UMR Communications is offering the latest headlines in the RSS format.
Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Searching the Scriptures Andrew C. Thompson, Mar 4, 2010
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Editor’s note: This is the third in a multi-part series on the means of grace in Christian practice.
I’ve made the case in the last two columns that the means of grace are centrally important aspects of our discipleship. Becoming a disciple of Jesus means learning more fully of the salvation Jesus brings. And likewise, we experience salvation’s healing as we grow closer to Jesus.
St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians speaks salvation in terms of building the body of Christ through a common increase in the maturity of our faith and knowledge. Paul then says, “We must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (4:15).
The means of grace are really about how that growth happens. And since I made the case for the importance of our participation in the means of grace previously, today I’m going to start looking at some specific examples of the means of grace.
Our Wesleyan tradition divides the “ordinary” means of grace into two main categories: those instituted by Jesus Christ in the New Testament and those that we find by practical experience to be means of grace as we live out our discipleship. For sake of ease, we’ll refer to them as instituted means of grace and prudential means of grace.
A good place to start is with the Bible. Christians have an intuitive sense that the Bible is important—after all, they hear sermons based on biblical texts each week, and it is to the Bible that we go to learn about Jesus. But the Bible is more than an encyclopedia of facts about God. As a means of grace, it is an instrument of our transformation.
Let me be clear: The Bible cannot save us. Only Jesus can do that. That’s a point Jesus makes himself, so I think it’s worth making here.
When Jesus was confronted by opponents who thought his acts of healing were violating Sabbath laws, he responded by giving a principle for how to read the Scriptures: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life,” Jesus told them. Then he went on, “It is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40, ESV).
Jesus is making a point about means and ends. So this is the perfect place to start thinking about those practices that make up the means of grace.
The Bible’s importance—as the word of God—is that it is the prime authority pointing us to Jesus. Our Church’s official doctrine recognizes that when it says, “The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Article V). Put simply, it’s the place where we can come to know who Jesus is.
John Wesley keyed in on the phrase from John 5:39—“searching the Scriptures”—when he wanted to talk about how our study of the Bible can be a means of grace. The Bible itself can’t give grace. It’s an object, and sitting on your beside table unopened it will do you no good whatsoever. But when we enter into a practice of reading, meditating and hearing the word of God in Scripture, then we find that we are indeed drawn closer to Christ.
In fact, that’s just the way Wesley put it in the instructions he gave to his preachers to practice searching the Scriptures as a means of grace. “Do you use all the means of grace?” he asked, and then extended his question to include three main ways of engaging the Bible. In Wesley’s own words:
“Reading: Constantly, some part of every day; regularly, all the Bible in order; carefully, with the Notes; seriously, with prayer before and after; fruitfully, immediately practicing what you learn there?
“Meditating: At set times? by any rule?
“Hearing: Every morning? carefully; with prayer before, at, after; immediately putting in practice? Have you a New Testament always about you?”
When I see the way he describes engaging the Bible, I immediately think of our Church’s most significant development in biblical study for laypeople over the past 25 years: Disciple Bible Study. If you’ve gone through the original Disciple curriculum, you know that the subtitle for Disciple I is “Becoming Disciples Through Bible Study.”
That idea is deeply Wesleyan in that it points to the real reason for searching the Scriptures. We don’t do it so we can win at a game of Bible trivia. We do it because reading, hearing and meditating upon the word of God in Scripture is a transformative practice! It draws us closer to Jesus Christ, and in that sense, opens us up more fully to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
I’m aware that a too-strong focus on the role of practices like the means of grace in our salvation can open Wesleyans up to the age-old charge of “works righteousness.” Wesley himself was sensitive to that issue.
In his sermon, “The Means of Grace,” he says, “We know that there is no inherent power in the words that are spoken in prayer, in the letter of Scripture read, the sound thereof heard, or the bread and wine received in the Lord’s Supper; but that it is God alone who is the giver of every good gift, the author of all grace . . . whereby through any of these there is any blessing conveyed to our soul.”
So we want to be careful to always emphasize that all saving grace is a free gift of God. But the fact remains that the means of grace are also given to us. And our experience through using them is that they help us to know salvation ever more fully!
One of Wesley’s favorite spiritual authors, Thomas à Kempis, writes in his classic The Imitation of Christ: “As iron cast into fire loses its rust and becomes glowing white, so he who turns completely to God is stripped of his sluggishness and changed into a new man.”
If grace is that transforming fire, then the means of grace are the kiln wherein it is stoked. And the more we use them, the more we’ll find our rust burned away and our souls healed.
Andrew Thompson
