In the season of Lent, it’s fairly typical for people to begin doing
things to try and take on practices that they might not do during the rest of
the year. That’s true not just for individuals, but it’s also true for
congregations. We, for instance, add a prayer of confession in Lent every week,
which we normally don’t do, we’ve been doing a breath prayer and receiving
communion every week. When I am working on planning worship I do that for
several reasons. One of them is simply so that this season is set aside as
being different than the other seasons of the year. But, we also do them
because they are specific things to help us in the season of Lent, which is a
season of repentance and preparation, to connect with God in a different way. 
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, talked about what he called
means of grace. Things that conveyed God’s loving action to us to create, heal,
forgive, reconcile and transform human hearts. Among those means of grace are
prayer and fasting and serving and worshipping and giving, which we also know as
spiritual disciplines, which we have already talked about, or will talk about.
These are the things that intentionally help us to not only deepen our faith and
our relationship with God, but which help us to understand and celebrate
receiving God’s grace. And another one of those means of grace, another
spiritual discipline that we are going to address today is what Wesley
identified as reading, meditating and studying the scriptures, and I don’t have
a bad joke to go with today’s discipline.
