In his sermon on “The General Deliverance,” Wesley concluded that, whatever happens, “[God] will certainly do what will be most for his own glory.” I nearly fell off my chair in surprise and excitement to find in Wesley this deeply biblical truth that I had learned from Calvinists. God will do what brings him the most glory. There’s something Wesleyans and Calvinists can agree on.

C. S. Lewis once cautioned against the blindness inherent in every age. Like others in our day, he warned, we are “specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” For Lewis, the solution was reading old books. New books share the presuppositions of our time; old books challenge our generational narrow-mindedness. The same warning could be issued with regard to theological tradition. If we read only those who share our basic framework and agree with us on most things, then we nurture devotional and theological nearsightedness. To counteract this tendency, we ought to be disciplined in reading other traditions and perspectives, not just to critique them but also to discover what we can take in from them. We may be surprised to find how much we have to learn.

I’m a United Methodist pastor, but I’ve learned a lot from reading Reformed authors and listening to Reformed preachers….

Seriousness of Sin

It’s easy to under-emphasize the magnitude of sin and its consequences. We don’t enjoy hearing what is wrong with us, and we tend to minimize our own sinfulness, even if this tendency itself manifests the problem we are so hesitant to face. By sitting at the feet of Reformed instructors, I have discovered the benefit of seeing clearly the great ugliness and horror of our sin, our complete inability to do anything about it, and the holiness of God in justly condemning human rebellion….

Creation’s Covenantal Structure

This one is big, and it’s something I learned from Presbyterians. God related to Adam and Abraham covenantally, and he relates to you and me in this way. When the covenant representative of the human race rebelled against God, we all suffered the excruciating reverberations. Our covenant head introduced sin and death into God’s good creation, and we, along with all of creation, now experience the agony of it. We stand together under the curse stipulated in God’s covenant with our first father. That is how covenants work.

But thanks be to God that covenants also work to bless, and thanks be to God that he has given a new covenant with a new representative. Through faith in Christ we are brought into covenantal union with him, and represented by Christ we have peace with God. We move from condemnation to justification, from death to life, and from darkness into his glorious light. All of creation is structured covenantally.

God’s Love for His Own Glory

This insight sometimes leaves those of us outside the Reformed tradition a little nervous. Our nervousness usually grows out of an honest effort to accurately present God as characterized by self-giving love, and we are cautious about language that sounds inconsistent with that character. How can the God whose character is most perfectly revealed in the self-giving love of Christ on the cross also be consumed with love for his own glory?

Read More