eBookFive Marks of a Methodist - eBook [ePub] (Five Marks of a Methodist - eBook [ePub])
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Overview
Five marks confirm our identity as genuine and fruitful followers of Christ:
1. A Methodist Loves God
2. A Methodist Rejoices in God
3. A Methodist Gives Thanks
4. A Methodist Prays Constantly
5. A Methodist Loves Others
This brief book, suitable for sharing with others, provides a meditation on each of these characteristics. Prayerfully apply them to your journey with Jesus. If you are part of the worldwide Methodist or Wesleyan family, these five marks will grant a greater knowledge and appreciation for why and how you follow Jesus. If you are located in another part of the body of Christ, you can emerge with a solid foundation to keep your spiritual house standing strong. Christians marked by these five habits, when taken together, have character.
Each chapter ends with questions for reflection or discussion.
“Steve Harper goes to the very heart of faithfulness as he describes and then calls upon all those who follow Wesley to live. It is lives of integrity that are the result of following these marks. Harper rightly says this will give the ring of truth to our daily living. He then goes on to identify the “marks” or “practices” that when followed will result in a life of righteousness, goodness, peace, and joy. It is a way of living in God’s gracious presence that he encourages for everyone, and it is a way of living I choose for myself.”
—Rueben P. Job, author of Three Simple Rules: A Wesleyan Way of Living
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501800603 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Series: | Five Marks of a Methodist |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Sales rank: | 935,649 |
| File size: | 828 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Five Marks of a Methodist
The Fruit of a Living Faith
By Steve Harper
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2015 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5018-0060-3
CHAPTER 1
A Methodist Loves God
"What then is the mark? Who is a Methodist, according to your own account?" I answered: A Methodist is one who has "the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost given to us."
—The Character of a Methodist, paragraph 5
A Methodist Loves God
"Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?"
He replied, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment."
—Matthew 22:36-38
We live the Christian life in relation to the two great commandments: the command to love God, and the command to love others. Directly or indirectly, everything else emerges from this way of love. John Wesley knew this. He had steeped himself in the Christian tradition, which was itself rooted in love. So first he wrote that a disciple loves God. By beginning with love, Wesley connects the rise of early Methodism with the essence of the gospel—with the very words of Jesus, and with the core motivation for everything that followed between the first and the eighteenth centuries. There was no other bona fide way to begin any Christian movement, awakening, or revival apart from the way of love. Wesley knew it; we must know it too.
Our life in Christ begins in the fact that we love God. We are like Peter, sitting with Jesus on the shore (John 21:15-19) and hearing him ask three times, "Do you love me?" There is no other starting point for the life of faith or the journey of discipleship. Jesus has to ask us more than once, as he did Peter, because we are prone to wander away from this core reality. And even if we find ourselves saying that we do love God, the repeated question forces us to look beneath the surface of our response to see what we mean by it.
"Do you love me?" Jesus focuses our understanding of love in relation to a world that alleges to love all sorts of things. Some of our loves are illegitimate, and must be challenged by Jesus. But even when we embrace genuine loves, we must allow God to ask us if they flow from a divine center, or if they are a random collection of deep affections. The question "Do you love me?" isn't Jesus's way of excluding other loves but rather his way of bringing all our loves into a supernatural and holy relationship. And as Jesus said in referring to the love of God as the first and greatest commandment, it is a love that brings us (heart, whole being, and mind) together into a unified personhood. As Parker Palmer puts it, we are divided no more.
In many ways, love of God was John Wesley's keynote theme for the rest of his life and ministry. We see it continuing in his sermon "Scriptural Christianity" (1744) where he lays the foundation of the love of God in ways that are remarkably similar to what he said in The Character of a Methodist. While looking at the first Christians on the Day of Pentecost, Wesley noted, "This then was the very essence of his faith ... the love of God the Father." This is an interesting way to put it, because "the love of God the Father" can either mean God's love to us or our love to God. John Wesley wanted the early Methodists to read it both ways, first receiving God's love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and then responding to that love by enacting the two great commandments.
There is no greater day in the Christian life than when we discover that salvation means wholeness. It doesn't merely mean going to heaven when we die; it means living abundantly while we are here. But for this to happen, says Jesus—says Wesley—we must love God. Having received God's love first (1 John 4:19), we love God in return with everything we are and have. We do it in relation to every aspect of our life. We do it every day and to everyone. This is the first and foremost mark of a disciple.
But what kind of love is Jesus talking about? What kind of love does Wesley want the Methodists, indeed all Christians, to have? The Greeks had four words to describe it: phileo, eros, storge, and agape. The Christian life includes and is committed to all four. But the word used to describe the essence and foundation of God's love is agape. Unlike the other three words, this quality of love is based in the lover, not in the one being loved. In fact, the other person may not be very lovable. The other person may not be wanting our love—or at least not appearing to do so. But with agape we love anyway.
This is exactly how God loves us, and many of us have experienced this kind of love. We have experienced what Charles Wesley called "amazing love" and what John Newton called "amazing grace." This is what Paul meant when he wrote, "But God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us" (Rom 5:8). In the past we may have laughed at the thought of God, run from the presence of God, or spit in the face of God, but what we received in return was God's love—variously described in the Bible as faithful love, loyalty, mercy, patience, forgiveness, and redemption, to name a few qualities. We now realize that if God's love had been anything other than agape, none of us would be here. The whole foundation would have crumbled long before now.
But ... we are here. We are alive. We aren't destroyed by sin; we are saved by grace. Light overcomes darkness. We are unable to run from God without also running into God. This is what John Wesley and others call prevenient grace, the love that moves the hymn writer to pen, "O, Love that will not let me go; I rest my weary soul in thee!" We are dearly loved by God! And nothing can separate us from that love (Rom 8:35-39). Only the word agape describes this—the most radical kind of love possible. Unconditional. Unrelenting. Unending. Unbelievable!
The first mark of discipleship isn't a call to increase our love but to receive God's love. The ability to love God comes from God! This is no self-help effort, no intensification of our devotion through a spiritual version of trying harder. The call to love God is a call extended by none other than God. The desire to respond with love is a desire put into us by God. As Eugene Peterson put it,
First God. God is the subject of life. God is foundational for living. If we don't have a sense of the primacy of God, we will never get it right, get life right, get our lives right. Not God at the margins; not God as an option; not God on the weekends. God at the center and circumference. God first and last; God, God, God.
A great danger in much of contemporary spirituality, Christian and otherwise, is that it keeps the focus on the self—the ego. And the peculiar thing about egotism is that it will let us believe in God and claim to love God, but always on our terms—no matter how sophisticated or subtle the affirmations may be. The sign of egoic faith is that we orient our love in terms of personal benefit, even our love of God. "Have it your way" becomes more than a hamburger-chain slogan; it becomes our life's motto. But the kind of love the gospel describes, and the kind of love Wesley affirms, is radically different.
It doesn't take very long for us to realize that this isn't a natural love; it is supernatural. Left to ourselves, we will love those whom we think are lovely. We will love others as long as they love us in return. We will love others for what we can get out of it—whether short-term or long-term. Wesley's call to love is one to which we respond, "I can't do this on my own!" This is right where he wanted the people called Methodist to be: people who renounce all attempts to love from the source of self, and who now receive the invitation to love from the source of grace. We manifest our love through phileo, eros, and storge, but the simple source of faithful love is agape—the love of God that first possesses us, and then enables us to love that way in return.
God is the first object of our agape love, because if God isn't our first love, we end up loving God for reasons that the self seeks. We will love God for what we can get out of the relationship. We will love superficially and capriciously. Instead, we must love as one who has "the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost."
By naming the first mark of a disciple to be a person who loves God, Wesley is inviting us to step into the stream of scripture and tradition; to join with the first followers and the subsequent saints who have made the love of God their heart's desire, a desire made possible because we are made in the image of God; that is, created with the desire and the capacity to receive and give life. Our incentive to do this is born out of God's first love of us. By making the love of God the first mark, Wesley is leading us to embrace the disposition of our hearts, from which everything else flows. And as he points out, it is a love that makes God the joy of our heart. Let the power of Wesley's words sink into us:
God is the joy of our heart, and the desire of our soul,
which is constantly crying out,
"Whom have I in heaven but you ?
and there is none upon the earth that I desire but you !"
My God, and my all!
You are the strength of my heart,
and my portion for ever!
Here are words we could ponder every day for the rest of our life. We need to read them over and over, allowing them to descend deeper and deeper into us. We yearn to be saturated with these words. They open the door to our whole being, commencing a journey that moves us from superficiality to substance, start to finish. We move beyond churchianity (good as it is) to Christianity. We move from membership (good as it is) to discipleship. Many of the people to whom Wesley ministered were already members of a congregation. To them, he exhorted a deeper life in Christ, one that included, but transcended, institutional identification. To those who were outside the church, he called them to become members of a Christian community somewhere, but to see it as a means to the greater end of loving God regardless of institutional affiliation.
As we can see from Wesley's excalamation above, the love of God produces joy. The church is necessary and good, but it isn't perfect. If we stop with the love of church, we will eventually be disappointed and hurt. A profession of faith is necessary and good, but it isn't the sum total for the Christian life. New birth is essential, but it only makes us spiritual infants. New birth is where we begin, not end, our discipleship. If we stop with a doctrinal faith, we will eventually be discouraged as we see fellow believers hotly debating it, and ourselves coldly living it. So there is only one place to begin: the love of God. Here is the source, the supply, and the life—of every disciple. The love of God is the goal to which we aspire, and it is the means by which we reach it. A disciple loves God. Charles Wesley set this sentiment to music when he wrote,
Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven, to earth come down,
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus, thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with thy salvation!
Enter every trembling heart.
A Methodist Rejoices in God
"Rejoices evermore!"
—The character of a Methodist, paragraph 6
A Methodist Rejoices in God
Don't be sad, because the joy from the Lord is your strength.
—Nehemiah 8:10
When one of my best friends sends me a personal note or e-mail, he ends the correspondence by using these words: "with His joy." For him, the phrase is much more than a happy-go-lucky way of ending a communication. It captures the spirit of biblical living. My friend has lived long and deeply in God. He and his family have experienced the ups and downs of life, the successes and failures, the joys and sorrows. But on any given day, if I receive a message from this mentor, it will likely end with the words "with His joy."
While standing in the stream of the Christian saints, John Wesley included joy in the first mark of discipleship when he said, "God is the joy of his heart." But rather than let it go at that, he made rejoicing in God the second mark of discipleship. He shows us that joy (like everything else) flows from the love of God, but rather than being blended into love in some kind of amorphous way, joy stands on its own as a distinctive evidence that we are living as Jesus's disciples. With an echo of Nehemiah's words to the people, Wesley was saying, "The joy from the LORD is your strength."
As a teenager in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, I was too young to leave home and join those who were singing, marching, suffering, and dying for freedom. I read everything I could find by Martin Luther King Jr. including Strength to Love. Martin knew what every saint has learned: it takes strength to love, and the primary expression of strength is joy. This is one reason why the civil rights movement included both sermons and singing. It is why the early Methodist movement included John the preacher and Charles the hymn writer. The Character of a Methodist is a treatise that begins and continues like a sermon, but ends with a song. Before Jesus and his disciples left the upper room and headed for Gethsemane, they sang a hymn (Matt 26:30).
What role does joy play in following Christ? Simply this: discipleship is a whole-life response to grace. We make a mistake when we define the spiritual life only in terms of its religious dimensions. We fail to grasp what God is offering us when we limit it to the cognitive element. Joy is the word used by Christians in every age to describe the comprehensive response we make out of our whole being to God's love. That's why Wesley made joy the second mark of a disciple. And from that simple word joy, he moved on to further define it.
He begins with happiness. He says that a disciple is "happy in God." Wesley was trained in classical thought, which understood happiness in terms of the Greek concept of eudaemonism. Don't let the strangeness of the word throw you. It is the reason why Wesley was quick to name joy as a mark of discipleship. Far from being a fleeting or superficial emotion that only occurs when we are getting our way, classical "happiness" is a deeply ethical word that means the harvest of a life given over to righteousness. The bond of being loved by God and loving God in return produces a quality of life that can only be found in a relationship with God. But when it is, happiness is the life of virtue and goodness that emerges. For Wesley, happiness of this sort was so powerful and transformative he used the word to begin each of the Beatitudes in his translation of the New Testament. For him, it was the hallmark of the more-often used word blessed. The Common English Bible also translates the Beatitudes with the term: "Happy are people who have pure hearts, because they will see God.... Be full of joy and be glad, because you have a great reward in heaven" (Matt 5:8, 12).
When we have this happiness, we have peace—peace based on the fact that perfect love (the union of God's love for us with our love for God) casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Joy is a mark of discipleship that gives us confidence and courage. This is an essential ingredient because as long as we evaluate our Christian life in terms of what others think of us, we will play it safe, which is to live in fear. Perfect love is the genesis of courage—courage rooted in love—courage that fills us with joy. It is different from a bull-in-a-china-shop spirituality, which claims to be courageously prophetic when it is actually only obnoxious. Instead of this, we live in joyful peace knowing that when we are faithful to God we are living not only as God intends but doing so in the right spirit.
E. Stanley Jones made this kind of happiness one of the hallmarks of his message. By using words remarkably similar to Wesley, he wrote, "It is no mere accident that joy follows [from] love. Joy is a by-product of love." He tells of passing by a place in Los Angeles that had this sign on the outside: Jones Jolly Joint. He wrote, "I laughed and said, 'That's me on the inside.'" Wesley would have liked that way of putting it, for the joy he has in mind for disciples comes from deep within—from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who produces the fruit of the Spirit in and through us, beginning with love, and then joy—joy with peace and patience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five Marks of a Methodist by Steve Harper. Copyright © 2015 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
"Character","Chapter 1" A Methodist Loves God,
"Chapter 2" A Methodist Rejoices in God,
"Chapter 3" A Methodist Gives Thanks,
"Chapter 4" A Methodist Prays Constantly,
"Chapter 5" A Methodist Loves Others,
"On Your Marks",