The Scandal Of God's Grace

Most of you will recognize the name, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. He was a priest in the Church of England in the 1700’s who preached up and down the British Isles and organized people into small groups everywhere he could with a format that brought thousands of people into a new life and a living relationship with Jesus Christ and empowered them to do incredible works of service for those in need. He made real disciples for Jesus Christ and he made a lot of them.

Historians have asked why it was that France exploded in the French Revolution, with the mass beheadings by guillotine and years of turmoil that ended up in the dictatorship of Napoleon that plunged all of Europe into war, while England with much of the same social injustice as France did not explode. Some historians say that the primary reason that England didn’t explode was the ministry of John Wesley, who turned the hearts of England, first to God and then to the poor.

John Wesley was a preacher of grace. He emphasized what he called prevenient grace, God’s Spirit working in our hearts even before we believe, justifying grace, by which our sins are forgiven by the death and resurrection of Christ on our behalf, and sanctifying grace, by which the life of God fills our souls and makes us new.

But let me read you a very curious entry from John Wesley’s journal, dated Sunday, May 14, 1738, a day that he was guest preacher in two churches in London. “I preached in the morning at St. Ann’s, Aldersgate; and in the afternoon at the Savoy chapel, free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ. I was quickly apprized, that at St. Ann’s, likewise, I am to preach no more.”

Wesley preached “free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ,” and they told him, you’re never preaching here again. It wasn’t long before pulpits all up and down England were closed to John Wesley. The only way he could get an audience was often to just go out into the marketplace, or along the road where coal miners walked on the way to work, sing a few hymns to draw a crowd, and then preach to anybody who would listen.

When he went back to his home church, where his father had been pastor for years, the new pastor wouldn’t let him speak in the church. So he went out into the church graveyard and preached outside, standing on his father’s gravestone, figuring nobody would deny him that pulpit.

And up and down England the good church people rejected John Wesley while the unchurched masses came out to hear him in droves and found new life in Christ through his preaching and his small groups. And the day did come when some churches could no longer deny his anointing from God and he became widely respected. But there was something in the churches that found it very hard to hear a message of salvation by grace. And I don’t think they were that much different from most churches today.

We’ve been working our way through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. We’ve already spent three Sundays in the first ten verses of chapter 2. So far we’ve talked about the three big enemies that we have going against us, the degrading influence of the world around us, the temptations and deceptions of the devil and our own selfishness, which Paul calls the flesh. Those are in verses 2 and 3 of our text. Instead of standing up and accepting God’s call to rule this earth in love and righteousness, we have all followed these three enemies of our souls, every one of us. And so Paul is clear in his letter to the Ephesians, and in his letter to the Romans and in his letters to the Galatians, Corinthians and Thessalonians, as well as letters to his sidekicks, Timothy and Titus, that we are really, deeply, messed up by these enemies of our souls, the world, the devil and the flesh. In our text for today, Ephesians 2, he tells the Ephesians that they were dead through their trespasses and sins.

The combination of the world, the devil and our own selfishness leaves us spiritually dead. A physically dead person has no appetite for food. A spiritually dead person has no appetite for God and can go for days without a serious talk with God. They can even go to church without a serious talk with God. Think about that. A spiritually dead person can even go to church without a serious talk with God.

A physically dead person knows nothing about what is going on around them. A spiritually dead person has no sense of the wonder of God’s creation around them. It’s just stuff, just a meaningless, empty world to be exploited.