January 27, 2009
Seeing in the New Year, John Wesley Style: Step 4, Receive Christ as Lord
This series has somewhat run away with me. It’s about seeing in the New Year and here I am, adding my update in the last week of January. Well, for what it’s worth, here’s the last bit of Wesley’s Directions, and a couple of thoughts.
This last section is all about receiving Christ as your Lord. Those who give themselves over to sin or the world say “Sin, I am yours” or “world, I am yours”. Christians, Wesley says, must be people who say “Christ, I am yours”. Wesley makes this pretty practical by making two qualifications, both of which were quite convicting for me. If Christ is really your Lord, you’ve got to let him give you your job and your station. You can’t pick an choose. It’s here that you get some of the most well known passages from Wesley, and the only ones which really make it through to a modern Wesleyan covenant service:
“Christ has many services to be done, some are more easy and honourable, others more difficult and disgraceful: some are suitable to our inclinations and interests, others are contrary to both: In some we may please Christ and please ourselves, as when he requires us to feed and clothe ourselves, to provide honest things for our own maintenance, indeed there are some spiritual duties that are more pleasing than others; as to rejoice in the Lord, to be blessing and praising God, to be feeding ourselves with the delights and comforts of religion; these are the sweet works of a Christian. But then there are other works where we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves, as in giving and lending, bearing and forbearing, reproving men for their sins, withdrawing from their company, witnessing against their wickedness, confessing Christ and his name when it will cost us shame and reproach, sailing against the wind, swimming against the tide, steering contrary to the time; parting with our ease, our liberties and accommodations for the name of our Lord Jesus.”
We are encouraged to go to Christ, saying
“Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will, put me to doing, put me to suffering, let me be employed for you or laid aside for you, exalted for you or trampled under foot for you, let me be full or let me be empty, let me have all things or let me have nothing. I freely and sincerely resign all to your pleasure and disposal.”
The point is that you can’t call Christ your Lord and then be picky about what he asks you to do. I love studying the Bible, and sharing what I’ve learnt with my Christian friends, I love learning from the greats in church history. I don’t enjoy evangelising my non-Christian friends, working with teenagers, and getting my hands dirty. I want to become the J. I. Packer, the Tim Keller and the Don Carson of Spain, all rolled into one. But can I submit to Christ if he asks me to work with the youth group, be thought a nutter by my peers, never manage to get to Spain and die in obscurity washing the dishes for a small church where few notice what I’m doing? Augustine once said that if you believe the parts of the Bible you like and think are reasonable, all the while discarding the parts you find unpalatable or difficult then it’s not really the Bible you believe, but yourself. It’s the same principle here. If I serve Christ in the fun bits and dodge the messy bits, it’s not really Christ I’m serving but myself.
Much though I found this challenge helpful, I wish there were more of the Cross. Wesley seems to be missing this key part of the Christian’s obedience here. We get “you are not your own” and “glorify God in your body”, but the Bible says “You are not your own for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:19b-20). Maybe we’re supposed to assume it from the section on Christ as priest, but what Wesley presents us with here is a crossless, Christless obedience. Combined with (true) warnings such as “when you have understandingly and heartily resigned and given yourself up to him, resolving forever to be at his command, and at his disposal, then you are Christians indeed and never until then. Christ will be the saviour of none except his servants” I have to start asking whether Wesley’s theology of repentance differs greatly from Islam. Christians repent because of the glory of God and his inherent worthiness, to be sure, but all this is buttressed by the value of Christ’s person, his blood shed at the cross and the grace of the Holy Spirit (see the warning of Heb 10:26-31). Of course, I know Wesley was aware of the distinction, and a casual perusal of his writings would reveal how much he usually laboured that obedience is based on and framed within the love of God in Christ, his trustworthiness and the redemption he has already provided. But it isn’t front and centre here.
This is particularly tragic since, as I said, of the whole treatise, this is probably the only bit which modern British Methodism is really all that familiar with. It’s such a shame that Britain’s Methodists (and a good chunk of the rest of the world’s Methodists) now swear an oath at their covenant service which is crossless, Christless and exclusively moralistic.
I’m going to end this series here because all that’s left is Wesley’s suggestion for a covenant prayer, it’s several pages long, and while you could do a lot worse than read it, I don’t really have the time or the energy to simply copy it out.
I’ve enjoyed reading this book, and it’s got me thinking about Methodism as a whole quite a lot. I love historic Methodism, and its achievements in the 18th century are a continued blessing to the English speaking world and beyond even to the present day. It’s a movement which has the essentials of the Gospel front and centre, and has been backed by a vigour to see other people come to Christ which I can learn a lot from. It’s also the source of the very finest in English hymnody. There’s a lot to be treasured and emulated here.
Ultimately, while it’s probably not harmful, the practise of the covenant renewal service in Methodism is somewhat unnecessary. God has already given us an act of covenant renewal – the Lord’s Supper. I wonder how different Methodism would have looked if Wesley had titled this booklet “Directions for participating in the Lord’s Supper”. If we all, week by week, put these sorts of thoughts into our participating in the Lord’s Supper (it was once an event accompanied by quite intense personal preparation, not unlike the covenant service), how would that look?
It strikes me as well that Methodism’s two greatest faults – its subjectivism and its individualism – come out in this booklet. The biblical way to renew the covenant, through the Lord’s Supper, is primarily objective in nature – God makes us objective promises based on historical events, we are primarily recipients. It’s also inherently communal in nature – you can’t take the Lord’s Supper on your own at home.
By contrast here, it is the believer making a covenant with God. Rather than entering the covenant sealed in Christ’s blood, we make our own manmade covenant, saying “and the covenant that I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.” In a day without smoking pots and halved animals, I wonder what we have for a sign of this covenant, that God has in fact ratified it. Don’t get me wrong, the content of the covenant Wesley proposes is essentially identical to the one God has already made, it is the shift from God to man, from objective promise to religious experience that bothers me a bit.
I don’t want to end this on a negative note, because as I said, I enjoyed the book, so I’m going to leave you with a hymn written specially for use at covenant renewal services by John Wesley’s brother, Charles.
Come, let us use the grace divine, and all with one accord,
In a perpetual covenant join ourselves to Christ the Lord;
Give up ourselves, through Jesus’ power, His Name to glorify;
And promise, in this sacred hour, for God to live and die.
The covenant we this moment make be ever kept in mind;
We will no more our God forsake, or cast these words behind.
We never will throw off the fear of God Who hears our vow;
And if Thou art well pleased to hear, come down and meet us now.
Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, let all our hearts receive,
Present with Thy celestial host the peaceful answer give;
To each covenant the blood apply which takes our sins away,
And register our names on high and keep us to that day!
