“How can I experience God? How can I help others experience God?”
Those are two questions we’ll be exploring in our new sermon series, Encounter, a study of Romans 1-8 that starts this Sunday. Those are also two questions (along with many others) that Paul had on his mind as he wrote the book of Romans. The first eight chapters describe what people experience as they move from selfishness and idolatry, to salvation by Christ, to whole-hearted dependence on the Spirit. Centuries after Paul wrote it, a young monk named Martin Luther encountered the gospel for the first time when he meditated on Romans 1. He explains:
I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us by faith. I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise… When I saw the difference, that law is one thing and gospel another, I broke through.
Two hundred years later, a disgraced missionary and failed preacher named John Wesley happened to be at a meeting where Martin Luther’s reflections on Romans were being read. As Wesley tells the story:
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
Knowledge of God leads to experience of God’s grace, which leads to life-transformation (and then, in the case of Luther and Wesley, world-transformation!)
Have you “broken through” like Luther? Has your heart been “strangely warmed” like Wesley’s? Through this series, we’ll look for opportunities to encounter God in new ways. Then, like Luther and Wesley, we’ll see how we can guide others toward an experience of God’s glory and power, our own sin and inadequacy, and God’s overwhelming grace and love.
Join us this Sunday, and invite a friend along!