May 3, 2022
The means of grace are wonderful ways to encounter God and grow in your relationship with Jesus. Sometimes, however, we confuse the means with the end. Join us this week to explore a few misunderstandings around the means of grace.
The means of grace are opportunities to grow in our understanding and experience of God’s love. It’s all too easy to think that reading the scriptures, prayer, or Holy Communion is the point. The love of God we know in Jesus is the point.
Let’s allow John Wesley to speak to us again.
In Wesley’s message, Sermon 16: The Means of Grace, he writes:
“But in process of time, when the love of many waxed cold, some began to mistake the means for the end, and to place religion rather in doing those outward works, than in a heart renewed after the image of God. They forgot that “the end of” every “commandment is love, out of a pure heart,” with “faith unfeigned;” the loving the Lord their God with all their heart, and their neighbour as themselves; and the being purified from pride, anger, and evil desire, by a “faith of the operation of God.”
The end goal of the means of
grace is a life transformed by the love of God we know in
Jesus.
Relationships, earning God’s love, and God’s preferred patterns for the means of grace are a few other topics we cover in the episode on the Misunderstandings of the means of grace.
Read More about John Wesley
Explore the Scripture mentioned in the Episode
Ephesians 2:8-9 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.