Three Meals a Day and Wesley's Three Kinds of Grace

 

 This Sunday we will gather for a stone soup type potluck:

Bring a favorite recipe and the ingredients. We will all work on each other's recipes. You will be the master chef for your recipe and can help instruct your sous-chefs.

 Arrive at the Fellowship Hall at 430. We will have a short discussion on grace and cooking before we start learning about our group's recipes and food. 

If you're childhood was like mine, you were taught to pray --say grace -- at least three times a day: before breakfast, lunch and dinner. Receiving food is like Wesley's idea of receiving grace: it ultimately comes completely from God.

Wesley suggested three kinds of grace, that are in sequence:

1. Prevenient
2. Justifying
3. Sanctifying

I will use our three meals to illustrate his point:

1. Breakfast: For some, it is made while you are still asleep. When you wake it is presented to you: gift! Prevenient grace comes before knowledge of God. God is working in the kitchen before you awake.

2. Lunch: Sometimes we choose to eat lunch and sometimes people get busy, putting work ahead of accepting food. Justifying grace is where our sins are forgiven. Think about it like this: God offers us lunch daily, in the midst of everything and in full knowledge of our failures, and we should turn ourselves to God and make sure we do not put other things before this offering.

3. Dinner: Dinner is commonly the largest meal of the day. It is where the table is full and brings together the fruition of our day. Sanctifying grace is expressed in bearing fruit in our lives from what we have been given. Cooking is an art in which we grow in skill and perfection, much like our lives through God's sanctifying grace.