Grace infuses us with the nature of God
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When Methodists speak of grace they speak of a life of holiness.
This was the teaching of John Wesley, Methodism’s founder. For him, grace is an active work of God leading to holiness.
Through “prevenient grace” God loves and accepts a person. By this prevenient grace the Holy Spirit draws a person toward recognizing Jesus Christ, who is God’s provision for making humanity holy.
Once a person expresses faith in Christ that person experiences God’s “justifying grace,” receiving the assurance of God’s love and acceptance.
Simultaneously with justification, God empowers the person through “sanctifying grace” to lead a life of holiness which ultimately finds its goal in Christian perfection, a state in which a person is motivated to act only out of love of God and love of neighbor.
To aid in this growth toward holiness, Wesley admonished his followers to attend upon the “means of grace,” such as public worship, receiving Holy Communion and fasting, all of which nourish the soul.
To share the age-old Sunday school adage, then, that grace is “unmerited favor” is only to tell half the truth.
While we do receive a gift from God in the love God offers us, grace propels us to enact a life of holiness that allows the glory of God to break into the world through us.
More than call us to action, grace transforms our very being.
Grace infuses us with the nature of God such that we participate in the glorious existence of the Holy One. It is out of the overflow of this transformed nature that we are able to produce thoughts, words and deeds which bring the love, mercy, justice and peace of God to the world.
Put more simply: To claim to be a recipient of grace is to claim to be in the process of becoming a saint, a word that literally means “a holy one.”
It is when we divide grace from holiness that we often stumble. When grace is no longer joined to holiness we are free to treat grace as an entitlement and holiness as do-goodism.
Grace apart from holiness is simply the love of God for me with no content or expectation for my life to change. It is my gift that I can take without ever returning to Christ to offer my thanks for saving me, as the nine cleansed lepers did.
Holiness apart from the empowering work of grace is an impossibility. So, we tame it to become good works that anyone can accomplish out of a humanitarian impulse.
Christ, indeed God, is not necessary to such works. We become like the Church in Ephesus in Revelation 2: those of noteworthy deeds who have forgotten our first love.
As Christians, and especially as Methodists, we are called by grace to be holy. We are called to be holy even as the one Jesus Christ called Abba is holy. And, by grace, this is what we are transformed to be.
The Rev. Mark R. Teasdale, a member of the Baltimore-Washington Conference, is the E. Stanley Jones Instructor in Evangelism and Doctor of Ministry program director at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill.
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