THIS REFLECTION began as a sermon preached at a Methodist Covenant Service. I’ve adapted it here for anyone who has ever struggled with resolutions, commitments, or prayers that ask more of us than we feel able to give. At its heart is a simple conviction: covenant begins with God, not with us.
Do you ever make resolutions at the start of the year – then remember how hard they are to keep?
As someone who has come to cherish the Methodist tradition, this feels like a good opportunity to reflect on the distinctive resolution renewed at the start of each year.
The Covenant Service lies at the heart of Methodist devotion, discipleship, and dedication to social justice. In the service the Church joyfully celebrates God’s offer of loving relationship.
In January 2022, I began regularly attending a Methodist Church, where I experienced the Covenant Service for the first time, and found it deeply moving.
The Covenant Prayer at the heart of the service reminded me of St Ignatius of Loyola‘s prayer of receiving, written in the 17th Century as part of his Spiritual Exercises. In the translation I know best it goes like this:
Lord Jesus Christ,
take as your right, receive as my gift,
all my liberty, my memory,
my understanding, my will.
All that I have, all that I am,
all that I can be,
to you, O Lord, I restore it.
Dispose of it according to your will.
Give me your love, give me your grace,
it is enough for me.
The Anglican chaplain at my university gave me this prayer when I was applying to train for ordination in the Catholic Church. I learned it by heart and have prayed it many times.
It’s likely that Wesley knew of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. There are parallels between Ignatian spirituality and Wesley’s emphasis on mutual accountability and structured communities to support spiritual growth.
The Covenant prayer also echoes the ‘prayer of abandonment’ of St Charles de Foucauld who lived as a Trappist monk in Syria in the 19th Century. After I left training for Catholic priesthood unexpectedly, I stayed with a community inspired by St Charles de Foucauld while I considered what I could do next. We would sing his prayer of abandonment each day as part of evening prayer, like this:
Father,
I abandon myself into your hands,
Do with me what you will,
Whatever you may do I thank you,
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me,
and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord,
Into your hands I commend my soul.
I offer it to you
with all the love of my heart,
for I love you Lord,
and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands,
without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.
When I heard Wesley’s Covenant prayer for the first time in 2022, I felt a connection with the same spirit as in each of the prayers that had already accompanied me on my journey of faith and ministry. It affirmed my decision to join the Methodist Church and begin the process of training for Methodist ordination that has brought me here.
So, I decided to look into the Covenant prayer more deeply, and this is what I found:
The Covenant is not a contract in which God and human beings agree to provide goods and services for each other!
It is not something we have to do to create a relationship with God. God has already, freely and graciously, made it possible.
That conviction – that covenant begins with God – is not Wesley’s invention. It is the heartbeat of the biblical idea of covenant itself.
The prophet Jeremiah spoke to people who:
- failed to keep God’s covenant;
- were exhausted by their inability to keep it;
- and might fear making promises again.
Yet God says:
‘I will make a new covenant…
I will put my law within them…
I will forgive…
and remember their sin no more.’
Before God asks anything of us, God promises to change us. Before God invites surrender, God commits God’s own self to relationship with us. The Covenant Prayer is not how we persuade God to accept us, but how we respond to a God who already has.
Jeremiah leaves us with questions:
- How will this new covenant happen?
- How will God write the law on human hearts?
That is where Mark’s account of the last supper comes in:
As Christians we believe Jeremiah’s promise is not fulfilled by words alone, but by a life given – and a body broken. Jesus says:
b‘This is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many.’
This idea of Covenant was basic to Wesley’s understanding of Christian discipleship. Just as God speaks through Jeremiah of being a ‘husband’ to God’s people in the first Covenant, so Wesley compared our Covenant relationship with God as being like a marriage between us (individually and collectively) and God in Christ. The earliest version of the Covenant Prayer echoed traditional Christian marriage vows, taking Christ as
‘my Head and Husband,
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
for all times and conditions,
to love, honour and obey thee
before all others,
and this to the death’.
This understanding of covenant particularly interested me, as my husband Warren and I were the first couple in the UK to register a civil partnership in a place of worship in 2012. We wrote our own service and, as it was not legally possible for a same-sex couple to marry in the UK at that time, we were careful not to use any language associated with traditional Christian marriage in our service. We made promises, not vows, and made a covenant to one another and God. We didn’t just ask for God’s blessing on that day – we most definitely received it.
Wesley understood Christian faith as a growing relationship with God. Because God’s grace is always at work, drawing us into deeper holiness and love, he introduced the Covenant Prayer as a pastoral way of helping people respond to that grace, again and again.
Wesley intended the Covenant Service to be held within a framework of pastoral care, preaching and guidance, linking personal devotion with collective worship, caring for the needs of the community and everyone within it.
The Covenant Prayer was originally offered during a Communion service. Wesley thought that the sacrament of Communion made real the words of the Covenant prayer. He urged Methodists to put Communion at the centre of their spiritual life and to share in it frequently.
The process did not begin with the Covenant service – it followed a day’s retreat for people to prepare themselves.
It did not end with the Covenant Service either. Pastoral guidance was offered both to individuals and groups in the weeks following the service to encourage them to understand how renewing their relationship with God affected their lives.
Whether or not those wider spiritual and pastoral practices still happen today, the Covenant Service itself remains a moment where God invites us to renew our response to grace.
The Covenant prayer points to deep surrender of ourselves in complete trust to God. But the words of the prayer can seem jarring and demanding. The original 18th century prayer includes the phrase ‘put me to doing, put me to suffering’. But the meaning of the word ‘suffer’ has changed – Where the King James Bible’s version of Matthew 19:14 says ‘suffer the little children to come unto me’, this would today be translated as ‘let the little children come to me’ (NRSVA). So to ‘suffer’ in Wesley’s time could also be understood as to allow or permit. The 1975 Methodist Service Book notes that these words
‘do not mean that we ask God to make us suffer, but that we desire, by God’s help, actively to do or patiently to accept whatever is God’s will for us’.
Today we will be invited to join in praying the alternative version from the 1999 Methodist Worship Book which aims to express the same sentiments in a different way. The phrase ‘put me to doing, put me to suffering’ becomes ‘in all that I do and in all that I may endure.’
The Methodist Church has rightly become more careful about how to respond to suffering and speak of it theologically as awareness has grown of the experience of survivors of abuse. The Covenant Prayer is not an invitation to accept harm as holy, but a way of trusting God with our lives – held within grace, accountability, and care.
Whichever version we find most familiar or helpful to pray, they are hard words to pray with a full understanding of what they might mean in practice. But then, the same could be said for marriage vows. And they are usually only made once in a lifetime.
So there is something to be said for reflectively renewing this commitment each year. Which brings us back to the spirit of the prayer at the heart of the Covenant Service. My question is: how can we dare to pray words of total surrender – and trust that doing so will be safe, faithful, and life-giving?
That question is exactly what Jeremiah, Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, and the Covenant Prayer answer.
- Jeremiah tells us that God promises a new covenant.
- Jesus shows us what that covenant costs God.
- And the Covenant Prayer becomes our grateful, cautious, hopeful response.
We do not pray the Covenant Prayer into a vacuum. We pray it in the presence of the One who has already gone first.
Jesus does not say, “Give yourselves to God.”
He says, “This is my body, given for you.”
Only because Christ has placed himself into God’s hands can we dare to place ourselves there too.
That is why the Covenant Prayer is not about proving our sincerity or strength. It is not about making ourselves acceptable to God. It is about trusting that, in Christ, God has already accepted us all we are, and all we can be, with the help of God’s grace.
Perhaps that is why this prayer is worth returning to, year after year. Not as a resolution we must keep, but as a relationship we are invited to renew.
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