Pastor's Midweek Message

August 26, 2026

Beloved,

According to Wilkinson & Finkbeiner, attorneys, the divorce rate in America is around 40 to 43 percent—down from the famous “half of all marriages end in divorce” figure cited a few decades ago, but still significant. Of those, Dr. Susan Daniel’s research suggests three out of five divorces cite “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split. That was the case with my own parents, when I was 12. It’s a sad thing whenever any divorce occurs. 

It’s even sadder, to me, to talk about the divorce between God and humanity, which is what C.S. Lewis called “The Great Divorce” (and wrote a book about it). Since the Fall, we have been removed from God, and incapable on our own of finding a way back. We can’t earn our way into God’s approval—our best intentions aren’t enough. 

The good news, though, is that there is a way to fix it. 

That’s what we will be exploring in our next sermon series, beginning this weekend. “Reconcilable Differences” will explore our Methodist understanding of God’s grace, which is the only way we are able to come back into connection with God.

Methodism has been described as “the religion of grace,” and the understanding of grace that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, taught us is absolutely central to our understanding of God. Over the next three weeks, we’ll explore what Wesley taught about the singular grace of the Triune God.

We’ll look at how God’s grace is at work in us even before we’re born, and throughout our lives, in an ongoing effort to draw us back into connection. God’s grace is what makes us even aware of God in the first place. God’s grace leads us to see that God is, that all we are and all we have is a gift of God, and that we’ve become estranged from God and need to find a way back. Wesley called this God’s “prevenient” grace, the grace that goes before us.

We’ll also look at how God makes us right with God: through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, and through our faith in Jesus alone. God’s “justifying” grace squares up our accounts, balances the books, and makes us able to be in relationship with God once more. But that happens only when we put our faith in Jesus: it’s not through anything we do, but through our changed hearts, that we’re saved.

Finally, we’ll examine what we get invited into next, the “sanctifying” grace of God, which goes to work to draw us closer to Jesus the rest of our lives, and to remove the vestiges of sin that remain in us. And while our good deeds don’t save us, when we are saved we can’t help but to want to do good things in Jesus’ name.

These three weeks are pretty important for us as Methodists. This is some pretty fundamental teaching about what it is we believe, and so I encourage you to make it a priority to be a part of it—and if you’re curious about Methodism, or have people in your lives who are, these can be great places to start!

So let’s go.

Grace and peace,

Pastor Eric