ON THE WAY OF SALVATION
A Sermon by Pastor Chico Martin
August 14, 2016 Twelfth Sunday After Trinity
Lections: Jeremiah 23:23-29; Psalm 139; 1 John 4:7-19; John 15: 9-17
This morning I want to begin by bringing our attention to the Collect for the Day. This beautiful prayer has a long history in the church; Thomas Cranmer took it from the Latin Rite, where it is originally attributed to the 5th century Pope Leo. Over the centuries, it has been edited and altered only slightly, most recently for the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer.[i] Its petition is for mercy, “forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask.” In his sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” John Wesley calls conscience, “more properly ‘preventing grace.’”[ii] This preventing, or prevenient grace, is perhaps John Wesley’s most distinctive doctrine, described in The Book of Discipline (BOD) as “the divine love that surrounds all humanity.”[iii] Prevenient grace prevents our utter ruin and enables our initial response to God: the ‘drawings’ of desires and ‘showing’ “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his God.” Prevenient grace is the first marker along “the way of salvation.” Today I want us to journey up that path, minding its guideposts as they appear in our readings and hymns. Continue reading