HIS PLAN

Jeremiah 29:10-14

For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope.

Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

Saved to do God’s Will

John Wesley  the founder of Methodist Movement believed that we are “saved” to establish God’s will in our lives. God’s primary will for us is to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30).  These two loves are inseparable and that God’s love for us leads us to love our neighbor.

John Wesley contended that Paul was writing about loving our neighbors when he penned 1 Corinthians 13 describing love as the greatest Christian virtue (Wesley, “On Charity,” 1.2).  It is the motivating love of God that causes us to love our neighbor:

“ . . . this love sweetly constrains him [the Christian] to love every child of man with the love which is here [1 Cor. 13] spoken of; not with a love of esteem or of complacence . . . but with the love of benevolence, of tender goodwill to all the souls that God has made” (Wesley, “On Charity” 1.2).

Referring to 1 Corinthians 13:3, Wesley writes that acts of mercy ought to flow out of love, otherwise, even though they benefit others, they will not benefit the soul of the giver (Wesley, “On Charity” 3.8). Wesley held that God’s will was established in our lives through renewing our will. He used the term will to refer to motivating emotions such as love, anger, and desire. These include both momentary emotional states and habitual emotional patterns.

Wesley used the term sanctification to describe the inward and outward process of establishing right emotions in a person’s life, which in turn establishes God’s will in a person’s life. God sanctifies us. However, Wesley said that we participate in God’s actions through means of grace; that is, actions that Christians do to participate in God’s sanctification process.

Acts of piety and acts of mercy are two categories of means of grace. Acts of piety include prayer, Bible reading, participating in the Lord’s Supper, etc. Acts of mercy include visiting prisoners and the sick, feeding the hungry, and housing the homeless. All of these acts increase our love of God and neighbor.

Perhaps surprising to us, Wesley wrote that acts of mercy were more important than acts of piety for Christian sanctification; both are essential, but acts of mercy take priority (Wesley, “On Zeal” 2). He wrote in his sermon “On Visiting the Sick” that those who neglect acts of mercy “do not receive the grace they otherwise might.” Even more strongly, Wesley points to the sheep and goats in Matthew 25:34-46 to argue that those who neglect acts of mercy will be weak and feeble in their Christian walk and will be rejected by God. He believes that this is true even for persons who regularly practice acts of piety. For Wesley, acts of mercy sanctify us. That means that they increase our ability to do God’s will – to love God and love our neighbors.