Later this month, I will have the privilege of teaching at our Conference Licensing School. This is a multi-day school which prepares people to receive their first appointments as pastors in our Conference. In fact, Navarre will host one day of the school.
I will be teaching the class on Wesleyan Theology. In preparing for that class, I was reminded of one of the significant contributions of John Wesley to Evangelical theology; the doctrine of grace.
To be sure every denomination and system of theology has an understanding of grace, but Wesley’s unique contribution has stood the test of time and continues to inspire people.
Grace has been popularly defined as “God’s unmerited favor toward us.” That definition deserves to be pondered over and over. By unmerited we mean that this grace is given without regard to any action or achievement on our part. To merit something is to deserve or be worthy of something. God’s favor is bestowed with complete disregard to the recipient’s worth; you might even say, in spite of the recipient’s worth.
To have favor is to show kindness toward someone. When we stand in someone’s favor we stand in a
privileged position. We could be in that position because we have supported the person or because we have benefited the person in some way.
The idea of grace is that through no worth in ourselves God has bestowed his favor on us. There was (is) nothing in us or about us that would cause God to owe us anything. I like to tell people grace means God likes us and there is nothing we can do about it. John Wesley put it this way:
All the blessings which God hath bestowed upon man, are of his mere grace, bounty, or favour; his
free, undeserved favour; favour altogether undeserved; man having no claim to the least of his mercies.[1]
The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, which is the one official guide of United Methodist doctrine says,
“By grace we mean the undeserved, unmerited, and loving action of God in human existence through
the ever-present Holy Spirit.”[2]
That, however, is only the first aspect of grace from a Wesleyan perspective. Wesley said that grace give us the ability to respond to God as well. In other words, God’s favor gives us the ability to do what God requires. Randy Maddox, of Duke Divinity School, calls this “responsible grace.” God gives us the ability to respond and that in turn makes us responsible before God.
Some of the more popular aspects of Wesley’s understanding of grace are found in the ways we experience that grace.
Wesley said that God’s grace works in our lives even before we are conscious of him. We experience this as God’s prevenient grace, the grace that comes before salvation. This grace restores a measure of our free will and a measure of conscience as well. It gives us our first desire to please God. As Randy Maddox would say, it gives us the ability to respond to God.
When we respond to this grace in repentance, God’s grace continues to work in our lives as forgiveness and moves us to accept his pardoning love. Responding to this justifying grace produces a real change in our hearts, we are born again and begin a new relationship with God. We are also given an assurance that we are, in fact, God’s children.
Immediately after the reception of this grace, the Holy Spirit begins to work in our lives leading us to grow in maturity through sanctifying grace. Our experience of grace from this point on leads us to do good works and serve God’s mission in the world with the aim of becoming mature or prefect in
love.
Grace comes to us through many different channels, but some of them Wesley deemed “ordinary means of grace.” These were the normal ways God uses to convey his grace. They included prayer, reading scripture, Holy Communion, Christian fellowship, worship, and fasting. God uses these ordinary means to convey his grace to us. To be sure God is limited in the ways his grace can come to us, but these are the ordinary ways.
We shortly celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, so what do afterwards? I would urge to settle into the ordinary pattern of life by drawing on God’s grace to be come a fully developing follower of Jesus Christ. Seek God out, for if we do he his promise,“You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord…” (Jeremiah 29:13–14a [ESV]).
Pastor Alan
[1] John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, Third Edition., vol. 5 (London: Wesleyan Methodist
Book Room, 1872), 7.
[2] United Methodist Publishing House (2013-01-01). The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2012 (Kindle Locations 1806-1807). United Methodist Publishing House. Kindle Edition.