A Foundation of Grace

A Foundation of Grace – Due to a severe winter storm, church services were cancelled for Sunday, and this service was recorded Thursday evening so that it could be streamed on Sunday. We continue moving through the Gospel of Matthew, and the scripture is the last portion of the Sermon on the Mount wherein Jesus cautions those hearing him that they will not all end up with him, and he compares their directions to someone building a house on a rock versus someone building a house on sand. Rev. Will McLeane, our Pastor of Spiritual Formation, delivers the sermon and begins by describing his experience with a math teacher who was not at all satisfied with a correct answer to a problem but was most interested in how the problem was solved. Will says that for Jesus, too, the answer alone is not satisfactory, but the foundation on which the answer is built is crucial, and that foundation is grace. Will offers the example of John Wesley, our founder of Methodism, whose mission from England to the Georgia colony failed, and he later learned that he had offered the answer without the foundation of grace. Will tells us that if our life is currently shaky, we should look for transformation by building on the foundation of grace.