As I mentioned in the introduction in the welcoming, this is the first Sunday of Lent. Just a few days ago, we had Ash Wednesday with the imposition of the ashes, and we talked about how the ashes are dying to ourselves. This is what it’s symbolic of.
Ashes are like death. So, you know, it’s a great uplifting time where we can say, hey, I’m ready to die. But it has to do with dying to ourself and living to God.
One big way, I feel like I should have just started it off like this. Hey, Methodist. Wait, we’re on a new series.
But we’re still Methodist. I mean, this is where Methodism really kicks in, and one of the big things about Methodism that we did talk about is being, having holiness of heart and life. And that holiness of heart and life is what we’re gonna journey through together during this Lenten season, and this holiness continues to grow and manifest itself.
Now, in the early Methodist, when Wesley would say Methodists have holiness of heart and life, I looked around at what different people said about holiness of heart and life. And some of the different things I saw in there were that it was the way of salvation. Remember, the way of salvation is the porch, the door, and the house.
It is the prevenient grace, preventive grace, that prevents us from sinning or nudges us, whether we’re aware of it or not, back to God. It’s God working out way beyond the church and the hearts and minds of people. It is that justifying grace that when we’re nudged just enough, we repent and we come to God.
And that kind of grace works within us, and then it’s the sanctification. Holiness is really tied a lot towards sanctification. In fact, some call it the journey towards full sanctification.
When it’s full sanctification, we’re fully sanctified or perfected in Jesus. In other words, it’s becoming perfected in love. Who’s on a journey to be perfected in love? We should all be on that journey to be perfected in love so that we have that sacrificial love of God, that agape love in us, that when there’s evil in the world, we overcome the evil through love.
When there’s evil within us, we overcome that evil through love. And then another way I just wanted to put it is loving and living like Jesus. If we love and we live like Jesus, that is the holiness of heart and life.
This is the part, as I talked about when we talked about scriptural holiness, holiness is just near and dear to my heart because I felt like we were just trying to ignore holiness. Even Christians were trying to ignore holiness, whereas holiness is holistic. They’re two different words, but they sound the same.
Holiness is holistic. When you’re holy, it doesn’t just mean you’re holy here. It doesn’t just mean you have this time of prayer set aside where you feel the presence of God and you have this holiness in your heart, but it’s your whole life.
It’s like when Holly said or prayed that God wants all of us. You know, not just our Sunday mornings, not just our prayers before bed or when we get up in the morning, but he wants every single part of our life. Holiness of heart and life goes way beyond what most Christians do in the United States today.
And that’s a journey I invite you to come with me on and with one another. Why don’t you just look around at everyone. Look at this journey.
Look at the people we’re gonna go on this journey with. Dana, stop doing this to everyone. We’re going on this journey to be perfected in love.
Isn’t that awesome? That God is going to transform you. God’s gonna transform me. When I say that part, you go, finally.
And we’re gonna walk together on this journey. So the core of what we need, especially as we’re gonna face so many challenges in this world, in our lives, even in Kansas City, what we’ve been going through, the base of what we need as Christians is still faith formation. Ephesians 4 really talks about faith formation.
I’m gonna read these six verses, 11, 12, six verses. But in your spare time, read all of Ephesians 4. Not your spare time. The time you’ve carved out extra during Lent for God.
Read all of Ephesians 4 this week. We’ll have more next week. But read all of Ephesians 4 so you can get the full sense of what Paul is getting at as we grow up and we form our faith.
Will you stand as you are able? Ephesians 4, starting at verse 11 says, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we attain the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be like children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried out by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. The word of God.
For the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
You may be seated. WGN Radio News had a story about angiotensin converting enzyme, or ACE inhibitors. See, do I sound like a professional physician? Oh, thank you.
Some of these medicines are, they help relax the veins and arteries of low to lower blood pressure. You see, when this gene in you is not working as it is designed, the veins can constrict, the veins, the blood vessels can constrict, and then what happens when blood vessels constrict? What goes up? Blood pressure. Now, the interesting thing on the opposite spectrum is that researchers have discovered that certain people are genetically destined or predisposed to excel in athletics.
According to their studies, the ACE gene is longer in athletes than those who are not agile, fast, or well-coordinated in their movements. I think my gene is shrinking as I’m getting older. How does the ACE gene affect athletic performance? You see, it’s been associated with an increased endurance performance at an Olympic level, and similar results of metabolic efficiency have been demonstrated in triathletes.
However, researchers have observed that these people born with a longer ACE must work out to take advantage of their hereditary advantage. To take advantage of it, they have to work out. They could be predisposed to be Michael Jordan.
Okay, actually, everybody here who knows who Michael Jordan is. We’re not that young. That Michael Jordan was, for example, he would go into practice and shoot and do more than everybody else.
It wasn’t that he was just so gifted that he just stepped on the floor. Of course, remember when he transitioned and played baseball and came back to basketball? It took a while to get his muscles back into shape for basketball instead of baseball. No matter how gifted you are, you have to work it out.
No matter how gifted you are in your faith, you also have to work out. Those who receive Christ are capable of a life with spiritual victory. When we become a Christian, we receive the Holy Spirit.
We have the power to say no to sin and yes to righteousness. But as with those genetically predisposed to athletic success, we must work out. Lent is a great time for workout.
Now, if you haven’t worked out in a while, you may be a little sore, a little stiff, have some aches and pains, and it’s hard. Sometimes we make our faith so easy, but when we grow in our faith, it takes work. What is faith forming? If we are gonna form our faith, just like if we form our bodies and equip our bodies, we are equipped.
We equip, we get, the Holy Spirit gives us gifts. We have tools that we have in our faith, tools that we get from scripture, tools that we get from other Christians, tools that we get to equip us in our faith. And there is teaching, teaching about how to be more like Jesus, teaching about Jesus.
Ephesians 4 also talks about building up. That’s where we grow, we strengthen, we empower, we encourage one another. We build up in our faith, and we are built up in our faith.
And it says we come to the knowledge of the Son of God. I mean, that kind of summarizes faith forming, is the knowledge of the Son of God. Not the knowledge of how awesome we are, but the knowledge of how awesome Jesus is.
And then, this is a tough one in today’s world, we speak the truth in love. Some people love to speak the truth and rip others from head to toe. Some people would rather, today a new virtue has been added in these days to lie to spare someone’s feelings.
And it doesn’t, it doesn’t. What works is when we speak the truth in love. How are we gonna overcome the obstacles we have before us unless somebody speaks the truth in love to our souls, so our souls can hear that and receive it and know the knowledge of the Son of God and how we need something more than what we may learn in school or even what we may learn from our friends.
Clinton E. Arnold, who wrote on this Ephesians 4, said this, the goal of ministry is to help all believers grow in the knowledge of Christ and of the core doctrines of faith to mature to a greater Christlikeness and to manifest love for one another in the life of the community. Now there’s a few important points that he has here. One of them is that it’s in the life of the community that we take this journey together.
Another one is that we’re not blown to and fro like somebody in this new age thinking comes up with a new way to interpret the gospel and we go with the flow and we’re tossed about by the winds and the waves. And what those things do is they end up taking away from the divinity of Christ. They end up taking away from the power of God.
They end up taking away from who God wants us to be, which is not who we just naturally are. We can actually be supernatural beings because the Holy Spirit working within us transforms us from who we are naturally to who we are in Christ. And it’s amazing thing.
Colin is in, I think I’ve mentioned it before to the whole group, something called Trail Life. Trail Life is, it’s like a, just a full-on Christian version of Scouts. And so, you know, the main two things they like to do is camp and hike.
And last summer, they had something called the Summer Adventure. And as a dad who calls it, it’s all for the kids, but then the dads go with them. And I like to call it dad torture.
Last summer, to be honest with you, I was in the worst shape of my life. Life. It was, it was bad.
And I was just, you remember, I fractured my hip about a year ago. And I, it took, I was on the crutches for like eight weeks, and then it took several more months to get through it and work through it and strengthen it and do all this stuff. But then in the summer, they had the Summer Adventure.
It sounded so much fun. I just did it. What happened was that the first thing they did was they went to the zoo, the Kansas City Zoo.
Then we camped out in tents. And then the next day, we went to another torture chamber for dads, which was an obstacle course in Kansas City, Kansas, where you not only go up the hills, but there would be obstacles along the way. And like the first one we hit, we went up a really steep hill.
It was about that steep. And then there was a bus parked on, couple of buses parked on that steep hill. And you actually climb in the bus and climb through the bus to get out of there.
And I was glad there were some younger kids and we had to wait on them so I could catch my breath. And then they had other obstacles. I didn’t, I wasn’t able to do all of them like some of the wall climbing and I chose not to do the rope swinging over the mud pit.
Colin did that though, he’s braver than me. And then there were other obstacles with ropes and different things, a teeter-totter kind of obstacle along the way. And the last one was climbing this wall and then you go down this wooden slide.
So splinters would be something else. And then you land on a wooden platform. So you land really hard.
And my knees and my hips were saying no, but my brain that’s telling me I’m still 25 years old was saying you’re gonna do it. And I went down and I hit the bottom and it hurt every joint in my body and I stepped off like nothing was wrong. But the cool thing about that, it was so much work and it was so hard, but we did it together.
You bonded with the dad, you bonded with your son, you bonded with the other people as you did this. The goals of faith forming the first goal that we have to remember, it’s the unity of faith. It’s not just a we’re gonna all get together and agree to disagree kind of thing like we’ve talked about.
It’s a unity of faith. We believe in Jesus Christ. We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit within us.
We believe in the power that comes from reading the scripture that is God inspired. The unity of faith, Paul says, is where we’re joined, we’re connected in Christ. We have, we move to another goal with that unity is the fullness of Christ.
In the fall, we were created in the image of God and in the fall, we marred and dismembered that image of God. So part of the faith walk is to become more of the imago Dei, that’s just the Latin for image of God. To have the fullness of Christ, the perfection and love within us and to be mature adults, entire sanctification.
And that’s adulthood in the faith, not just maturity because you grow up physically, but maturity because you grow up spiritually. So when the waves come in your life, your soul stays strong because of the faith that we have that’s formed within us to strengthen us. So in all that, how do we do faith forming? I think we know.
Worship passionately, love extravagantly, witness boldly, the mission. Worship passionately, say it with me, worship passionately, love extravagantly, witness boldly, but we can’t do that so well on our own. We’ll have obstacles and barriers in our obstacle course of life that we just look at and we say, ah, just walk around.
But when we have brothers and sisters who encourage us, who lift us up, then they can help us get over the wall and move in deeper ways, that’s faith forming. That’s what we’re gonna focus on during Lent. But the question is, we talked about holiness of heart and life, we can talk about faith till we’re blue in the faith face, but the point is, how does it impact our lives? Holiness of heart and life says it goes beyond the church walls, it impedes, and we let God into every facet of our lives.
This comes from family fortification. I want your families to be strong, that nothing Satan brings against us can rock our families, our relationships that spreads into our extended family, our friendships, our church family, our neighborhoods, our community, our country, and the world. What are our relationships like and what is God’s role in those? We’re gonna talk about each of these in depth in the successive weeks.
Fitness focus, our health, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, how does God speak into our health in life, our fitness? And financial foundations. Some of you are going, this isn’t fair, this is not pledge season, and you’re talking about financial stuff. But you’d be surprised how much discipleship has to do with our finances.
If our lives, how much of our lives have to do with how we earn money, how we spend money, how we save money, those financial foundations are an important part of who we are in Jesus Christ. And of course, when you have all that, then you can have future hope. When we have that, we have that future hope that says we can make a plan in life that says we’re gonna make plans that God is gonna be with us.
That everything we do in the future, we know without a shadow of a doubt that God is gonna be with us. Because we have holiness of heart and life, and that holiness doesn’t just end when the sermon ends or when the last song ends or when the blessing ends. It never ends because we have that eternal life that begins when we let that holiness in every part of it.
Let’s pray. Gracious God, this journey of Lent, we take the hands of our brothers and sisters. We open our hearts and our minds to you.
Form within us a faith that is strong, a faith that is not rocked to and fro by the winds and the waves of the world, but a faith that is grounded in scripture, in doctrine, in hope, in faith in Jesus Christ so that we can be holy not only as church people, but we can be holy with every aspect of our lives. During this Lenten season, we invite you to tear down any walls that separate us from you. What do we have that is ours that we just clutch so tightly to and we refuse to give? Lord, we slowly open our hands.
We lay it at the cross and we trust in you. Our hope is built in Jesus. Our hope is built on a faith that is on a firm foundation.
Our hope is strong because of Jesus. Admit that we are weak when God can make us strong. It’s when we break down and say, God, okay, it’s taken me 50 years, but now I realize I’m not perfect.
And it’s only through you that love can make me perfect. It’s when we stop and instead of doing everything for ourselves, we say, God, instead of praying, God, give me this, give me this, give me this, give me this, make this happen. We say, God, what do you need? What do you need to strengthen me for so that somebody can know about Jesus today? The difference of the world on whether or not it’s evil or it’s good sometimes just depends on if we show love to others.
God can give us the strength to love our neighbors. God can give us the strength to be holy. We just have to trust and walk this journey together because looking at you, God’s not focused on a sinner.
God’s not focused on someone who falls short. God’s not focused on someone that’s been beaten down by the world. God looks at you and says, this is my child perfected in love because they trusted.
This is my child who I welcome with open arms because they gave their life for the kingdom. Amen. Will you accept my blessing? The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace in all things. Amen.