THE RISE AND FALL

Three Simple Rules:

STAY IN LOVE WITH GOD

Colossians 2:6-7

God gives us means of grace to

stay in relationship.

A sermon preached by

Dr. William O. (Bud) Reeves

First United Methodist Church

Hot Springs, Arkansas

March 15, 2009

How do you stay in love? We often look to couples who have been married for a long time to give us examples. A friend of mine in Oklahoma had a couple in his church who were celebrating their 40^th anniversary. He asked them how they kept their marriage fresh. The husband said, “We go out to eat twice a week. …I go on Tuesdays, and she goes on Thursdays!”

A pastor in Michigan had a couple named Ralph and Janice who were celebrating their 50^th anniversary. So at the men’s group meeting he asked Ralph to come forward and share how he had lived with the same woman for 50 years. Ralph said, "Well, I treated her with respect and spent money on her—but mostly I took her traveling on special occasions."

The pastor asked, "Trips to where?"

"For our 25th anniversary," Ralph answered, "I took her to Beijing, China."

The men nodded and murmured in appreciation. Then the pastor said, "What a terrific example you are to husbands, Ralph. So tell us where you're going now for your 50th anniversary."

Ralph replied, "I'm going to go back and get her."[1]

These are not best-practice examples of staying in love. Nevertheless, whether you’re a married couple, or have a good friend, or have a relationship with a parent or a child, even if you’re a brother or a sister to someone, you live with this issue. How do you stay in love with one another? How do you keep the relationships in your life alive? There are various relationship tools that help us to maintain ties with people—things like unconditional love, respect, kindness, encouragement, responsibility, communication. These are the cornerstones that build the foundations of our relationships. But no matter what kind of relationship you’re in, one thing is universal. Relationships are work. They don’t happen easily. You have to pay attention or you’ll lose them. Being in relationship, staying in love, requires discipline and practice.

So does our relationship with God. Like any relationship, it takes work to stay in love with God. It’s not just a matter of having an initial experience of God—accepting Christ, receiving forgiveness, entering the process of salvation. It’s more than just getting your spiritual ticket punched and then waiting on the train to heaven. The Christian journey is all about staying in relationship to God, learning and growing, being transformed day by day into the image of Christ. John Wesley called this relationship sanctification—being made holy. Paul wrote about it in Colossians: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”[2]

God gives us a plan for doing this. There are certain practices that open up our lives to the grace of God. If we do these things, it is easier to maintain a closeness to our heavenly Father. Wesley called these practices “means of grace,” or the “ordinances of God.” His third general rule goes like this: “It is expected of all … that they should continue to evidence their desire of salvation, Thirdly: By attending upon all the ordinances of God; such are: the public worship of God, the ministry of the Word, either read or expounded, the Supper of the Lord, family and private prayer, searching the Scriptures, and fasting or abstinence.”[3] Since “attending on the ordinances” sounds kind of archaic, Bishop Reuben Job restated the third general rule as “Stay in love with God.”[4] These are some of the practices that convey the grace of God to us. It’s not an exhaustive list. In other places Wesley talks about Christian conversation with other believers as a means of grace. Service, especially missional service to the needy, is a means of grace. For me, music is a means of grace. Whatever opens up your heart to the Spirit of God, whatever practice draws you close to Jesus, do those things to stay in love.

The third simple rule is what empowers the other two. You can try to “Do no harm” and “Do good” under your own power, but it will ultimately leave you exhausted. But if you rely on the strength of God, maintained by practicing the disciplines of faith, you will receive power to perform. This is the engine that drives the car. The more you practice the means of grace, the more you receive the power. The more sensitive you are to the Spirit. The more in tune you are with the will of God.

Darrell Waltrip is one of the stars of the NASCAR circuit. He’s a race car driver. Over the years of successfully doing what he does, he has developed an ear for listening to the car he is driving. He told an interviewer: “Racing drivers must use all their senses. When you're in tune with the car, it speaks to you with a small voice. When something's happening, you smell it; you hear it in the changing tone of the engine. If my car was starting to go, my senses would come alive.” If you don’t pay attention to the signals, the results can be devastating in terms of accidents, expense, and injury. Waltrip says, “Several times I've had the crew pull an engine out of a car when it was running fine. ‘I don't know what's wrong,’ I'd say, ‘but something is.’ They'd pull the engine. ‘You were right,’ they'd admit later. ‘We were scuffing a piston,’ or, ‘It was losing a lobe on a camshaft,’ or, ‘The rod bearings were about ready to fly out of the thing.’”[5]

I have no idea what Darrell just said there. But I do know that when you practice the means of grace, you can listen to the still, small voice of God, pay attention to the Spirit’s signals, receive the power, and avoid a crash.

Tony Jones, in his book, The Sacred Way, compares this relationship to learning a sport:

A common theme in modern Christianity has been that head knowledge is how one becomes more adept at following Christ: the more you know, the better you'll do. But in fact, that hasn't proven to be true.

Instead, it seems the Christian life is more like being a baseball shortstop: A young player can watch videos, read books by the greatest shortstops of all time, and listen to coaches lecture on what makes a good shortstop; but what will make him a truly good shortstop is getting out on the field and practicing. The only way he'll really get a feel for the game is to field ground ball after ground ball, to figure out when to play the ball on a short hop, when a pull-hitter is at bat, and how far to cheat toward second base when the double play is on. The more practice he has, the better he'll be.

Getting a "feel for the game" in following Jesus is much the same. You can listen to innumerable sermons and read countless books, but the true transformation happens only when you practice the disciplines that lie at the heart of the faith. As the disciplines are practiced, your life becomes more attuned to God's life, and you become more "at one" with the rhythms of creation. Like a finely trained athlete, you can anticipate the movement on the field; like a world-class pianist, you actually inhabit the music as you take notes on the page and give them life; like an expert carpenter, you run your hands over the grain of the wood and see what this rough cut can become.[6]

I saw a great example of this process this week in our Lenten devotional book. Have you been reading these? Some of our church members have put together some great devotionals for the season of Lent. Last Wednesday, Caroline Shults talked about going to Sunday School as a child. Her grandmother sparked her interest in Scripture and gave Caroline her first Bible, which was inscribed with these words from Second Timothy: “Study to show thyself approved unto God; a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”[7] Then Caroline wrote these words: “I confess that it took many years of reading to see and understand what that phrase meant. God in His infinite wisdom had used mankind to share with his fellow man or woman the true meaning of Holy Scriptures. That meaning does not come easily. It is understood as one gives himself or herself to God’s Holy Spirit and prays for understanding as one struggles with the problems of life.”[8] There is one of our own who understands what it means to stay in love with God.

Unfortunately, we don’t always stay in love with God very well, do we? What happens when we fail to live our faith, when we neglect the means of grace, when we do not practice our spiritual disciplines? Well, what happens to any relationship you don’t work on? You grow stale. Distance develops. The spark of love grows dim, and the ties can be broken. You run out of gas.

Several years ago, the Boeing company finished a labor of love—completely restoring the last Boeing 307 Stratoliner, the first pressurized commercial airplane. No expense was spared to make it absolutely authentic, down to the fabrics and knobs. Six months after it was restored, this beautiful antique airplane crashed into Elliot Bay in Seattle. It didn’t crash because the old engines failed, and there was no problem with the wing or tail controls. The plane crashed because the crew had forgotten to refuel the engines.[9]

When we try to live the Christian life without the means of grace, it’s like trying to fly without refueling. We will crash and burn. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your church is, how well you’re dressed, how nice the car you drove to church. It doesn’t matter if you have the biggest leather-bound Bible they make, or if you’re a member of the smartest Sunday School class in the church. All that matters is, are you staying in love with God?

Every Lent we tell the story of the crash of Peter. When Jesus was arrested, Peter followed him to the house of Caiaphas the high priest. As they questioned Jesus inside, the bystanders questioned Peter. They knew he was a Galilean disciple. Three times Peter denied even knowing Jesus. When the cock crowed, Peter realized that he had done just as Jesus said he would, and he broke down in tears. Before the day was over, he saw his Lord crucified and laid in a tomb.

Some time later, Peter got a second chance. By the sea of Galilee, the risen Christ appeared to some of the disciples who were out fishing. As they sat by the lake, Jesus asked Peter three times, just as many times as he had denied him, “Simon, do you love me?” Three times Peter answered, “Lord, you know I do.” In the end, he stayed in love. In the end, that’s all that matters. Yes, you need to follow the rules. But the rules receive their power from being in love.

Lent is a time when we focus on the practices that keep us close to God: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. These are the tools of our relationship with God. Lent is “Tool Time” for the church.

Do you remember the sitcom “Home Improvement” that was popular a few years ago? Tim Allen played Tim Taylor, who was the host of a home repair show called “Tool Time.” Much of the humor in the “Tool Time” segments came through the accidents that Tim Taylor had on the set of the show. For a guy who was supposed to be an expert at home repair, he was incredibly accident-prone.

There was once a rabbi who encouraged his disciples to be accident-prone. He taught that experience of God can never be planned or achieved. He said, "They are spontaneous moments of grace, almost accidental."

His student asked, "Rabbi, if [the experience of God] is just accidental, why do we work so hard doing all these spiritual practices?"

The rabbi replied, "To be as accident-prone as possible."[10]

This Lent, use these tools to be as accident-prone as possible. Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God by practicing the means of grace. Maybe you will bump into God. Maybe you will stumble into life. Amen!