Would you like to live longer? Would you like to have the
ability to recover most quickly from illness and surgery? Would you
prefer speedy recovery from depression? Would you like to be better able
to cope with pain? According to an article in the Journal of the American
Medical Association persons who live longer, recover more quickly form
illness, surgery, and depression and are best able to endure chronic pain
are persons with strong religious beliefs and practices. Harold G.
Koenig, a professor at Duke University Medical Center, advises physicians
to ask patients about their spiritual history and encourages them to
support beliefs that “help their patients cope.”
United Methodist Chaplain at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore took this very seriously when he established the “Intensive
Prayer Unit,” (IPU) a few years ago.
IPU is not located in the prestigious hospital, rather it is a
process in which volunteers
from.. local…church(es) take time each day to pray for specific
patients struggling with
cancer…IPU..has over 100 patients signed (at any one time).
United Methodist Reporter,
Paul McKay, Aug. 28, 2001
Religious belief and practice. They’re good for the
patient. They’re good for the prayer partner. They’re good for
everyone. It seems we all could use a good “dose” of God’s grace!
This evidences in a most particular way the emphasis of
this series of sermons on our distinctive United Methodist witness. We
really do depend so much on that image of God in us; the image of God in
your heart that called you back into relationship with God. The image of
God in you is that yearning, that longing in you that is never satisfied
until your relationship with God is restored. This is the grace of God
John Wesley, the founder of the 18th century movement in
England that became our United Methodist Church, identified as Prevenient
Grace—the love of God in you before you were born. That image of God was
restored in you by God’s justifying grace, as again John Wesley described
it.
It’s like your first experience of God’s love—it’s just the
beginning. If there is one thing that makes United Methodism distinctive
it is this: when you first come to faith in Jesus, that’s just the
beginning. Conversion, as we United Methodists understand it, is not just
a one-time event in your life. The first time you said “Yes’ to God had
better not be the last time! In the moment of your conversion, you know,
when God made it all right, God reestablished your relationship with God
but it was not the end. It was just the beginning. You see, God’s love
does not stop after you first come to God. No, if you know God at all you
know how rich and generous and abundant God’s grace is to you day after
day after day. According to John Wesley this is the work of God’s
sanctifying grace. You see, God will never stop until love is fully
restored to the very center of your life. God will never stop until love
is again the way of the world. God will never stop until love restores
all of creation. You see, we believe in love that never lets you go.
There are moments, aren’t there, in
your life when you receive a new insight, a new inspiration, a new
awareness of God’s love for you—an experience, an awareness, a knowledge
that you never quite had before? That moment is pure grace—a sure sign
that you have been drawn yet a little closer to God than you were before.
That’s the real gift that God gives you.
--a warm feeling in your heart during a worship service
--a conviction in your soul that you just cannot identify as
anything else but the call of God
--or it might just as easily be a restlessness of spirit that
things just aren’t right, when you
are led in a different, unique direction in your life
That’s the gift of the love of God, God’s sanctifying grace,
when you realize that you are not just saved once, you are saved every
day, when you realize that your first repentance was just practice for the
daily discipline of prayerfully and deliberately surrendering every bit of
you life to God.
John Wesley believed
God’s love makes a difference in your life.
--old, harmful habits are rooted out by love and replaced with
holy habits
--indifference to the plight of others gives way to an
overriding
passion of self-giving love
--obsession for accumulation and getting and gaining is
transformed
by a real experience of the sheer joy of giving
You see, we believe in love that never lets you go.
Things happen to you
when love grows in you. That’s when
--two friends who fell out of friendship with one another become
friends again
--a parent and a teenager finally do hear and understand one
another in the midst of very
honest and maybe heated discussion on a very
important issue to them both
--a husband and wife, after talking past each other for a
number of years, finally begin
to listen, really listen to each other
--you face a very difficult and serious threat to your health
and you don’t know how in
the world you could ever make it through the
treatment required but somehow,
somehow you do
--you share the last hours with your loved one knowing all
along in your heart that
death, though it comes, will never have the last word
That’s the love we believe in—love that never lets you go.
One of the best
illustrations in personal life I know of our unique United Methodist
understanding that love never lets you go I have encountered many times.
Often in my ministry a member of the church will come to me and say,
“Pastor, something happened to me I just gotta tell you about.” And the
story is a wonderful experience of God’s love. The person attended a
religious gathering, or responded to a TV or radio presentation, or
somehow heard the Gospel in a new way. By that witness a change happened
in his heart. And often the person will say to me, “Pastor, I never knew
Jesus. I have been a member of this church all my life. I was baptized
as an infant, did Confirmation Class, joined the church like everybody
else. But the church never told me about Jesus, not really.” Perhaps you
have known this experience in your own life—this experience sometimes
comes this way—a two-fold experience—one of exhilaration and joy in new
found faith accompanied perhaps by one of disappointment that somehow the
church had let you down. In response to this this pastor rejoices in
newfound faith embraced by a child of God. I prayerfully encourage that
newfound faith to continue to grow. But I am also aware, as John Wesley
understood, that any new step in faith is the result of God’s love that
never lets you go. When a growing Christian is baptized, confirmed, and
then participates in the ministry of the church, love grows in you all
along the way—you don’t get it all at once. The church didn’t let you
down—the church told you about Jesus all along. That significant
experience is simply the growing awareness of God’s love—it is the gift of
God restoring love to the very center of your heart. It is the gift of
God’s sanctifying grace.
When you come to faith
in Jesus, that’s just the beginning. We believe in love that never lets
you go. And God will not stop until all the wholeness, goodness, love,
and justice God first made in the Garden of Eden is restored to all of
creation. John Wesley believed this so strongly that
--every time he saw an underage child working long hours in a
English factory, he took action
--when he heard stories of laborers and miners risking their
lives in
unsafe working conditions, he protested
--he denounced the practice of slavery and worked for economic
justice.
God didn’t make the world that way. John Wesley believed the church, the
community that professes to live life right now the way God intends it,
should pray, work, and witness until every vestige of injustice and
oppression is eradicated from the earth. This distinctive social witness
is a vital part of United Methodism today. So
--when child labor laws were adopted
--when slavery was abolished
--when the labor movement enhanced safe working conditions and
fair labor practices
--when the civil rights movement witnessed to the cause of
freedom
and justice
--when a wall came down in Berlin
that’s the work of the love that never lets us go. And when the abundant
resources of the earth are finally so equally distributed that no child
anywhere goes hungry any more, that will surely be the work of love that
never lets you go.
How can you tap this
resource in your life and realize all the advantages to health, life, and
spirit that it promises? John Wesley believed that persons who adopt
spiritual practices are those who find themselves most open to the
influence of God’s sanctifying grace in their lives—practices like prayer,
Bible study, hearing the Word preached, Holy Communion, generosity with
the poor, and service.
Our new Bishop Charlene
Kammerer led the clergy in our area in a Teaching Day recently. As she
taught us she shared with us a spiritual encounter she had with retired
Bishop Richard Looney in the Laundromat of the hotel where they were
staying. This was Bishop Kammerer’s very first meeting of meeting of the
Council of Bishops having just been elected a little more than four years
ago. As she was preparing to launder a few things she needed Bishop
Looney came in. He said to her, “Here, I’m retired and you have so many
other important things to do than this. Let me do that for you.” At
first she refused, but since she was just learning how hard it is to say
“no” to Bishop Looney she eventually relented and returned to her room.
It was not long before there was a knock on her door and the Bishop
delivered her clothes neatly folded. As she received them from him and
saw the look of satisfaction and peace upon his face she was struck with
how important that one act of service was for him. She knew then that if
she had refused his offer she would have denied him an important practice
so essential to his spirit, inadvertently hindering the work of God’s
sanctifying grace in his life.
Bishop Charlene Kammerer, Virginia Conference
“Teaching Day,” January 25, 2005, Fishersville, Va.
Life, health, and
wholeness. That is the work of God’s sanctifying grace—
love restored to the center of your life, the center of our community, the
center of our world, the center of creation. Sisters and brothers, God
will never stop until love is restored to the very center of your life.
God will never stop until love is again the way of the world. God will
never stop until love restores all of creation. We believe in love that
never, never, never lets you go.
