Not-So Secret Agents of God: Love God With All Your Soul

Each week’s blog post during SSUMC’s Not So Secret Agents of God Series will offer a reflection on Jesus’ Greatest Commandment; by faithfully living into – which means faithfully living out! –our Savior’s command to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength – friends, there is no way we will be secret agents of God!

Sunday’s Scripture ~ Acts 8:26-39.

Devotional Scripture ~ Mark 12:30 and Hebrews 4:12-13.

Of all the modes of how we are called to love our God, the soul is the most mystical. It is mystical because although the soul is part of us, it is beyond us. It is something otherworldly – an other – given to us in our creation – given to us by our God.

The soul refers to the breath of life that animates our beings. This breath is the breath of God – the breath that breathed life not only into us, but into all creation.

This breath is the root of our identity.

This breath is revealed in the art that we produce, in the ways we breathe in God and breathe out God’s love as we ascend to and embody Christ’s greatest commandment.

God gifts this breath to us to steward with the knowledge that one day we will be called upon to give an account of what we have done.  

The primary question discussed at the Band gatherings of the early Methodists Societies was, “How is it with your soul?” In these small groups they did not shoot the breeze. They did not talk about the weather. They did not bemoan the horrendous escapades of their beloved sports team.

(Oh football…how I miss thee…I digress.)

Members of these small groups cut deep to the marrow of themselves and of their brothers and sisters: how is it with your soul?

Wesleyan Bands were homogenous groupings by gender, age, and marital status. Participants in the Bands desired to grow in love, holiness, and purity of intention. Gatherings were characterized by ruthless honesty and frank openness, and members sought to improve their attitudes, emotions, feelings, intentions, and affections through their participation.

Persons who participated in the Bands wanted to get to the root of their sin problem. They had curbed their bent toward outward sinning and now, through soul-searching examination, they wanted to completely transform their desire to sin in the first place. How would they go about doing that?

• Through attending to the study of Scripture
• Through prayer
• Through receiving the Eucharist
• Through consistent accountability for the ways in which they integrate God’s messages with their faith

One thing is for certain – the Early Methodists would not do this work alone. They walked with and alongside the church – and through their participation, God made them whole.

Consider your own soul. How is it? How do your current life choices mix with the breath that gave and gives you life? Does God’s teaching persuade you? Does God’s teaching nourish your inner being? Are your soul and God’s teaching like oil and water or like water and food coloring? Are they identifiable one from the other? Or are they mixing their way into one homogenous solution?

Though our souls are other, God desires that we would be one with them – that we would be one with God – and that we would apply ourselves with the vigor of the early Methodists to eliminating any stumbling block or addressing any issue that unsettles God’s breath within us.

How is it with your soul? And how could it be? Our answers to these questions accompany our transformations into overt agents of God.

Prayer: “I heard an old, old story, how a Savior came from glory, how he gave his life on Calvary to save a wretch like me; I heard about his groaning, of his precious blood’s atoning, then I repented of my sins and won the victory. O victory in Jesus, my Savior forever! He sought me and bought me with his redeeming blood; he loved me ere I knew him, and all my love is due him; he plunged me to victory beneath the cleansing flood.”* Amen.

*“Victory in Jesus,” The United Methodist Hymnal 370.

From Wreck to Restoration: We Commit Sin

Sunday’s Scripture ~ Jeremiah 2:4-13.

A congregant once said to me, “Pastor, I’ve never heard a preacher talk about sin as much as you do!”

I remember laughing as he said this…and then I was quite struck as his words washed over me. If pastors are not talking about sin, then how will people in our congregations know how to talk about sin? How will people in the world know how to talk about sin?

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of my favorite authors, advises that we need language about sin as much as we need language about salvation. In her book, Speaking of Sin, she writes,

Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human beings will continue to experience alienation, deformation, damnation, and death no matter what we call them. Abandoning the language will simply leave us speechless before them, and increase our denial of their presence in our lives. Ironically, it will also weaken the language of grace, since the full impact of forgiveness cannot be felt apart form the full impact of what has been forgiven.*

It is not easy to talk about sin. Why dwell on the bad stuff, especially when God has promised to forgive the bad stuff and absolve us of it? I believe we need to talk about our sin, not so we carry the guilt and shame of it with us always, but so that we know the weight of our sin, and therefore the magnanimity of God’s amazing grace.

An essential component of John Wesley’s Class and Band structure was to have members of the bands sit before one another and answer the question, “How is it with your soul?” In responding to this question the band members would share where they excelled, struggled, and out right failed in their lives – personal, professional, and of faith – since the last band gathering. (Wesley would say the life of faith pervades all spheres of life.) It was not enough for band members to say that they sinned; they would have to name the sin specifically and articulate how that sin had harmed God, their neighbors, and themselves. Some might consider this method a severe form of behavior modification, but it worked for the Early Methodists and it continues to work for many today that participate in a covenant or accountability group.

Developing a language to discuss sin draws us into intentional thinking about our sinful acts as well as their consequences and repercussions. From this sort of reflection I am led to

1. Repent of my sin and seek forgiveness and reconciliation and
2. Make note of the circumstances, my actions, and my reactions, so that my behavior will be different the next time I encounter the same or similar circumstances.

I talk about sin and I talk about my sin as a way of letting people around me know that I am  a safe place to talk about sin. And maybe one day, if they would like, we could talk about their sin together. And when that conversation begins it will most surely end with the affirmation that our God forgives our sin, that Jesus removes the guilt of sin, that the Holy Spirit breaks the power sin has over us, so that we will indeed live as the forgiven and the redeemed.

Prayer: “In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine, a wondrous beauty I see, for ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died, to pardon and sanctify me. So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, till my trophies at last I lay down; I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.”** Amen.

*Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin 4.

**”The Old Rugged Cross,” The United Methodist Hymnal 504.