Discipleship in the Way of Grace

A Disciple's Path Defined

Do you remember Alice's conversation with the Cheshire Cat during her journey through Wonderland? When she came to a fork in the road, she asked, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" The Cat replied, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." She said, "I don't much care where." The Cat replied, "Then it doesn't matter which way you go."

When we know where we are going, it makes a big difference how we get there. Like Jesus' first disciples, we've heard our Lord say, "Follow me!" Like them, we want to follow. But if we tell the truth, we often feel like Thomas, who said, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" (John 14:5-6). We want to know ...

• Where is this path taking us?

• What's our destination?

• How will we get from where we are to where we want to be?

Jesus marked the destination of discipleship on the map of our souls in an intriguing conversation with a teacher of the law.

"Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" [Jesus] said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." (Luke 10:25-28)

The destination of every disciple's path is a life that is completely centered in loving God and loving others, a life in which the love of God that became flesh in Jesus becomes flesh in us.

In 1734, a twenty-one-year-old Oxford student named Benjamin Ingham asked similar questions of John Wesley. Ingham's goal was a holy life. He knew that reaching that destination was not a directionless jaunt through the nondescript countryside of indistinct spirituality. He knew that being a disciple is more than drifting aimlessly from one spiritual high to another. He wanted to know the path that would lead toward the destination of a Christ-centered life.

Later in his ministry, John Wesley would use the term Christian perfection to mark the destination of a life that is completely aligned with the love of God. He wrote, "In a Christian believer love sits upon the throne which is erected in the inmost soul; namely, love of God and man, which fills the whole heart, and reigns without a rival."

So, what does a disciple look like in the Wesleyan tradition? After a long time of searching and study, our team settled on this definition:

A disciple is
a follower of Jesus
whose life is centering
on loving God and loving others.

We chose the word centering instead of centered to indicate that discipleship is a lifelong experience of continuing transformation by the grace of God. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche called "a long obedience in the same direction." The grace of God is instrumental in the process.

A Journey of Amazing Grace

"Amazing Grace," one of our best-loved hymns, includes these words: "'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, / and grace will lead me home." John Newton (1725–1807), the former slave trader who penned that hymn, was influenced in his understanding of grace by his relationship with George Whitefield and John Wesley.

Wesley scholar Kenneth J. Collins has named the grace of God as "the key theme" of Wesley's theology. He writes, "There is no point in Wesley's theology of salvation where divine grace is not the leading motif."

For Christian disciples in the Methodist tradition, the pathway of discipleship is an excellent adventure of amazing grace from beginning to end. Here's my homegrown definition of grace:

Grace is the undeserved, unearned, unrepayable gift of the God who loves us enough to meet us where we are, but loves us too much to leave us there. Grace is the love of God at work within us to transform each of our lives into a unique expression of the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ, so that we become participants in God's transformation of the world.

As United Methodists, we often talk of three kinds or aspects of God's grace: prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace. Let's consider each one.

Prevenient Grace: The Love That Goes Before

John Wesley used the term prevenient grace—preventing or preparing grace—to describe the love of God that is active in our lives prior to our response. Prevenient grace is the love of God that seeks us before we seek God.

• It's the creative love that searched for Adam and Eve when, in their rebellion and sin, they tried to hide in the garden.

• It's the undeserved love of the God who "proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

• It's the unearned love that left John saying, "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us.... We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:10, 19).

• It's the seeking love that Jesus described as a shepherd who searches for one lost sheep or a woman who turns her house inside out looking for one lost coin.

• It's the pursuing love that Francis Thompson described as "The Hound of Heaven" who relentlessly hunted him day in and day out through the labyrinth of his own attempts to run from God until, finally, he fell before God and heard the Hound of Heaven say,

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!

Wesley defined prevenient grace as "the first wish to please God,—the first dawn of life concerning his will ... the beginning of a deliverance from a blind, unfeeling heart, quite insensible of God." It's the love we did nothing to deserve, the love that prepares us to experience God's forgiveness. But we have a hard time comprehending it because we like to think that we can find God.

Some years ago a Christian organization launched a nationwide evangelistic campaign with the theme "I Found It." It was a simple way of saying, "I have found new life in Christ and I want you to find it too." But there's a biblical problem with that slogan.

The Bible is not the story of the way we find God; it's the story of the way God comes seeking us. We are the ones who are lost, the ones who hide from the naked truth about ourselves. We get disoriented in the chaos and confusion of the world. We lose our way in our radical self-absorption and squander our souls in meaningless living. God is the one who comes to find us. That's prevenient grace.

United Methodists affirm prevenient grace in the sacrament of infant baptism. When someone...