic mark of the Christian life. If this sounds difficult or even dreary, then it is only because we are so tied to consumerist materialism that we have a hard time imagining another way to live.

For Wesley’s part, he believed that the transformation we can experience by grace gives us the only real happiness we can know in this world. In the sermon, “The Important Question,” Wesley says that the “fruits of love” we experience through our use of the means of grace within a community of other Christians “are means of increasing the love from which they spring; and of consequence they increase our happiness in the same proportion” (¶III.4).

4. Practices of Piety are intimately linked to Practices of Mercy

The instituted means of grace are what Wesley elsewhere calls “works of piety.” They are practices of worship and devotion. But there are other practices that Christians engage in. These are the “works of mercy” that Jesus points us toward when he speaks of finding him in the context of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and showing hospitality to the stranger (Matthew 25:31-40). When we pursue this work of compassion and justice, we find that the works of mercy, too, are true means of grace.

In Wesley’s teaching, piety and mercy go hand-in-hand. “But what are the steps which the Scripture directs us to take, in the working out of our own salvation?” Wesley asks in the sermon, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation.” We should always “be zealous of good works, of works of piety, as well as works of mercy,” he says (¶II.4). Wesley does not believe authentic discipleship can ever exclude one or the other. Indeed, he seems to believe that they mutually reinforce one another: our practices of devotion and worship ready us for works of mercy, while actively pursuing compassion and justice in the world reveal to us the deep need for a life of piety.

These four Wesleyan commitments for disciple-making may not sound like good news to the person who is enthralled with the easy-as-you-please culture of our present day. It may just give us the right insight into what it really takes to make a disciple of Jesus Christ, though.

Discipleship is not about techniques and gimmicks. It doesn’t happen HotPocket-quick. It is about being formed in a way of life over the course of time, and with a deep immersion into the practices of the Christian faith. We’ll find transformation in that process, too, and it will reveal within us something we’d never dream of otherwise.

Andrew C. Thompson – The Power of Forgiveness

 

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

That’s Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. It explains how birds fly and fish swim. Jump on a trampoline and you’ll experience the third law firsthand: You force the bounce mat down, and it springs back to throw you up into the air.

Newton’s law applies to actions and reactions in the physical world. But we can also see a similar law in human relationships. When you act emotionally towards someone else, he or she will always react back toward you.

Offer love to another, and you expect to receive that love back again. But lash out in anger, and the response will be different. Just as with Newton’s law, the character of the emotional reaction is determined by the initial act itself.

This isn’t so much the law of motion as it is the law of the heart. We’re made with it stitched into our souls. Human relationships work on an action-reaction dynamic. So wouldn’t it be great if we always acted out of love? And wouldn’t life be simpler if our loving acts were always interpreted as we meant them to be?

Unfortunately, the analogy between the law of motion and the law of the heart does have a limit. A bird’s wings beating against the air or a body’s weight on a trampoline are impersonal forces. There is no moral quality to motion.

Human relationships are very different. With us, the impersonal becomes very personal! Every one of our relationships has a moral character to it. We don’t, in fact, always act as we should. Even when we do, our actions and attitudes are not always interpreted as we mean them to be. The sinful and broken reality of life intrudes on every relationship we have.

Instead of love, we act in anger. Rather than gratitude, we experience greed. Given the opportunity to show compassion, we show cruelty instead. The clarity we wish existed in person-to-person interactions is missing; in its place we find the fuzziness of mistaken intentions and plain misunderstandings.

The law of the heart—as it turns out—is more like the law of the broken heart. The presence of sin within us ends up affecting our interactions at every level—a vicious cycle of hurt and revenge. Husbands and wives experience it in marriage. It thrives both in the workplace and the marketplace. Politics is rife with it. It’s the reason wars are fought in every age.

We don’t have to be convinced that love should be met with love, and anger with anger. We just don’t seem to know how to choose love consistently. Sometimes we don’t even know how to interpret love when it comes our way. We act out of anger and hate and resentment, and we react in those ways when others provoke us. Thus do we feed a monster whose appetite is endless.

From Revenge to Forgiveness

Our dilemma is that we ought to act and react in love, and instead we find ourselves doing the contrary. The Christian faith has a solution to the cycle of hurt and revenge, though, and it lies at the heart of the gospel. That solution is found in forgiveness.

We first must realize that there’s nothing natural about forgiveness. To practice it, we have to react to others in ways that are not equal and opposite to the actions upon us. “Where there is hatred, let me sow love,” the Prayer of Saint Francis puts it, and this is exactly the counterintuitive commitment that forgiveness requires. It’s so difficult that we cannot do it on our own.

The need for forgiveness to be at the center of human relationships is proven by the fact that forgiveness was at the very center of Jesus Christ’s ministry. He came into the world claiming the power to forgive sins. It was this very act that caused the religious authorities to oppose him saying, “It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7).

We see in the crucifixion how the Son of Man who came to forgive sins finally becomes the agent of forgiveness through his own body. His sacrifice upon the cross mediates God’s forgiveness to the whole world. As the Apostle Paul puts it to the Corinthians, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). We are all called to receive Christ’s forgiveness, which we come to know through a sure trust and confidence in him and the power of his atonement for our sin.

Learning to forgive is the only path to truly loving relationships with others. And Jesus shows us that to acquire the forgiving heart that can allow us to forgive each and everyday, we must first come to know what it means to be forgiven.

Forgiveness and Sanctification

We are reconciled to God when we receive forgiveness in Christ. That is a monumental spiritual experience! But we haven’t fully overcome our problem just by being forgiven. We need both pardon for sin and the power to overcome its corrupting effects as we move forward in our lives. Without the power added to the pardon, I could hear the message of the cross with joy aplenty as it pertains to God’s forgiveness of me, while going right ahead and dealing out vengeance on all those I think have wronged me.

So where can any of us find that power?

John Wesley’s account of how the power of forgiveness is conveyed into the lives of believers is helpful on this point. Indeed, Wesley’s view on the power of forgiveness is full of deep spiritual insight—especially as it is related to the way that forgiveness can transform us inwardly. Take for example the oft-repeated story of Wesley’s experience on Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738. Sometimes we can sentimentalize Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed” and confine its importance it to a moment of his personal spiritual journey. But Wesley’s narration of the Aldersgate story in his Journal makes a statement about the profound importance of forgiveness within the experience of salvation for all of us. Here’s how he describes what happened to him that evening:

“I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Wesley is sharing one of the primary convictions of evangelical Christianity in this testimony: God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ is meant to be received personally by every child of God. This is what it means to know God as Father, and it is the way we are adopted into God’s family. The reconciliation we find in forgiveness is such a dramatic experience that it gives us new birth.

In Wesley’s view, though, the power of forgiveness extends event beyond the great moment of our reconciliation to God. Forgiveness is a part of our ongoing spiritual growth as well. To be redeemed—fully redeemed—means to be transformed by the love of God. So when the Apostle Paul writes to the Colossians that Christ Jesus is the one “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:14), Wesley writes in his New Testament commentary, “Forgiveness is the beginning of redemption, as the resurrection is the completion of it.” He links the pardon of the cross with the power of the resurrection, not wanting us to diminish any part of the fullness of redemption.

On the other hand, Wesley also understands that forgiveness continues to work in us as a special kind of power, forming the very Christian virtues that will nurture a forgiving heart. Later in Colossians, Paul says we should embrace compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience—and finally love. And in the midst of that counsel, Paul emphasizes the need for Christians to forgive one another. “Just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you forgive” (Col 3:13), he writes. Wesley adds in his NT commentary that those who have been renewed by Christ’s forgiveness are none other than the elect of God, writing, “Holiness is the consequence of their election, and God’s superior love, of their holiness.” So forgiveness begins a renewal—a healing—in the soul. And the character of that renewal is a soul filled with God’s love. This is what it means to be made complete, as Wesley points out using the New Testament’s language of perfection: “The love of God contains the whole of Christian perfection, and connects all the parts of it together.”

The power of forgiveness is rooted in the fact that it is an act of God’s love. So forgiveness cancels our sin and then begins to heal us of that sin entirely, all the while enabling us to begin forgiving others.

Forgiveness, in this sense, is the very rhythm of redemption. Our redemption and the redemption of all our relationships.

“We love him because he first loved us,” Wesley tells us in the sermon, “On Family Religion.” That love is, fundamentally, the “love of a pardoning God.” It’s a love that “may admit of a thousand degrees” (for not all of us are at the same place in our journey). But it always makes us thankful for Christ’s gift to us and compassionate toward all those others for whom Christ died. “Gratitude to our Creator will surely produce benevolence to our fellow-creatures,” Wesley tells us. “If we love him, we cannot but love one another, as Christ loved us.” Then he goes on: “And toward all the children of God we put on ‘bowels of kindness, gentleness, long-suffering, forgiving one another’…‘even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven us’.” We learn to forgive in love, because the loving forgiveness we have received makes us into new creatures.

Whereas life in the world makes us react to others with a hard and self-centered temper, the forgiveness we receive through Christ teaches us a better way. Knowing mercy, we are made merciful. Having been forgiven, we learn to forgive. And then we are welcomed into the company of Jesus’ true friends, where we commence “steadily walking in all his ways, [and] doing his will from the heart.” This is the power of forgiveness—the power that will save us and the power that will ultimately transform this world.