Texts: 2 Kings 23:1-3; 1 Peter 1:13-25; John 15:1-8
We have turned the page to a new year…thanks be to God! All of us are looking forward to a better 2021 and will have no problem leaving 2020 in the rearview mirror. We certainly hope and pray that our circumstances will be different, that the pandemic will subside, and that we’ll soon be back to worshipping together among many other things.
But while the calendar turns and we hope for change in the world, the bigger question that the new year brings is, “What will change in us?” Certainly this year we have discovered some things about ourselves and, under the pressure and isolation of the pandemic, we’ve been forced to confront some of the darker aspects of sinful human life—the nasty rhetoric, self-serving attitudes, violence, injustice, unrest. We’ve seen it writ large in our culture and chances are we’ve seen it in ourselves, too. And while we can’t always control what happens in the world around us, we do have some say in how our inner life is ordered, particularly if we are people who claim to follow Christ.
John Wesley certainly understood the need for periodic renewal and refocusing for the people called Methodist, which is one of the reasons why he began holding covenant renewal services for the Methodist societies in 1755—a time for people to “return thanks, either for a sense of pardon, for full salvation, or for a fresh manifestation of [God’s] graces, healing all their backslidings.” In London, these services were usually held on New Year’s Day while around the rest of the country they were conducted whenever Wesley visited the Methodist societies.
In doing these annual services of renewal, Wesley was following a biblical pattern of covenant renewal. We read about one such renewal in our Old Testament reading today—King Josiah had the words of the law, God’s covenant with his people, read out in public as a way of reforming the nation that had long been straying away from God in sin and idolatry. It was a call to return to the way God had laid out for his people, both corporately and individually.
That way, the way of God, the way of Christ, is the way of holiness—a call to God’s people to reflect the character and mission of God for which they were created. Holiness was and is a central focus of the theology and practice of Methodism, which is why Wesley saw these regular services, as well as daily practice of the means of grace, as vital for helping people grow in holiness of heart and life. He believed, as the Scriptures reveal, that the salvation God made possible through the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus wasn’t just something that God had done for us, but is also something God does in us—that the grace of God can actually transform us now, shape us now into the people God intended for us to be, people who are, as Peter says in our New Testament lesson, “holy in every aspect of our lives, just as the one who called us is holy” (1 Peter 1:15).
As Methodists we believe that God invites us into that life of holiness through prevenient grace—the common grace that convicts us of our condition under sin and that leads to repentance, a turning back to God. Not all will accept that invitation, sin being a form of self-serving slavery, but those who do put their faith in Christ, in his death and resurrection on their behalf, experience justifying grace—God forgives their sins and begins to set them right. This is the “new birth” that Jesus told Nicodemus about in John 3 and that Peter expresses earlier in 1 Peter 1:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading…”
This new birth produces in us three things, according to John Wesley —Faith, hope, and love—and these three things are the beginning of holiness or what we Methodists call “initial sanctification.”
Faith is not merely intellectual assent to a particular set of doctrines but a “disposition of the heart” and “ a sure trust in confidence in God that through the merits of Christ that [our] sins are forgiven” and we are “reconciled to the favor of God.” As Wesley puts it:
“The faith, then, whereby we are born of God is ‘not only belief of all the articles of our faith, but also a true confidence of the mercy of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Such faith is transformational and as Peter puts it, it calls us to “prepare [our] minds for action, to discipline ourselves, to set all our hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you, when he is revealed.” When we put our faith in Christ and in his grace, it is Christ, through the Holy Spirit, who gives us the power to live differently—to change, to no longer be bound by slavery to sin but to have power over the sin in our lives. Wesley believed as the New Testament writers believed, that the transforming grace of Christ really can change us—that sin no longer need reign in those who put their faith in Christ. But living a life free from the slavery of sin requires some discipline, as Peter says, preparation of the mind for action, a desire for holiness.
Cultivating that desire for holiness is an intentional process—participation with the Holy Spirit and with other believers in reshaping our loves. We tend to become what we love and orient our lives around those loves. If we love money, for example, we’ll shape our lives around that desire. If we love recognition, we’ll do whatever it takes to get it. If we want security, power, sex, health, influence—we’ll reorder our lives to pursue them.
It’s not that any of those things are bad in and of themselves, it’s that we weren’t designed for those things to be our first love. When we place something, anything, before God, we are engaging in idolatry—the most basic sin that leads to so many others. Real change begins with reordering our wants, our first love. Listen again to what Peter says to the church in verse 14: “Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
So often, we in the church have tried to reorient people through more education—through more study of God’s Word, for example. Or we’ve tried to do it by giving people more instruction in Works—those things people ought to be doing. But until our Wants are transformed, we can never really be on the path to holiness. That’s one of the reasons many Christians don’t look much different in their attitudes, their desires, their pursuits than the rest of the world. They might know the Scriptures and they might do some good things, but God is not their first love. We see it today as Christians pursue all kinds of other things: political power, fame, cultural recognition, influence, wealth, and a whole lot of other stuff. What Jesus says to the church in Ephesus in Revelation could be just as easily said to the church today: “You have lost your first love.”
The heart of the gospel, the heart of the Wesleyan way, is transforming that first love to love of God above all things. Indeed, Wesley’s definition of a Methodist is “one who has the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Spirit given unto him.” Love of God and love of neighbor, the Great Commandment according to Jesus, is the heart of holiness. That love is produced in us when, as Peter puts it in verse 21, our “faith and hope are set on God” and (verse 22) when our souls are purified by “obedience to the truth.” That kind of obedient faith and assured hope enables a “genuine mutual love” that enables us to “love one another deeply from the heart.” Only a transformed heart, only a heart “born anew, not of perishable but imperishable seed, through the living and enduring Word of God,” can produce holiness in us.
How is that kind of holiness of heart and life cultivated? It is through obedience, discipline, and mutual support from the Holy Spirit and from others who desire God above all. The journey toward holiness, which we call sanctification, is a process of growing toward maturity and none of us reaches that strictly on our own. At the beginning of chapter 2, Peter says, “Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.” And then he returns to the image of new birth: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
In other words, once you are born again, given new birth through water and the Spirit, you have to grow up! And none of us grows up without help. You have to learn a new language, engage in new practices, develop new habits. If you’ve had a taste of the Lord’s goodness, a taste of his grace, then our desire should be for more of him, to live lives that are pleasing to him, to be shaped and formed into the people God created us to be from the beginning: people made in the image of God. For Wesley, that was the goal of holiness, the “one thing needful”—renewal in the image of God, the ground of sanctification, the epitome of Christian maturity and perfection—to be holy as God is holy.
It’s a lofty goal, yes, but what I love about this is that Wesley, taking his cue from the Scriptures, actually believed that a transformed life of holiness was possible in this life. So many Christian traditions are pessimistic about human life and the power of sin, believing that holiness is something awaiting us at death or sequestered away in heaven, but that our present lives are doomed to be racked by sin. Our only hope is to punch out of here.
But the Wesleyan vision is that God made creation good; that he made humans to have a vocation within that creation—a vocation of love, reflecting the image of God. And God has not abandoned that project. Christ came to transform us now, to save us now, not just later. As Wesley puts it in his sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation:”
“If you seek [sanctification, holiness] by faith, you may expect it as you are: and if as you are, then expect it now.” You can be no worse for that expectation!
The Covenant Service, then, is a form of commitment to this expectation—an expression of a change of desire. We recognize that God promises to give us new life in Christ, and we promise “to live no more for ourselves but only for Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us.”
I invite you pray through the Covenant service. Listen to the ways in which the call to respond to God’s grace and the invitation to holiness comes through. Hear the invitation to discipline, to putting away our idols, to obedience, to developing new habits, to putting all of our loves at the feet of Christ.
You may find this covenant to be a high bar—it is meant to be, for holiness is a narrow way of life. It’s a high bar that we need each other and the Holy Spirit in order to reach, that’s why we don’t do this Covenant service in isolation. If we were in the room together we would be looking at each other, but I believe we can do that even more powerfully if we would commit to being in groups together to support one another and hold one another accountable to this covenant, this way of holiness. That was the Methodist way and will be again—to be a Methodist is to be in relationship with others who are pursuing holiness with God’s help.
As we move later into 2021, we’re going to invite every one of you to be in a small group designed for that purpose. Our Discipleship Team met this week and is very excited about this opportunity to renew a practice that has the potential to change lives and reform the church. If we all make that commitment to be in relationship and to watch over one another in love, to help one another on toward holiness, then 2021 will indeed be the best year yet in the life of the church.
Do you desire more of God? Do you want to grow in Christian maturity? Do you desire to have the love of God shed abroad in your heart by the Holy Spirit given unto you? Do you want to experience the abundant life Christ offers, a life free from slavery to the sin that binds you and one that reflects the image of the person God created you to be?
Then I invite you to take the first step and join in covenant with God. God promises to meet you when you draw closer to him.
So take a moment, breathe deeply, and join me as we come together as a church to renew our covenant with a holy God who calls us to holiness…
(You can access the text of the Wesley Covenant Service here)
