July 12, 2015
Ephesians 2:1-10
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WESLEY
4. The Door to True Religion
Preface to the Word
The sermons this summer are focused on the core beliefs of Methodist Christians. It’s important
for those of us who worship and live as United Methodist Christians to know what we presume
to be ultimately important and true to being a Christian, especially in these days and times.
We’re not arrogant about our beliefs. We don’t claim to have the only truth and that anyone who
disagrees with us will go to hell. But on the other hand, we have had a unique and powerful
understanding of the Gospel, which has transformed the lives of individuals and communities
around the world for the last 250 years or so, and still has that potential today.
I want to thank those of you have told me that you are enjoying this series of sermons. Some of
you have said that you have been Methodists for years and yet have never heard about the
“Scripture way of salvation” that John Wesley taught and preached. In case you haven’t heard of
him before, John Wesley was a priest in the Church of England and a professor at Lincoln
College of Oxford in the 1700’s, and through his scholarly work, keen insight, dramatic personal
experiences, effective preaching, and skilled organizing found himself as the leader of a spiritual
revolution that became known as Methodism.
Like any of us, Wesley was a product of his time. In the previous 200 years, people had been
pulled every which way, both religiously and politically. The Church of England split from the
Roman Catholic Church over King Henry VIII’s determination to divorce Queen Catherine of
Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. But the religious landscape kept switching back and forth as
new monarchs took the throne, some supporting the Roman Church and some the Church of
England. It went way beyond arguing and debating religion. There were religious wars,
persecutions, purges and strife. Then Lutheranism came along, followed by the teachings of John
Calvin. Add to the mix John Newton and the emerging age of science, and you can see that there
were many truths battling for the hearts and minds of the people. Weary of conflict and
controversy, the Anglican Church began looking for the common ground – called via media, or
“the middle way.” John Wesley, being an Anglican priest, also took this approach and could see
truth in all of these institutions. The practical theology he developed borrowed heavily from his
Anglican Church, as well as Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation, and science.
But his primary reference point was the Bible, which provided the essential ingredients for his
“Scripture way of salvation.” There he found that humans were originally created in the image
of God in terms of having free will, dominion over the creatures of the earth, and the capacity for
love, justice, mercy, truth and purity. But the image of God in us got corrupted early on and our
relationship with God is broken. Spiritually speaking, humanity as a whole is wounded and
diseased, constantly missing the mark of loving God with heart, mind and soul and loving our
neighbor as ourselves.
But still God loves us, showering us with mercy and love, seeking us before we ever begin
seeking God.
So last week we talked about God’s grace, beginning with prevenient grace – the grace that
“comes before…” before we know it, before we care about it, before we respond to it. God’s
universal grace creates in us our first awareness of God’s love and God’s will. It works to help
us realize how distant we are from God and how we keep missing the mark of loving God and
neighbor. It stimulates our first wish to please God.
God’s prevenient grace endeavors to bring us to repentance…the point of recognizing our
wayward nature and our need for God. Wesley called it true self-understanding and
metaphorically described it as the “porch” of religion. God’s gracious presence in our lives
works to lead us to the porch of salvation… but to step through what Wesley called the “door of
true religion” needs something more.
Today we need to talk about that “something more,” which is also grace and is called justifying
grace. The best description of justifying grace in the Bible is found in Ephesians 2:1-10, which
we’ll have read to us now. As the lesson is read, listen for what changes in our relationship with
God and how that change happens.
Scripture Reading: Ephesians 2:1-10
Sermon
I.
God’s Part in Justifying Grace
A. There’s a story about a man who came home from work one night feeling pretty sorry for
himself. Nothing had gone right at the office. It was one of those days when there seemed to
be one hassle after another. When we arrived home he could tell by the look on his wife’s
face that she had probably had the same kind of day. Before she could say anything, he said,
“I don’t know what your day has been like or what you’re going to tell me, but if it’s bad
news, please keep it to yourself. I’ve had all the bad news I can take for one day.”
She looked at him for a moment and then said, “Well, maybe it’s good news. You know we
have three wonderful children, right?” “That’s right,” she said. Then the wife said, “You’ll
be glad to know that two of them did not break an arm today!”
B. Good news or bad news is sometimes a matter of perspective. The bad news concerning
humanity is that we all miss the mark of God’s intentions for us and we seem incapable of
doing so on our own. But the good news is that God is gracious, and while we may deserve
to be written off by God, God provides us a way to be at peace with God.
God delivers us. We are saved by grace.
C. Now all of this is God’s doing through Jesus. “Justification” is the word the church uses to
describe what God does freely for us through grace. It is a term that comes from the law
courts and is based on the imagery of being on trial before God. The Greek word translated
into English as “to justify” is diakioun. All Greek verbs that end in –oun do not mean to
make someone something, but to treat or reckon someone as something. The point of God’s
relationship with us is this – when we appear before God we are anything but innocent. In
fact, we are utterly guilty. But God treats us or reckons us as if we are innocent. This is
what justification means.
D. It’s all possible because of what God worked out on our behalf through Jesus – not just
through his death on a cross, but his life and teachings as well. Jesus has made possible our
at-one-ment with God. Great Christian thinkers, including the Apostle Paul and others,
developed theories about how Jesus’ crucifixion made it possible for us to be reconciled to
God. As I’ve mentioned before, there is more than one way Christians have understood and
explained the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross. They are called the theories of
atonement. But Methodism has not been stuck on any one theory. What we’ve focused on as
a matter of core doctrine is simply that Jesus’ life, teachings and death have created a bridge
between humanity and God, where before there was a gulf. How exactly that happened is
ultimately a mystery. But that it has happened is ultimately true.
E. Though justification is a metaphor of the law court, we can’t really understand the grace of
God justifying us unless we see our sinfulness not so much as a crime against the law of God
but as a crime against God’s love. To be sure, we sin when we break God’s law. But more
importantly, we break God’s heart. We may atone for a broken law, but how do we atone for
a broken heart?
F. Maxie Dunnam tells about a painting he has in his bedroom that was painted by a friend who
was a member of a church he once served as the pastor. The painting is of a little black girl
with haunting eyes that reflect a mixture of sadness and hope. The artist, Mary Jo, started
painting as therapy for a deep sorrow in her life. This painting of the little girl was one of her
first paintings.
The story Dunnam tells is that one afternoon Mary Jo and her three daughters were at a
shopping center which was within walking distance of their home. She was carrying the
baby and the other little blonde, blue-eyed daughters were walking ahead of her where she
could keep an eye on them. And then it happened without warning. An older man coming
out of a parking place bumped another car, panicked, and hit the gas pedal instead of the
brake. The car jumped the curb, ran into one of the little girls, and drove her through the
guard rail into a ravine below. She was dead before her mother’s eyes.
He doesn’t know what happened to the driver. Usually, drivers whose carelessness or
recklessness takes lives are arrested, tried, sentenced, fined, and sometimes imprisoned. But
after they have served their time and paid their fines, the law no longer has claim on them.
As far as the law is concerned, justice has been served.
But what about the hearts of those involved? What about the heart of the parent of the child
who has been killed or of the driver who did it? The driver of the car that snuffed out the life
of Mary Jo’s little girl could never make things up to her parents, never put things right by
paying a fine or serving a prison sentence. Only the forgiveness of the little girl’s parents
could mend the relationship between them and the driver.
G. In a similar way, we may have broken God’s laws, but the terrible tragedy is that we’ve
broken God’s heart. Only an act of the free forgiveness of God’s grace can bring us back
into a relationship with God. This is the message of Jesus’ life, teachings, and death.
It’s amazing grace.
H. Dunnam goes on to write: “I think about that amazing grace when I look at Mary Jo’s
painting. She forgave the man who killed their child and worked out her grief by painting the
likeness of little children from all over the world…As I look into her sad but hopeful eyes, I
am reminded that God is saddened by our sinfulness, but hopeful – always hopeful that none
of us will perish but all of us will come to repentance.”
II.
Humanity’s Part in Justifying Grace
A. But all that God has done in Christ to restore the image of God in us and our broken
relationship with God accomplishes little without our response. As the author of Ephesians
said it, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is
the gift of God…” (Eph 1:8) God has already acted on our behalf. It is our faith in what God
has done in Christ that saves us.
B. This was a central doctrine of the Protestant Reformation and Wesley accepted it
wholeheartedly. A few days after his own conversation experience at Aldersgate, Wesley
preached a sermon with the title, “Salvation by Faith,” making clear his belief that sola fide
(or “by faith alone”) is the first and last article by which the church and its gospel stands or
falls.
C. We’ve talked before about what we mean when we use the word “faith.” In his sermon,
Wesley spelled out what he knew faith to be by first describing what a saving faith is not. He
said faith is not merely believing that some kind of a God exists.
Nor is faith the belief expressed by the demons in the Bible, who recognized Jesus for who
he was but feared him because of what he could do to them.
Faith, according to Wesley, is not “a speculative, rational thing, a cold lifeless assent, a train
of ideas in the head.”
Faith, according to Wesley, is a “disposition of the heart.”
D. According to one Wesley scholar, Steve Harper, the saving faith as taught by John Wesley
had at least four characteristics…
First, faith means putting your confidence and trust in the mercy and forgiveness of God.
Our faith is rooted in the nature of God. We believe God is love and therefore is more
willing to heal us than hurt us. We can put our confidence in that love.
The second element of faith is assurance. I’ll say more about assurance next week. Here I’ll
simply say that we can know beyond any doubt that we are accepted by and are at one with
God – we don’t have to guess, to wonder, to worry, or to hope about it. We can know it for
sure!
Reliance is the third element of a saving faith. In the act of faith we switch the control center
of our lives from ourselves to Christ and start to rely on the power Christ more than our own
power and determination.
Faithfulness is the last dimension of a saving faith. Faithfulness is living with integrity to our
restored relationship with God and a heightened desire to live out of God’s grace. It’s living a
life that is consistent with our faith. It is walking the talk.
E. Justification is the beginning of the Christian life. No matter how glorious, how dramatic, or
how life-changing our awareness of God’s justifying grace may be, it remains only the
beginning of the Christian life. For Wesley and his people, justification represents the door
to true religion… and he fully expected his people and other believers to walk through the
door.
Faith is what takes us through the door. None of what God has done for humanity in Christ
has any traction in our lives until we trust it, are assured by it, learn to rely on it, and live
lives that reflect our faith.
Next week we’ll consider one of the most distinctive of Methodist doctrines – something
called “assurance.”