God’s Gift of Grace at Christmas

The word grace is the term used for the free, unmerited, no-strings-attached gift of a relationship of love that God offers to people everywhere. It’s accepting that relationship of love, says Paul, . . . and not anything that we do . . . that saves us from the life of sin and death and brings us into a new experience of life itself.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? After all, we Americans are achievers. We’re hard working, goal-oriented people. There’s no free lunch, we say. You get what you pay for. To our ears, this notion of salvation, the notion of our relationship with God as being purely a gift, sounds strange. It doesn’t fit with what we learn about life in our culture.

And Jesus told stories of . . .  

• a lost son who squandered in loose living the inheritance he received from his father in advance and yet was given a party by his father when he came back home,
• the eleventh hour worker who was paid the same wage as the ones who had worked hard in the vineyard all day,
• the great banquet to which the invitation went out to all those who had never been invited anywhere in their entire lives.
 

In eighteenth-century England there was a man who pursued salvation, who sought a sense of wholeness and peace within himself, with others, and with God. He tried through scholarship to find what he was searching for, becoming an avid student and then a member of the faculty at prestigious Oxford University. He pursued salvation through religious zeal by becoming a priest in the Anglican Church and even a missionary to the American colonies. His search for salvation took him in the direction of social action as he visited prisoners, tutored the poor, and spoke fiercely against such things as slavery and the abuse of alcohol.

John Wesley’s compulsive attempts to redeem himself, to secure himself, to prove himself before God didn’t even begin to bring him peace or a sense of wholeness within himself, with the world, with God. He sought inner assurance of his own worth and identity. He worked very hard to find it, but it eluded him.

It was in the evening of May 24, 1738 when he attended a meeting of a religious society that was studying Martin Luther’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, that John Wesley had a meaningful experience in which he felt his “heart strangely warmed” that proved to be pivotal for him. 

What is typically referred to as John Wesley’s “heart warming experience” was preceded by thirty-five years of attempting to earn his own sense of worth, acceptance, and God’s favor. Wesley never knew any real peace in his life until he came to internalize the truth that real peace comes to us only through our acceptance of God’s gift of love through Jesus Christ. 

That experience of John Wesley is the basis of United Methodism. The notion of God’s grace as a gift and how that gift transforms our lives is what undergirds all that we are about and everything that we do. In a world that proclaims salvation through achieving, accumulating, winning, knowing, and doing, we are part of a church that puts its major stress on God’s gracious gift of love as ultimately the only way to experience the sense of wholeness and peace that most of us long for and search for.

A true experience of God’s grace is one that over time transforms the recipient of that grace into a new creature with new priorities, a new focus in life, and a new understanding of what it means to be a human being.

That’s what we celebrate in this season: the gift of the birth of God’s love into the world, and into our lives, in ways that transform us and lead us into an experience of peace and wholeness that God intends for us.

May your heart be strangely warmed in this season. See you in Church!

Grace and Peace,