A Brand Plucked out of the Burning

Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? ZECHARIAH 3:2

The rectory at Epworth. John Wesley was born in June 1703 at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth child of Samuel Wesley, the rector, and his wife Susanna. Samuel was a learned, difficult, frequently indebted clergyman who never quite won the affection of his parishioners. Susanna was one of the remarkable women of her century: devout, formidably intelligent, and the architect of a household run with a discipline that her son would later carry into a nation. Of her many children fewer than half lived to grow up. She taught those who did in a schoolroom at home, with fixed hours, and set aside time each week to speak with each child alone about their soul.

The fire. On the night of 9 February 1709 the rectory burned. The family escaped into the garden, and only then realised that John, not yet six, had been left asleep upstairs. He appeared at a window with the roof alight above him. There was no time to fetch a ladder; neighbours climbed on one another’s shoulders and pulled him out, and moments later the roof fell in. His mother took the rescue as a sign that God had a purpose for him, and she resolved to take particular care of his soul. Wesley himself came to use the words of Zechariah about his escape: a brand plucked out of the burning. It became the phrase of his life.

Oxford and the Holy Club. He was educated at Charterhouse School in London and at Christ Church, Oxford, which he entered in 1720. In 1725, reading Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying and then Thomas à Kempis, he resolved to give his whole life to God; William Law’s Christian Perfection and A Serious Call followed and deepened the resolve. He was ordained deacon in 1725, elected a Fellow of Lincoln College in 1726, and ordained priest in 1728. Back in Oxford he took the lead of a small group his younger brother Charles had gathered for prayer, study of the Scriptures, weekly Communion, fasting, and visits to prisoners and the poor. The university laughed at them. Among the nicknames was the one that stuck: Methodists, for their methodical piety. The young George Whitefield joined them.

Georgia. In October 1735 John and Charles sailed for the new colony of Georgia, John to serve as a minister to the settlers and, he hoped, to preach to the native peoples. On the voyage a violent storm broke over the ship, and while the English passengers screamed, a company of German Moravians went on singing their psalm. Wesley was afraid to die, and he knew it. He asked one of them afterwards whether he had not been afraid, and was told that he was not, and that the women and children were not afraid either. The mission itself went badly. Wesley was rigid and unwise, his pastoral care of a young woman named Sophy Hopkey became an entanglement he could neither commit to nor end, and after she married another man a legal dispute followed his refusal of Communion to her. He left the colony at the end of 1737, humbled and convinced that he had gone to convert others and had never been converted himself.

Aldersgate. Back in London he met another Moravian, Peter Böhler, who told him plainly that he lacked the faith that brings assurance, and counselled him to go on preaching faith until he had it. On the evening of 24 May 1738 he went, unwillingly, to a society meeting in Aldersgate Street, where someone was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. His Journal records what happened. “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation.” He received that night not a new doctrine but assurance: the knowledge that his sins, even his, had been taken away. Within weeks he preached before the University of Oxford on the text By grace are ye saved through faith. The sermon, Salvation by Faith, stands first in his collected sermons.

Into the fields. Whitefield had begun preaching in the open air to the colliers near Bristol and begged Wesley to come and take up the work. Wesley recoiled. He had been so attached to church order, he later admitted, that he would once have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church. On 2 April 1739 he preached in a field outside Bristol to some thousands of people. The pulpits of the Church of England were closing against him, and when he was challenged for preaching in other men’s parishes, his Journal records his answer: “I look upon all the world as my parish.” From then until his old age he travelled almost ceaselessly, usually on horseback, rising early and preaching often at five in the morning to workers on their way to the pits and mills. The traditional figures, some quarter of a million miles and forty thousand sermons, are later estimates rather than his own tallies, but his Journal leaves no doubt of the scale.

Societies and classes. His genius, as many have said, was less in the pulpit than in what came after it. He gathered those who were awakened into societies, and in 1742 the societies were divided into classes of about a dozen, each under a leader who met them weekly. From 1744 he met his preachers, many of them laymen, in an annual Conference. He wrote, abridged and published constantly, from sermons and hymns to a Christian Library of devotional classics, a book of simple remedies for the poor, and notes on the New Testament. Charles wrote the hymns, several thousand of them, and the people sang their theology.

Opposition and division. The early years brought mobs, and Wesley learned to face a hostile crowd with a calm that often disarmed it. They brought controversy too. His sermon Free Grace, an attack on predestination, divided the revival into Arminian and Calvinist streams and wounded Whitefield; yet the friendship survived, and when Whitefield died in 1770 it was Wesley who preached his funeral sermon in London.

Marriage. In 1751 he married Mary Vazeille, a widow. The marriage was unhappy from early on and remained so. He would not travel less, and she resented his absences and his correspondence with women in the societies; she left him more than once, and they lived apart for years before her death in 1781. The man who guided thousands could not order his own house, and honesty requires that it be said.

The last years. He never meant to leave the Church of England and never formally did. But in 1784 he made legal provision for the Conference to hold the chapels after his death, and in the same year, since the American Methodists had no bishops willing to serve them, he ordained ministers for America himself, a step that made separation all but certain. He kept preaching into his eighties. In the last days of his life he wrote to encourage William Wilberforce in the campaign against the slave trade. He died at his house beside the City Road Chapel in London on 2 March 1791, in his eighty-eighth year. Those round his bed remembered him saying more than once, “The best of all is, God is with us.” He left very little money. He had given it away, as he had taught others to do.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Wesley was a disciplined, devout clergyman for years before he knew the assurance of forgiveness. Ask whether your own religion rests on your effort or on Christ.

2. The calm of the Moravians in the storm exposed his fear. What recent trial has exposed where your trust really lies?

3. He preached faith before he felt it, on the advice of a younger man. Is there someone God has sent to tell you something you did not want to hear?

4. Wesley overcame his dislike of field preaching for the sake of people who would never enter a church. What preference of yours might God be asking you to lay down for others?

5. Choose one of Wesley’s sermons in the Ochorus library, Salvation by Faith or The Almost Christian, and read it this week.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You plucked Your servant out of the burning and kept him for Your purpose. You have kept me too, often when I did not know it.

Forgive me for trying to earn what You give freely. Warm my heart with the assurance that Christ died for me, even for me.

Give me courage to go where people are, and not only where I am comfortable.

Where my life, like his, is marked by failure at home or in the work, humble me and heal what can be healed. And let me say at the last, with him, that the best of all is that You are with us. Amen.