Introduction

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 1 JOHN 4:16

John Wesley was an Oxford don who spent fifty years on horseback. He was a clergyman of the Church of England who preached in fields, market squares and graveyards because the pulpits were closed to him. He was a scholar who wrote grammars and a medical handbook and abridged whole libraries for poor readers, and he was a man who could stand before a mob with his hat knocked off and blood on his face and go on speaking about the love of God. When he died in 1791, the movement he had gathered had spread across Britain and Ireland and taken root in America, and it has since gone round the world.

One conviction beneath the rest

His message can be put in a sentence. The grace that pardons is the grace that heals. Wesley believed that human beings were made in the image of God, that sin has defaced that image in every part of us, and that the gospel is God’s way of restoring it. He did not think of salvation chiefly as a ticket to heaven, though he believed in heaven with all his heart. He thought of it as a cure. God forgives the guilt of sin, and in the same moment begins to break its power, and He does not stop until love for Him and for our neighbour fills the heart and rules the life.

Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy. LEVITICUS 19:2

Almost everything he taught follows from this. There is grace before we seek God, stirring conscience and drawing us to Him; Wesley called it preventing grace, the grace that goes before. There is grace that justifies, received by faith alone, and with it a new birth and an inward witness that we are children of God. And there is grace that sanctifies, working through prayer and Scripture and the Lord’s Supper, through fellowship and works of mercy, until the believer is, in his favourite phrase, made perfect in love. His teaching on money, on the poor, on the slave trade and on Christian unity is not a separate department. It is the same love, carried into the street and the counting-house.

Why he still matters

Wesley is worth reading for at least three reasons.

The first is that he refused to separate faith from holiness. He preached justification by faith alone as plainly as Luther, and he preached the pursuit of holiness as earnestly as any Puritan, and he would not let either swallow the other. A faith that did not make people more loving was not, in his judgement, the faith of the New Testament.

The second is that he wrote for ordinary people. In the preface to his sermons he says that he designed plain truth for plain people, and he meant it. He stripped his sermons of learned display, and the result is prose that a farmer or a factory hand could follow, and that still reads with remarkable clarity.

The third is that he made the Christian life a shared life. He did not leave converts alone with their feelings. He put them into small groups, gave them rules, set them to visit the sick and the imprisoned, and asked them every week how their souls were prospering. Whatever else Christians today learn from him, they may learn that holiness is not a private hobby.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, nineteen short chapters set out his teaching. They follow what he called the scripture way of salvation: from the faith that saves and the danger of being only almost a Christian, through the disease of sin and the grace that goes before, to justification, the new birth and the witness of the Spirit. They go on to sin in believers, the way of sanctification, Christian perfection and what it does not mean, and then to the practical life he built on those foundations: the means of grace, works of piety and mercy, the class meeting, the use of money, the catholic spirit, the call to the fields, and his care for the poor and the enslaved.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Wesley would have approved. His brother Charles gave the movement its hymns, and John saw to it that Methodists sang, prayed and examined themselves as well as listened. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say at the outset where Wesley must be weighed rather than simply received.

His teaching on Christian perfection has been misunderstood from his day to ours, sometimes by his friends as much as his enemies. He did not teach that a Christian could become sinless, free from mistakes or beyond temptation, and he said so repeatedly. But his language could run ahead of his qualifications, and some who followed him claimed more than he did and fell into pride and delusion. Chapters thirteen and fourteen set out what he taught and where it needs care.

Second, his quarrel with George Whitefield over predestination divided the revival. Wesley was sincerely convinced that the doctrine as he understood it dishonoured God, and his sermon Free Grace says so with force. But he was not always fair to what careful Calvinists actually believed, and many of his Reformed brothers have served Christ as faithfully as he did. Chapter seven tries to set out the dispute honestly.

Third, he governed his movement with a firm, sometimes autocratic hand. He appointed and removed preachers, set the rules and interpreted them, and did not easily share authority. It served the movement in its early years and cost it later. And his own marriage was unhappy, as the biographical chapter says plainly.

Why read him, then? Because on the central matter he was right. God does not merely forgive us and leave us as we were. He means to make us whole. The counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Wesley is faithful — on grace, on faith, on assurance, on love — receive it gladly and act on it. Where he presses beyond what is written, set it aside and lose nothing.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly whether you think of salvation mainly as forgiveness, mainly as a change of life, or as both together.

2. Choose a pace for this book — a chapter a day or a chapter a week — and decide now when you will read it.

3. Name one person with whom you could share what you learn, and perhaps read these chapters alongside.

4. Resolve to test everything in these pages against Scripture, keeping what is true and setting aside what is not.

5. Ask God to use this book to send you not to Wesley but to Christ, and to love.

A PRAYER

Gracious God, You made us in Your image, and You have not given us up though we have marred it.

Thank You for Your grace, which went before me when I was not seeking You, which pardons me through the blood of Jesus, and which is able to make me new.

As I read of Your servant John Wesley, keep me from admiring a man and missing his Master. Where he is faithful to Your Word, let me receive it; where he is not, give me discernment.

Fill my heart with Your love, and let that love rule my life, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.