Wesley's Sermon 14: The Repentance of Believers

[This is part of the Getting to Know John series on John Wesley's Sermons. Click here to see the other posts.] Apparently in Wesley's day there were a lot of Christians who believed that once a person repented of their sin and came to faith in Christ, that their sin was completely wiped out and they would not ever need to repent again. Brother John provides a pretty convincing argument otherwise, pointing out a pretty thorough list of things that still rear their ugly heads even after we're assured that we are God's children; pride, self-will, idolatry, love of the world, desire to be praised by people, jealousy, envy, lust, selfishness, and helplessness are just some of the things he uses to make his point.

Then, after this long list of remaining effects of our sin and pointing out how utterly powerless we are to do anything about them, he makes that case that God can rid our lives of them, God wants to do so, and God wants to do it right now. 

I really like Paul Chilcote's closing paragraph in his prayer based on this sermon in [amazon_link id="0835809501" target="_blank" ]Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit[/amazon_link]:

When you accepted me as a part of your family through Christ, I felt as though I was born again. The change in my life was amazing. But I need to experience your life-changing love over and over again in order to grow into the fulness of your love. Amen.

Download and read my ePub file of the original text of the sermon by clicking here.

Or, just check out my outline of the sermon.

And a great Wesleyan hymn to go along with it:

Depth of Mercy Charles Wesley, 1740

Depth of mercy! Can there be mercy still reserved for me? Can my God his wrath forbear, me, the chief of sinners, spare?

I have long withstood his grace, long provoked him to his face, would not hearken to his calls, grieved him by a thousand falls.

I my Master have denied, I afresh have crucified, oft profaned his hallowed name, put him to an open shame.

There for me the Savior stands, shows his wounds and spreads his hands. God is love! I know, I feel; Jesus weeps and loves me still.

Now incline me to repent, let me now my sins lament, now my foul revolt deplore, weep, believe, and sin no more.

Getting to Know John

Theology scholar Paul Chilcote says that he's always believed that if people would read John Wesley's sermons, many lives would be changed, and I'm convinced that he's right. I've been a Methodist my entire life, but it was when I had a theology class where I finally had to John Wesley's sermons that my admiration for him and confidence in the reliability of my faith heritage began to increase dramatically. Therefore, in an effort to continue to get to know Mr. Wesley better myself and hopefully help some other people to do so, I'm beginning a series of posts on his sermons. The problem is that sermons in England in the 18th century don't have much in common with sermons today. There are absolutely no jokes. They're long. And the overwhelming consensus is that they're not very entertaining. (They're seriously boring unless you happen to enjoy reading old boring stuff, then they're great!) But the guidance contained in them is so good that we need to find some ways to get past these obstacles.

Chilcote has done a great job of this in his book, [amazon_link id="0835809501" target="_blank" ]Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit[/amazon_link], which takes each of Wesley's Standard Sermons and turns them into short prayers. This book is a great way to get better acquainted with what he believed and taught.

I also thought I'd throw my own hat in the ring and make my own attempt at making his sermons more accessible to us today. Wesley had many sermons, but 52 of them were designated the Standard Sermons, which served as the doctrinal standards for the early Methodists and continue to provide the basis for United Methodist theology today (well, at least they're supposed to). Since there are 52 of these, it's easy to work with one each week of the year, and because this is the 14th week of the year, I'll begin the series this week in the following post with Sermon 14: The Repentance of Believers.

Wesley's sermons are more like logical arguments than we're used to in sermons today. A positive aspect of that is that it makes them really easy to outline. (He usually says the points he's going to make in an introduction, then writes the rest of the sermon with numbered paragraphs.) So while I find it difficult to just sit and read through one of his sermons, if I can find the point of each numbered paragraph, I can really get into them.

So... here's what I'll do with each sermon:

  • I'll create and post an ePub file of the original sermon, which can be read in iBooks on iPhones, iPads, iPods, and maybe iSomeOtherStuff... and a host of other e-reading devices.
  • Since Wesley's sermons lend themselves so easily to being outlined, I'll post my own outline of the sermon in the blog post. If you're not up for reading the entire thing on the ePub file, the outline will help you get his point.
  • I'll also (hopefully) post a Wesleyan hymn whose text applies to the sermon.

And here are the sermons that are posted so far:

Relaunched

Since this is something of a relaunch for the SalvationLife blog, here in its speedy new Wordpress home, I'm pulling a link out of the archives of the first blog post I made: Get the Hell Out of... Us. Because of the controversy around Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins, the word "hell" is getting a lot of attention in Christian circles today, and I just figure as long as people are probably searching the internet for it right now, I might as well throw it into my own blog a few more times. What the h...

I haven't read Love Wins yet, but from reviews theologians I trust (like Scot McKnight), I can gather that part of Bell's point is the same point I tried to make in Get the Hell Out of... Us, which is to note that as much as people in churches have tended to talk about who gets in to heaven and who doesn't, Jesus spent very little time on the subject. His message was much more focused on how we can change our direction and enter into his Father's kingdom today.

How to Never Reach Retirement (and why that's a good thing)

[This is one of the posts telling a story from the life of my Dad. Click here to see the others.] When my Dad turned 65, I remember asking him, "So, are you going to retire?" I knew what was coming, but he said it even better than I was hoping.

"Retire? I can't think of anything I want to do less than retire."

I had no doubt something like that would be his answer, not only because I knew him well, but because I knew retirement wasn't anywhere in his genes. I watched his father work until he died at age 84, and that was the norm for him.  "I guess I can't think of anyone in my family who ever retired," he said.

We get bombarded with advertisements telling us that we're not saving enough for retirement, and I'm enough of a student of Dave Ramsey to know that habits like saving money in retirement accounts, living on less than we make, and not depending on the government to provide for us in our later years are essential to our own well being and that of our families and society. But those things usually aren't the point of the ads. Rather, they seem to want to send us into a panic so that we'll work longer hours, invest more money in their firm, and be able to retire at an early age to... do what?

Rather than following the ads' advice to work like the dickens now so that I'll be able to quit working early and finally enjoy my life, I'd greatly prefer to take my Dad's approach: Find a lifestyle now which I love, and of which my work is a natural part, so that what I do now and what I dream of doing as doing whatever I want are the exact same thing.

Welcome to Lent!

"How will I find ways to return to God with all my heart?" Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, the period of preparation for our remembrance of Christ's death and celebration of his resurrection on Easter. The question above is what Ruth Haley Barton says is the real question of Lent, rather than a surface-level, "What did you give up?"

I've found that the more fully we can enter into traditional Christian practices such as observing Lent, and do so with their context and meaning in mind, the richer times they are for all of us. Ruth does a great job of setting the stage for us in her post today, "Lent: An Invitation to Return to God." Lent will be off to a solid start for anyone who can read and reflect on what she says there, and hopefully also participate in an Ash Wednesday observance somewhere today.

And by the way, if you're giving up something for Lent, good. Do it in the frame of mind described by Ruth in her article. Do not take the approach one of my friends took several years ago of doing something that actually ends up being harmful to those around you: my friend gave up breath mints! Please, for the love of God and all of the rest of us, find an option that reconnects you to God and also keeps your breath fresh.

To read Ruth's post, click the link above or go here.

Why You Should Waste Some Time Today

[This is one of the posts telling a story from the life of my Dad. Click here to see the others.] When I graduated from high school, I had the idea that it would be fun for the my Dad and me to make the six-hour drive to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and go to a Texas Rangers baseball game together. Their new ballpark had just opened and he’d never been to a big league game, so we went. He and I drove there in his pickup the day of the game, watched it, stayed the night in a hotel, drove back the next day, and I don’t think we said more than 150 words on the whole trip. And for the rest of his life we still mentioned how much we enjoyed it!

You are likely not as quiet as my Dad and I, but I think you can understand something of this aspect of a relationship between people. There comes a point in getting to know someone when you can enjoy just being together rather than having to get acquainted through small talk and other conversation. Sure, words are still fine and are often used, but there is also a trust and comfort that is uniquely expressed without them.

Brennan Manning says, “Simply showing up is a kind of loving. The readiness to conscientiously waste time with a friend is a silent affirmation of their importance in our lives.”(1) That is a great description of one way of praying (without words): “conscientiously wasting time with a friend to affirm their importance in our lives.”

I had been a Christian for quite a while before I ever realized the truth of this in my relationship with God. It occurred to me, “If I cannot enjoy just being with God, without having to fill the time with words or other things, what does that say about how close we are? How can I even really describe it as a relationship, much less an ‘intimate personal relationship’ like we often say, if I will so easily come up with any tool or excuse available to avoid just being with God?”

Dallas Willard describes this bluntly. He says, “Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life. It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world and leave only us and God. And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to ‘just us and God’? Think of what it says about the emptiness of our inner lives if we must always turn on the tape player or radio to make sure something is happening around us.”(2)

Enjoying being with God without having to use words is such an important part of the spiritual life, because it is during this time when that “something between just me and God” is given a chance to grow and develop. It is the time when what we so often call a relationship with God can come to consist of the two of us actually enjoying being together.

Albert Haase recounts a great story of a 19th century parish priest in France. One of the first things the priest noticed after coming to town was a certain villager who never passed the church without entering. He would enter the church in the morning on the way to work and again on his return home in the evening, leaving his pickaxe at the door. The priest also noticed that the villager never prayed with rosary beads or a prayer book, so he once asked the man what he said to God during his long visits in the church. The man answered, “Oh, I don’t say anything to God... I look at God and God looks at me.”(3)

I want to know God in that kind of way.

(1) Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus, p. 205.(2) Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 163.(3) Albert Haase, Coming Home to Your True Self, pp. 88-89.

Book Review: A Pocket Guide to Prayer by Steve Harper

 

A very meaningful practice for me over the past year and a half has been fixed-hour prayer (which is called by different names in different traditions, such as the daily office or praying the hours). I had been part of communities who practiced fixed-hour prayer together in the past, and really enjoyed it even though I didn't have any idea what we were doing. My real introduction to the practice came as part of my participation in the Transforming Community with Ruth Haley Barton.

For thousands of years, seekers of God have shared in the practice of praying at particular times of the day, as described in Psalm 55:17: "Evening, morning, and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice." (Also see other passages such as Psalm 119:164, Daniel 6:10, Acts 3:1, and Acts 10:9). This rhythm of prayer was central in the practice of ancient Judaism, which means it is almost certainly a way of praying practiced by Jesus and his earliest disciples.

Although many evangelical Christians today are as unfamiliar with the practice as I was for so long, thankfully there are very helpful resources available to help us rediscover it today, so that we too can share together in the sacred rhythm and words of prayer with an innumerable community of God's people through the centuries, even including Christ himself.

A recent addition to these resources, and perhaps one of the most accessible, is A Pocket Guide to Prayer by Steve Harper.

In a very small volume, Harper provides a guide to prayer for five times of the day: upon awakening, morning, noontime, evening, and at bedtime, and the guide provides readings for one month. As is universal in these Christian guides to fixed-hour prayer, the person praying will be led through praying the Psalms, the Lord's Prayer, times of silence, and a reflective reading of the scriptures. This manual also includes the texts of hymns and readings of classic Christian literature for each day of the month.

The book's organization is simple and very usable, but the most helpful thing about it is its size. I'll admit that I have larger than average hands, but this should help you get an understanding of how very "totable" the book is:

Perhaps the most widely used contemporary guide to fixed-hour prayer is the excellent Divine Hours series by Phyllis Tickle. I used these for my first year of this practice, before settling into the Book of Common Prayer this year. As great as the Divine Hours manuals are, their disadvantage is their size. I've put Harper's Pocket Guide next to one of the three volumes of Divine Hours required to get through a year:

It can be a powerful thing for us to incorporate this way of regular praying into our lives, particularly when we realize the community of folks around the world in our own day and through centuries past who have prayed the same words, at the same times, in the same ways. If you are interested in exploring fixed-hour prayer for the first time, or if you have practiced it for years but could use a more mobile guide, this little book is a great resource for us.

(And if you would like to learn more of the history and context of this way of praying, read Praying With the Church by Scot McKnight, which was part of our reading in the Transforming Community. The TC introduced me to the practice; McKnight's book led me to love it and make it a central part of how I seek to grow my friendship with God.)