Flashlight faith

God calls us to follow even when we can’t clearly see the path ahead.

 (A sermon delivered March 17, 2024, at Spring Hill United Methodist Church, from the Ephesians 2: 1, 4-5, 8-10.)

 We are nearing the end of our Lenten journey preparing us for the joyful season of Easter.

 Lent is a journey of transformation, from captivity to sin to freedom in grace. The journey always begins with repentance, turning away from who we were, toward who we hope to become. The point of repentance is not to make you feel bad but to change you.

 Even if you can’t feel it happening, every day of Lent can involve some movement, large or small, toward greater wholeness and closer relationship with God.  Whether you recognize it or not, you are on a similar spiritual journey every day of your life.

 I believe that a “golden thread” runs through your life. That golden thread is called grace, and It’s woven throughout your story, and it stitches your story together into a coherent whole. You may not recognize it at first, but it’s there.

 To show you a bit how this works, I’ll briefly explore a familiar moment from the life of John Wesley, the chief founder of the Methodist movement.

 I’ve got a new book out about it. It’s titled Change of Heart: A Wesleyan Spirituality. I’ll be happy to sell you a copy, at a substantial discount from the cover price, but my purpose this morning is not to sell books, but to sell that change of heart that God wants to make in each of us.

 If you look on the south side of our worship space you’ll see two faces that also are on the cover of my book.  This is the only church I know that has both Wesley brothers so prominently displayed in its sanctuary. That’s John Wesley on the left, Charles on the right.  John is the sterner of the two, Charles the more congenial.

My book has a lot of their biography in it, certainly more than I first thought would be necessary.

But the more I looked at their lives and their theology, the more I realized that so much of their theology grows out of their biography; the story of the golden thread running through their lives; the story of their personal experience of God through daily events, through reflection on Scripture, and through inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

I’ll focus on John this morning. His change of heart involves moving from the false gospel of personal moral striving to the real gospel of God’s grace.

He grows up surrounded by a theology of grace, but like many others of his day, he completely misses the experience of grace. And until he actually experiences God’s grace first-hand, he is one confused and miserable human being.

Early in his life, he is certain that growing in Christ involves moral striving.

Like a lot of people, then and now, he pictures God as a loving ogre – that is, someone who loves you only if you do the right things. This is the kind of heavenly taskmaster that’s just waiting for you to make a mistake so it can clobber you – a giant jerk in the sky who likes to dish out painful lessons to stimulate your spiritual growth. That kind of monster is far from the God of the Bible – although, sadly, many people still suffer from ordering their lives around that awful illusion.

When the young John Wesley starts attending Oxford University, he is convinced that he must earn his salvation by being as good a person as possible.

He checks his spiritual temperature constantly, and he keeps a meticulous record in a journal. If he’d had a computer, he would have kept a spreadsheet with all the virtues listed, and several times a day he would check boxes “yay” or “nay” and 1 through 10 for how well he’s doing right then.

Even some of his friends think he’s a bit looney. But somehow he remains open to hearing the voice of God in his life, and several experiences convince him that there is a better way.

 Looking back, he sees that God works in his life “by degrees.” Several events are pivot points for him, points of repentance and conversion to a new way of thinking and living.

 And isn’t that the way it is for all of us? Looking back on your own life, can you see a straight path of spiritual growth – or, for that matter, a straight path for any other kind of growth?

 Don’t you see, as the writer Anne Lamott says, that we don’t move to faith by one giant leap of faith but by a series of staggers from one safe place to another. We don’t have leaps of faith so much as we have smaller staggers of faith.

 You can see some of that in the famous Aldersgate experience that we Methodists make so much of.

 John Wesley is 35 years old at the time, and in a state of great spiritual distress.

 In 1736, he and Charles sail off to America. They’re going to provide spiritual guidance to the English colonists in Georgia, and they’re going to convert the Indians.

 But neither the white settlers nor the Indians care much for their message. Charles is forced to leave when his health breaks. John flees just ahead of a mob that might string him up if they catch him.

 He is devastated. On the ship over, he befriended some other missionaries, German Lutherans called Moravians. He’s astonished by the depth of their faith, and he desperately wants the certainty of salvation that they have.

 “The faith I want,” he says, “is a sure trust and confidence in God that through the merits of Christ my sins are forgiven and I am reconciled to the favor of God.”

Back in Britain after the disaster in America, the brothers find themselves still out to sea, as it were. They both preach salvation by faith alone, not salvation by works, as most other preachers do. Salvation by faith alone is a long-established doctrine of the Church of England, but it’s not in style right then, and John and Charles get into deep trouble for preaching it.

In fact, they are barred from preaching in most churches. It gets so bad that John isn’t even allowed to preach in the church where his father had been pastor for nearly all of John’s life – so he preaches in the church graveyard, standing on his father’s gravestone.

It’s not so much what you preach, one friend says. It’s how you preach it! You’re so unconventional! You’re so emotional! You stir people up!

On the evening of May 25, 1738, John Wesley is the one who is stirred up.

He has a rough day spiritually, one of those days that you know must be preparing you for something – but it’s just as likely something bad as it is something good.

He’s in a small group on Aldersgate Street studying the book of Romans. About a quarter before nine, while they’re discussing the change that God works in the human heart through faith in Christ, God reaches out and touches Wesley’s heart.

 Suddenly, he recalls later, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

 He likely knew this all along, intellectually, but he’d never felt it. He’d never experienced it. Now, suddenly, he realizes that God not only loves everyone, God loves him specifically. Christ died not only for the whole world, but also specifically for John Wesley. And he can live in the confidence not only that God loves him but that God wants what is best for him.

It is a liberating experience. It changes everything. Of course, change of such depth takes awhile to sink in fully, so it’s months before he truly lives out his newfound sense of God’s grace. But he gets there.

And so can we, if we hang in there faithfully, rolling with the inevitable punches of life and looking to Jesus, the perfecter of our faith, as a guide to all things.

It takes John Wesley nearly half his life to learn that the grace that Jesus offer is not something you earn. It’s something you’ve given. It’s free to you, though it cost God dearly to offer it to you.

Truth is, you can’t make God love you any more than God already does. At the same time, you can’t make God love you any less than God already does.  God loves you, period. Loving is what God does because, as the first letter of John says, God is love.

Rudy Rasmus, a United Methodist pastor in Houston, has a wonderful way of putting it. He says, “God loves you, and there’s nothin’ you can do about it.”

Do you believe that? If you believe it, I’d ask you to turn to a neighbor near you and say, “God loves you, and there’s nothin’ you can do about it.” Now turn to another neighbor say, “God loves you, and there’s nothin’ you can do about it,”

 Does hearing that make you feel good? It ought to. Does telling that to another person make you feel good? It ought to.

 That little saying captures much of the heart of the gospel. But there’s a vital piece still missing. God surely loves you, and there’s nothing you can do to make God love you any more, or any less.

But you can grow closer to this loving God. You can grow closer to being the loving person God created you to be, by allowing God to change you from within, by daily putting on more of the likeness of Christ, by daily allowing yourself to be transformed into the image of Christ, who is the perfect image of God the Father.

It can be a long and sometimes painful journey. So often we fight it, clinging to a cherished past and turning away from an uncertain future.

The journey is hard because faith is a living thing, a breathing thing. Some days you feel fit to run a marathon or climb a mountain. Other days, you just can’t catch your breath. Some days you feel right on course. Other days, you wonder if you’re even going in the right direction.

. . .

I have reached that point in life where I don’t like to drive at night.

I’m sure some of you share the feeling. It seems like I’m always driving ahead of my headlights. They just don’t provide enough light for me to see the road far enough ahead for me to feel comfortable.

But I’ve learned that in many aspects of my life, I don’t need to see that far ahead.

Some 30 years ago, I decided to abandon my career as a journalist at The Kansas City Star and follow God’s call into ministry.

It was a scary time for both Linda and me, and for our two daughters, too. We weren’t at all sure how this was going to work out.

In more recent years, there was a time when Linda was working half-time in pastoral care at Church of the Resurrection and quarter-time as pastor of the United Methodist church in Linwood – and oh, yes, she was also completing her master’s project in seminary.

It was a tough time. We weren’t sure it would ever end – and if it did, how it would end. But we made it – not because we could see all the road ahead, but because we let God guide us day by day and step by step.

There’s a song in our hymnal by Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant. It’s titled, “Thy Word.” It’s inspired by Psalm 119, verse 105. In King James language, it says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”

God provides just enough light to guide our steps on the path ahead. No more, no less, just enough light for us to walk in faith.

I’ve heard it called “flashlight faith.” You know how narrow a beam of light that a flashlight throws. You can’t see much – just enough to pick a path to where you’re going.

But that’s enough, isn’t it?

I don’t need to see all the road ahead. I don’t need to see what’s over the hill or around the curve. I just need to see where I’m walking now. I just need to see where my next staggering step will take me.

God will order my steps and be with me every step of the way.

As Saint Patrick said, Christ with me and within me, before me, behind me, beneath me, above me, on my right, and on my left.

Flashlight faith is good enough. It will get you where you need to go. Because God loves you, no matter what. Because you are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ for all the good works and all the good things God has in mind for you.

Don’t ever forget it. Live it, one step at a time. I invite you: Let’s stagger into God’s future together, shall we?

Ephesians 2: 1, 4-5, 8-10 (NLT)

            Once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins.

            But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead.

            It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!

            God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God.

            Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.

            For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.