Special note: This is a brief summary of the sermon I heard on Sunday. Just a reaction, almost, to a simple idea. Faith can be developed, I believe, and the hymn seems to show the four levels of grace that John Wesley has identified: prevenient (born into God’s grace), justification (learning how God’s grace works), sanctification (knowing the Holy Spirit is with you in all that you do), and perfection (truly assimilated into the Christian lifestyle). Now those are not the formal definitions, but they are in my words. The hymn, Spirit of the Living God, almost boils it down to just the four verbs: melt, mold, fill & use.
For years, the question has cycled through my brain: Why is developing one’s faith in God so difficult?
Sunday’s sermon by Rev. Jim Downing was titled, Faithfull. Simple, right? No, we have a way of making something simple, complicated.
God did everything he could to make it simple to be faithful; and we tend to do everything we can do making our lives faithless.
Rev. Downing began Sunday’s sermon with a review of a classic hymn, “Spirit of the Living God,”(United Methodist Hymnal, #393):
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
One verse. Simple. Direct, and often overlooked, certainly in today’s contemporary Christian music. But the words carry the message in classic simplicity, and those in the Celebration Center could join in the words with little trouble as it is deeply etched into memory.
Those four lines serve as a prayer asking God to fill us with the Holy Spirit; but in that third line comes the simple steps to living life faith-filled:
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Granted, there are many who still do not know the story nor the significance of Jesus Christ and his life
One must hear the story of Jesus Christ and how his ministry taught us to live in relationship with God and with one another—loving others as we want to be loved. Hearing the story is the first step, then we begin duplicating the loving behaviors of Jesus—at this point we are meltingthe old self and the old behaviors away.
Accepting Jesus Christ as our savior and beginning to live the lifestyle of loving one another above all else, the Holy Spirit fills us up and we become moldedin the faith. People see a change in us as we model the behaviors Jesus lived. The Holy Spirit, God within us, now molds us.
The third verb listed is fill. One might think that anybody who is modeling Jesus’ lifestyle of loving one another is already filled with the Holy Spirit, but the process of fillingone might indicate the emptying that happens when one tries pouring out love to others.
One of the best qualities of the Holy Spirit is that as long as one pours out unconditional love to others, the Holy Spirit keeps fillingone up with more love to give.
This leaves one verb left: use. This is the challenge level of faith. Our lives can be very comfortable just accepting God’s love, yet Jesus told his disciples that we are to dolove. Loving one another is not a noun, it is an action—a verb—it is how God usesus.
The hymn calls for God to renew us (me); to fall afresh on us (me). The idea of being refreshed indicates that as humans we can be emptied or worn out. Jesus did not tell us that living in our earthly world would be easy; but he knew that when Jesus was not physically present, we were alone, we needed the Holy Spirit, God’s very presence, within us.
The Holy Spirit renews us, stays with us and keeps usingus to serve as the hands and feet of God in a world that needs so much.
The message from the hymn seems so simple. We only have to meltfrom self-control to God-control. God will then moldus into the Christians Jesus teaches us to be. This will fillus with the Holy Spirit (or God within us) to live a life loving one another. As we turn ourselves over to God, we then ask that he useus in any way that he can to do all we can in any way we can to love one another.
Dear Heavenly Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Thank you for loving me despite all my flaws.
Thank you for understanding I am worn down
and need refreshing.
Thank you for showing me how easy it is
to be refreshed.
Thank you for melting me from my old self,
for molding me into a loving Christian.
for filling me up with unconditional love,
and for using me to do all that I can
in any way that I can so others, too,
are refreshed by they Holy Spirit. –Amen
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