[This was from a sermon series I preached based on the sermons of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. While the illustrations and language are updated, many of the concepts and ideas, as well as the general structure and message of the sermon, are taken directly from Wesley’s sermon entitled "The Means of Grace" which was first preached in the 1740’s.]
Yesterday evening, my wife and I took the train into Chicago to attend “Taste of Chicago.” We enjoyed a beautiful summer day. We had our choice of dozens of overpriced food selections. And we joined several hundred thousand people in a free concert. The band put on a good performance, and we thoroughly enjoyed the concert, the food, and the sun. It’s always a different experience when you see a band perform live. It’s funny – even though this band has been singing and playing music since long before my wife and I have even been alive, we had never heard their music directly from the band. Instead, their music has always come to our ears through another way – through the radio playing their songs, through a compact disc, through a televised performance of them in concert. In these cases, the original music and my ears were separated from each other. It was only through the cd, radio, or tv that their music could come to me. The cd isn’t the music itself, but *through* the cd, the music of the band can reach my ears and be heard and enjoyed.
Love can be the same way. There are many times when my wife shows her love for me directly. She’ll tell me directly with her words, “I love you,” or she’ll show her affection directly with her actions. But there are just as many times that she’ll share her love for me, not directly, but through something else. I’’l come home and find that she’s left a kind note for me to find. Or I’ll discover that she’s made plans for a nice evening to spend together. Or she’ll prepare my favorite meal for a special occasion. Or she’ll say we’re going to the hardware store and end up taking us for frozen custard instead for a surprise treat. Or any number of other ways she shows her love, even though she doesn’t say it directly. In those situations, her love is shown through the note, through the romantic evening, through the meal, through the surprise treat. And really, they tell about her love just as loudly as her words ever do.
When Jesus lived and walked the face of the earth, his followers had direct access to his love. They could directly experience the love that he shared with them. They didn’t need a cd of Jesus’ teachings – they had the original right with them! They didn’t need a recording of his wisdom – they could receive it any time they asked him! They didn’t need anything to remind them of his love – they knew his love firsthand!
After Jesus’ death and resurrection, it was clear that his followers wouldn’t have direct experience of his love in the same way they were used to. Yet Jesus promised that he wouldn’t leave them all alone either. The final words of the book of Matthew record that Jesus told his disciples, “Remember, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” So how would this be? Jesus’ followers would still be loved by Jesus, but it wouldn’t be the same direct access they had enjoyed while he was living with them.
From the earliest days of the church, Christians have found that Christ’s love is still available to us. We’re not just remembering a love that was given to somebody else who came before us, but we can experience God’s love for ourselves in the here and now. And in the earliest days of the church, sometimes God’s love was felt directly, so that Christians could personally feel that God was directly touching their hearts. At other times, God’s love was felt coming through other actions. During a time of singing praises with hymns, they felt God’s love coming *through* the music. During a time of praying, they felt God’s presence coming *through* the words of their prayers. During a time of Holy Communion, they felt God’s strength feeding them *through* the bread and the wine. During a time of serving someone in need, they felt God’s love moving *through* their actions. During a time of reading the Bible, they heard God’s voice speaking *through* the words on the page.
In Acts, chapter 2, the Bible talks about the birth of the Christian church. Peter preached a sermon about the incredible things God had done in the world, the Holy Spirit moved powerfully among them, and 3,000 people were baptized as Christians that day. And how does Acts describe the activity of this brand new church? Acts 2:42 says: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” So in these four ways, they grew stronger as a church and stronger as individual Christians. They learned from the teaching of the church leaders. They spent time together in fellowship and friendship. They broke bread together in the Holy Communion meal. And they prayed.
Even though they didn’t have the physical presence of Christ with them any longer, they knew that Jesus Christ was still with them. And they had no question that through these actions – prayer, worship, taking Holy Communion, fellowship, reading the Bible, and others. Through these actions, God’s love was often made available to them. They knew that these were outward actions that God used to bring inward grace into their souls. They used these actions constantly, “devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”
In the Christian church, these actions that connect us with God and that help us receive the grace and love of Jesus Christ have become known as “the means of grace.” “The means of grace” are outward words and actions that God has given to us, and they are ordinary ways for us to receive extraordinary grace. The “means of grace” are these actions and practices we use to connect with God and experience God’s love in our lives every day.
*Prayer* is a means of grace. In prayer we draw close to God and listen for God to speak to us.
*Studying the Bible* is a means of grace. In the Bible we learn about God and Jesus Christ and find wisdom for our life.
*Holy Communion* is a means of grace. In Holy Communion we remember how Jesus died for us and now invites us to receive the forgiveness of our sins through him.
There are many other “means of grace” that God has given us. Really, the “means of grace” are anything that opens ourselves to God’s work in our lives and our spirits. The “means of grace” help us expereince God’s love in immediate ways and transform us to make us become more like Christ every day. They are the ordinary ways God does extraordinary things in our lives.
[At this point, we used a 30 foot long piece of plastic pipe (available for >$10 at any home improvement store) and a bowl of marbles to illustrate the idea of God’s love being available to us through prayer, the Scriptures, and Holy Communion. I suggested that the pipe represented the “means of grace” and the marbles represented God’s love. At first I handed marbles directly to several people and said, “Does God’s love sometimes come directly to us?” and of course the answer is yes. We sometimes are overwhelmed by God’s love directly. Sometimes out of the blue! I then had a teenager take one end of the pipe and walk it around the sanctuary. He would stop at an individual in the congregation, and I asked, “Are there times that God’s love comes through prayer?” and then drop a marble through the pipe for them to catch it. Another person would take the end of the pipe, and I asked, “Are there times that God’s love comes through reading the Scriptures?” and would drop a marble. And so on…]
So when we seek God’s love, it doesn’t mean we just sit around and wait for love to simply wash over us. Of course, God can choose to show us love in any way or at any time! God’s God, right? So surely God can move directly in our heart, sometimes before we even know it’s happening. But, at the same time, we aren’t supposed to sit back and do nothing. We are to *seek* God’s love, to *desire* God’s love with all our hearts and all our minds.
As Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given you.” We are to seek out God’s love, and ask for it!
So the first way that God often shows love for us is through our prayers. When we approach God in prayer, it opens up an avenue that God can use to show us love. So Jesus instructs us to ask so that we can receive.
“Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened for you.”
And just so we would be completely clear, Jesus makes his point again in a more personal way:
“If your child asks for a fish, what kind of a father would give them a snake? If your child asks for an egg, what kind of mother would give them a scorpion? If parents, who make all sorts of mistakes, know how to give good gifts to their children, won’t your Heavenly Father, who is perfect, give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:9-13)
How could Jesus be any more clear? Through prayer, we may ask God for all of our needs.
So prayer is the first action through which God often shows us love.
The second action is to “search the Bible.”
Jesus told people who wondered about him, “Search the Scriptures diligently, because these are the Scriptures that testify about me.” Again, Jesus wanted people to “search the Scriptures diligently, because these are the Scriptures that testify about me.” To tell people exactly who he was and what he was about, Jesus wanted people to diligently search the Bible to find out about him. And when we eagerly search the Bible, we do find out who Jesus truly is.
As one example, when Paul was preaching about Jesus to a group of non-Christians, Acts 17:11 says “the Bereans received Paul’s message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” After Paul preached his sermon, the Bible says the listeners “received Paul’s message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.”
They heard Paul’s sermon with great eagerness, but they weren’t gullible either. They examined the Bible to see if Paul told the truth. And what was the result? The next verse tells us: “Therefore, many of them believed.” They heard the message, they checked it against the message of the Bible, *then* they believed.
Bud Stout has said he takes home the bulletin, looks through the Bible reading later, and checks that the sermon message was true to the Bible’s message. Bud’s practice is a really good one, since it doesn’t matter how nice the sermon sounds, if it doesn’t match up with the message of the Bible.
Every time we open the Bible to search its message and examine its truths, we give God a chance to speak to us in a new way.
Every time we read our Bible and meditate on its meaning, we open up a pathway for God to reveal new wisdom to us.
We should eagerly seek every chance to read the Bible, so that God has as many chances as possible to speak to us and strengthen our faith.
So searching the Bible is the second action through which God often shows us love.
The third main action that God uses to share love with us is Holy Communion.
Of all the means of grace, Communion may be the one we have the toughest time talking about. If you go to a Christian bookstore, you’ll find hundreds of books about prayer and hundreds more about Bible study. But you’ll be lucky to find more than a couple about Communion, even though it is something we have been doing as Christians continuously for 2,000 years. If you think about all the different churches that have ever existed, just about every single one of them has celebrated Communion. Along with reading the Bible, praying, worshipping, and singing, Communion is something that Christians of all times and all places have always done. Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Greek Orthodox, Pentecostals, Presbyterians – all take Communion. In a few moments, we’ll be celebrating Communion ourselves!
Why has this one act been so consistent over the centuries? Well, the obvious answer is that Jesus instructed us to do it. When the early church told about Jesus, they remembered his words “Jesus took a loaf of bread, broke it, and said, ‘This is my body that is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ He took the cup, and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant of my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)
Jesus said to do it, so we do it. That’s certainly the main reason we celebrate Communion. At the same time, I think we know that we experience something special every time we approach the Communion table. We feel God’s presence in a special way when we take the bread and the cup.
And we can’t always put the experience into words. We sometimes call it the sacrament of Communion, and sacrament comes from a Greek word that means ‘mystery.’ How taking a bit of bread and a few drops of grape juice reveals God’s love is mysterious. We can’t really explain how Communion “works.” But I know from my own experiences, and from talking with many other Christians, some of the most profound experiences we have of God’s love come to us when we enjoy the Lord’s Supper.
Our experiences tell us clearly that Holy Communionis a way that God often chooses to show love to us.
All this is not to say that *every* time we receive Communion we must have a profound experience of God’s love, or that *every* time we pray we will feel God drawing near. It doesn’t even mean that we will feel our knowledge of God growing *every* time we read the Bible. God doesn’t always work the same way every time. There may be times when our prayers seem to meet only silence and times when Communion may only seem to be a piece of bread and sip of wine.
We saw this attitude in the early church. At first, many people had incredibly profound experiences of God through prayer and Communion and learning about the Bible. But over time, some people got frustrated that they were not experiencing God in the same way.
For some, their hearts began to grow cold. They no longer experienced that presence of Christ when they prayed. They no longer felt Christ’s love when they listened to the stories and teachings about Him. They didn’t even sense Christ in breaking the bread together with other Christians. Eventually, they stopped praying or reading the Bible altogether! They couldn’t be bothered to pray or gather with other believers anymore, even though they still insisted that they were Christians.
We know there are still folks like this today. They used to pray, but didn’t feel that God was speaking to them, so they quit. They tried reading the Bible once or twice, but they thought it was too hard to understand, so they quit. My wife’s dad was on a diet one time so he could lose weight. His wife told him that for dinner he had to cut back on calories, but never said anything about breakfast or lunch. So he would load up on two meals a day, and then scale back on one. He weiged himself a couple times on the scale, didn’t see any difference, and gave up after only a couple weeks. This is the problem we see today – people will try praying for a week, complain that it didn’t result in an earth-shattering change in their life, and give up on it entirely.
The funny thing is, if you ask them, “Do you believe in the power of prayer?” they’ll always say, “Oh, yes! I believe in prayer!” But if you follow up, “Do you pray?” then the answer will be a hesitant, “Well, no, I can’t find time to pray.” You ask, “Do you believe in the Bible?” and they’ll say, “Oh, yes! I’m a Christian. Of course I believe in the Bible!” You ask them, “Do you read the Bible?” and they’ll tell you, “Well, I don’t actually read the Bible.”
Of course, just because we don’t feel God’s presence burning inside us every time we take Communion or every time we read the Bible, that doesn’t mean these things are not still “means of grace.” And it doesn’t mean that God isn’t using them. It only means that these ordinary means of grace can be awfully ordinary sometimes. But just because they seem ordinary, just because we don’t have deep and profound experiences of God’s love every time we use them, doesn’t mean we can say, “I just don’t get anything out of prayer, so I don’t do it.”
First of all, we don’t say that because God intends to use these means of grace to show us love. So failing to use them means we give ourselves fewer opportunities to receive God’s love and grace. But beyond that, we can’t assume that when we don’t have a profound experience, God isn’t working anyway. Most of us didn’t experience math class as a deeply moving experience, but we did learn how to add and subtract our numbers there. In the same way, God gives us love and grace through the “means of grace” whether or not we are deeply moved by them.
When my wife was in college, she began to take a few minutes every night to read one or two chapters from the Old Testament before she went to bed. Each night she would pick up the Bible and read, and if she didn’t remember what she read the night before, she just re-read it. She didn’t always find deep and profound messages from God during those evenings, although occasionally she did. But, the time she spent then has given her a knowledge of the Scriptures that she have available to her at any time now. She knows the stories and can remember them when she is struggling in her life. She can remember the problems Moses had, and that Ruth had, and that King David had. She wasn’t particularly moved by them back then, but God uses that time she spent reading the Bible back then as a “means of grace” for her even today. She is deeply thankful for that.
Other Christians have gone the opposite direction. Instead of thinking that the means of grace are useless and shouldn’t be bothered with, they began treating worship and prayer and Communion as the goal itself. They focused entirely on the outward activity and forgot that their focus was supposed to be on God, not on the actions that lead to God. So, they focused on doing the proper rituals and saying all the right words, and they took pride in doing them well. The problem was, they forgot how to find God’s love through those words and actions. Instead of a living faith that led their hearts to God, they ended up with a religion of empty gestures. They were going through the motions of faith, but they lost the faith itself. It left them with a hollow faith of outward works, completely disconnected from God’s love.
And of course, you know people like this, too. You ask them, “Are you a Christian?” and they immediately say, “Oh, yes! I go to church every Sunday!” But you ask them, “Does worshipping every Sunday lead you to a deeper love of God?” and they just look at you funny. You ask them, “Are you a Christian?” and they respond, “Oh, yes! I read the Bible all the time!” But you ask them, “Has your reading led you to trust in Christ for your salvation?” and they give you a blank stare. They’ve gotten so caught up in the actions of faith that they forget that those actions are meant to lead *past* the actions and toward God!
The means of grace are meant to help us know and love God. If they do not help us know and love God, they are useless to us. And we completely misuse the means of grace when they become a substitute for actual faith. When we start thinking that being a Christian just means going through the motions of faith, we’re misusing the means of grace. Because if these outward actions are separated from God, they cannot help us at all. God alone is the source of their meaning and value. They are *means* of grace, not grace themselves. Without God working in them to make them useful, the means of grace are no better than a having a faucet with no source of water. You can turn put your glass under the faucet and turn it on all you want, but if it isn’t attached to the source of water, you’re still going to be thirsty.
That means that praying has no power all by itself, the bread and wine we receive in Holy Communion offer no healing all by themselves, even the Bible has no authority all by itself. God alone has power, authority, and healing. God is the source of all. And God has chosen to give us these good gifts through prayer, through the Bible, through Holy Communion. And God could, and occasionally does, choose to give these good gifts without them, too.
Also, we need to remember that a million prayers can never earn us forgiveness for a single sin. It is the blood of Christ alone that reconciles us to God. We do not *earn* anything from God by using the means of grace. We don’t become more holy every time we pray. We’re not doing God a favor when we come for Communion. We’re not earning our salvation when we read the Bible. Everything we gain from doing these actions comes as a free gift from God. It’s true that God is always pleased when we use the means of grace, but that’s because God has chosen to especially use these ways to show us love.
So, it’s time for the rubber to meet the road. How do we put the means of grace into practice? Most simply, we just do them! To give God the maximum number of chances to speak to us and show us love, we should use the means of grace as often as we possibly can! And the good thing is, they’re easy to do. God is the one working through the means of grace – we just need to make ourselves available.
So when we find new ways to pray, we’re giving God a chance to use this means of grace to show us love. When my wife and I were at the Jones’ house for dinner, their daughter led the prayer before the meal. Their family thought for a few moments about what they would be thankful for, and then their daughter offered her thanks to God in prayer. When a six-year-old can lead us in prayer, we know it’s something everyone can do! When we were at the Smith’s, they used the Upper Room devotional book for their prayer. Each day features a short reading from the Bible, a story to help reveal something about the Bible reading, and a prayer for the day. Every Sunday, at the end of the children’s moment, we pray together. We always thank God for something we have been given, and we always ask God for help as we live our lives. It’s a simple pattern, but it’s a powerful way to pray.
And there are times we don’t need to follow a set pattern. We can discover all kinds of ways to pray! Look through the hymnal, and you’ll find dozens of songs that are actually prayers. So we can sing our prayers. Some people have tried breath prayers, where you find a simple phrase and actually breathe it in and out. Simply find a quiet place, make yourself comfortable, and then, as you breathe in, you say quietly, “Spirit of the living God,” and then as you breathe out, say, “fall afresh on me.” “Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.”
The second means of grace, “searching the Bible” also gives God a chance to show love to us. Hopefully it’s clear how important the Bible is to us in this church. Purchasing Bibles for all the pews was an important choice for us as a church. Giving Bibles to third graders, to new members, to the parents of baptized children, and to high school graduates all shows how strongly we wish everyone to have a copy of the Bible that will speak to them where they’re at. And establishing the new Bible library has given everyone a chance to look through new translations and new study versions of the Bible. And hopefully you can tell how important the Bible is to my preaching, as I seek to bring a message each Sunday that comes directly from the Bible’s truths.
Every time you open the Bible to read, God’s message will have a chance to reach you. There are study Bibles that help us understand the Bible’s message better. And to help us stay in practice, some Bibles are split into 365 readings that we can do every day for a year. With only ten or fifteen minutes a day for a year, you can read through the entire Bible, beginning to end. My mother just called in April to say she’d finished her “One-Year Bible.” She reads from the Bible daily and has for many years, but this was the first time in thirty years she had read the entire Bible cover to cover. She discovered new truths in the Bible and explored new sections she had never learned about before. This is what I mean – by reading the entire Bible all the way through, my mom opened up a chance for God to speak to her in new ways. For children, there are even a couple kids versions of one-year Bibles that allow children to read a section each day.
Somebody told the joke one time, “With so many translations of the Bible out there, which one is the best one?” The answer? “The one you read!” To me, it doesn’t matter so much which translation you prefer, as long as it’s the one you can understand and appreciate and that you’re willing to read regularly. Because each time is a chance for God to speak to you through your reading of the Bible, your listening to the Bible’s message, and your meditating on the Bible’s truths.
So, that’s it! God has given us the means of grace for us to use and to experience God’s love through them. We have discussed prayer, reading the Bible, and Holy Communion as specific means of grace, and have suggested some ways we can use them. All that’s left is for us to actually use them. So, let’s do it!
As we continue our worship service, we’ll sing together, we’ll worship, we’ll pray, and in a moment we’ll enjoy Holy Communion. In all these things, we hope God will choose to show love to us through these means of grace. Amen.
