Discipleship and the people called Methodists - BEH District

deep, true places of our being that we want to become better Christian disciples.
Early Methodists talked of similar yearnings as the pursuit of holiness, or ‘perfect
love’.
Divine disquiet
One aspect of holy yearning is what I call ‘divine disquiet’ and I suffer and benefit
from it often. I’m not alone. From years of talking with Christian people I know it to
be a wonderfully common condition, and a necessary part of discipleship. One of
the greatest things about ‘divine disquiet’ is that it doesn’t lead to hopelessness
or despair. That’s not its purpose, nor what God wants. Its purpose is to enable us
to become better disciples of Jesus. So for example, some Christians talk about
being ‘under conviction’ as if it were a bad thing, designed only to make us feel
miserable or guilty. But it’s only ‘bad’ when we refuse to respond properly to it.
When we come to realise that the Spirit is urging us to deal with something, and
promising divine strength to help us, we begin to understand the proper purposes
of being ‘under conviction’. Another example is the tendency of some Methodist
congregations to interpret a corporate sense of ‘God-doesn’t-want-us-to-be-like-
this-ness’ as a sign that God has totally given up on them and they are finished.
Actually it’s the reverse. It’s a sign that God has not yet given up on them. It’s a
sign that the Spirit of Life and Hope longs to renew and change us. So hope, not
despair, flows from divine disquiet. As St Paul notes, there is a deep spiritual truth
that when we are weakest we are strongest, because that’s when we are most
open to God’s grace which is always enough (read Corinthians ).
Do you experience ‘holy yearning’? Or ‘divine disquiet’? What do you think God
is saying through it? How is it shaping your personal discipleship… and that
of your local church or small group?
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