#BeUMC Week 3: The People of God Who Attend to the Ordinances of God

PLANNING NOTES

After two weeks of arguing that what seemed simple was actually more complex than it appeared, we now change gears and assure the worship planning team that “attending to the ordinances of God” isn’t as difficult as we might think. So hang in there.

If you became familiar with the General Rules since Bishop Rueben Job published the book Three Simple Rules, then you may be wondering where this one came from. Actually, the better question is, “How did Bishop Job get from ‘Attend to the ordinances of God’ to ‘Stay in love with God’ as his third general rule?” Well, he was interested more in the object than in the process. You can’t argue with Bishop Job that the intent of the third rule was to cultivate a lively passion for God and for the world that God created. Wesley also wanted the people called Methodist to stay in love with God, but he was concerned about the means for doing so. The ordinances of God were those things that Wesley identified as being required of God’s people. He categorized them into works of piety and works of mercy. We have come to call them the inward and outward spiritual disciplines. The inward disciplines were those things that we would do within the body of Christ, sometimes alone, but more often in small groups. These disciplines would include things like worship and Bible study, prayer, and fasting. The outward disciples were things that were done in the wider community, visiting the sick or imprisoned, giving to charity, and caring for others in a variety of ways. These together were called the means of grace.

Grace, then, is how we experience then return God’s love. So, these ordinances were all about moving us to love God more by disciplined action. Therefore, the faithful people of God are those who keep these disciplines, not in a regimented or rote fashion, but as a way of expressing and experiencing love for God and neighbor, which Jesus named as the highest law of all.

Worship is one of the works of piety, or disciplines, but it can also be a means of presenting or encouraging others. Here again, a major purpose of this series is to celebrate what is already going on in the life of the church. Take the opportunity to lift up the various Bible study opportunities and bless those who have been faithfully attending and leading those efforts. Identify the prayer warriors in the life of the church, those who can be called upon to lift up the church and its ministries in regular prayer. Perhaps you could encourage others to do so by handing out prayer cards and inviting the whole congregation to pray the printed prayer at a specific time each week.

For some, these disciplines will feel like a burden, a duty to be performed. For those folks, some encouragement to consider a different approach would be helpful. Ask them to consider works of mercy as a way of disciplining themselves and allowing others to help keep them on track. Spirit-filled refers to being in tune with the Spirit in whatever activities we do. It is about being opened and being guided into new experiences, about seeing in new ways, about finding deeper connections with those inside and outside our Christian community. All that we do as the body of Christ is done to widen our reach, to invite others to come and know what we know and experience what we experience. Finding ways for people with different ways of engaging the world to experience God’s love is a way of Inclusion, of making sure that not everyone has to do the same or act the same or think the same in order to be a part of the whole.

Our goal, of course, is to make these disciplines, these ordinances, a part of our lives and a part of the witness of the community of faith in daily living. We look to those among us for whom prayer is a way of life—those who have dedicated themselves to Bible study, those who are deeply rooted in the activities of faith and have become examples and mentors to us all. They, like all of us, are disciple-making by how they live their lives. They are making themselves disciples and, by their witness, are making others disciples around them. Through them, we have had an experience of God through The United Methodist Church, and we rejoice in that. How might we feature these saints among us during worship—even those who may not seek it? We don’t want to embarrass them, but we do want to thank them for their witness and for the love of God that radiates from them. We want to celebrate their influence, connection, and impact on so many lives simply because they have been faithful to the ordinances of God.

Worship this week is about reaching out to God in ways that are beneficial to us and to those around us. This is about building up the body that we might all know God’s love in our daily lives. Send folks out with a challenge to continue to seek God’s grace by regular attention to these ordinances, providing direct resources for fulfilling that challenge. Staying in love with God, we can discover, takes discipline, but it is really easier than we think.

PREACHING NOTES

(NOTE: Please start your sermon preparation by reading the planning notes first. The design outline and intent of the series are found there and are essential for the sermon as well. The campaign words and messaging themes are outlined there and are useful for sermon preparation.)

“For the love of God is this, that we obey God’s commandments” (1 John 5:3). It makes sense that Bishop Job would translate this third general rule into “Stay in Love with God.” That is certainly what the ordinances are about, the disciplines as we know them. They are all about love—the love of God that is also expressed in the love of neighbor. Jesus taught us that. It is two sides of the same coin, this loving thing.

The problem is not that we don’t know that. We’ve heard that since we began in the faith at whatever point in our personal history. We know that we are to love God, and we know we are to love neighbor. We know. What we don’t know, or at best are confused about, is what love is. Or rather we don’t know how we’re supposed to love God. Love in our culture is . . . messy. Emotional, flighty, dependent on circumstances, subject to our moods and desires—love is messy. At least as we see it expressed, sung about, and performed in our dramas and comedies. And yes, we’ve explained it before, what love is, agape love. But it bears repeating and then talking about the discipline of loving.

So, let’s back up into chapter four of this first letter of John and explore this love thing a little more deeply.