A Reader’s Guide to John Wesley

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. PSALM 119:105

Wesley is one of the easiest of the great Christian teachers to read. He wrote, as he said, plain truth for plain people, and most of his sermons can be read in half an hour. The difficulty is not his style but his quantity: he wrote, edited and abridged an enormous amount. What follows is a short path through it.

Begin here

Sermons on Several Occasions, in the Ochorus library. The heart of Wesley’s teaching, and the source of most of this volume. The early sermons were meant as a doctrinal standard for Methodist preachers, and they still serve as the best introduction to his thought. Begin with Salvation by Faith, The Almost Christian, Justification by Faith and The Scripture Way of Salvation; these four, read together, give the whole shape of his gospel. Several are also available in the Ochorus library as single sermons.

A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in the Ochorus library. His own account of his most contested doctrine, part history and part questions and answers. Read it slowly and read all of it; its qualifications and warnings matter as much as its claims. Chapters thirteen and fourteen of this volume are a companion to it.

Sermons for particular needs

For assurance, The Witness of the Spirit, in both discourses. For struggling believers, On Sin in Believers and The Repentance of Believers. For prayer and the sacraments, The Means of Grace and The Duty of Constant Communion. For practical Christian living, The Use of Money, On Visiting the Sick and On Zeal. For Christian unity, Catholic Spirit and A Caution Against Bigotry. For the new birth, The New Birth and The Marks of the New Birth. All are in the Sermons on Several Occasions, and several are also in the Ochorus library on their own.

His other writings

The Journal. Wesley kept a journal for more than fifty years and published it in extracts. It is one of the great documents of the eighteenth century: travel, preaching, mobs, conversations, opinions on everything. Read a good abridgement first; the full text is very long. It contains the account of Aldersgate and much of what we know of his life.

Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755). Brief, practical notes, much indebted to the German scholar Bengel, which Wesley intended as a standard for his preachers alongside the sermons.

Thoughts upon Slavery (1774). Short, forceful and still disturbing. Read it alongside chapter twenty-one of this volume.

A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780). Chiefly the hymns of Charles Wesley, arranged by John as, in the words of his preface, a little body of experimental and practical divinity. Many Methodists learned their theology by singing it.

Approach with care

Free Grace. Read it to understand the controversy, not as a model of how to conduct one; chapter seven explains why. Read alongside it Wesley’s sermon on the death of Whitefield, which shows the better side of the same man. Some of his polemical writings against Roman Catholics and against particular opponents are sharper than they needed to be, and are best read with his own Catholic Spirit in mind.

About him

Many biographies have been written. Luke Tyerman’s The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley (1870–71), in three volumes, is old-fashioned but full of documents. Henry D. Rack’s Reasonable Enthusiast (1989) is the standard scholarly life: long, balanced and frank about his faults. Stephen Tomkins’s John Wesley: A Biography (2003) is shorter, readable and fair. Roy Hattersley’s A Brand from the Burning (2002) is the lively account of a sympathetic outsider. For his theology, Albert Outler’s anthology John Wesley (1964) and Randy Maddox’s Responsible Grace (1994) are good guides. Read more than one life. Admirers can make him a saint and critics a tyrant; the truth lies in the details.

Three counsels for reading him

Read him whole. Wesley’s teaching is a single structure, and any one part pulled out of it can mislead. His perfection needs his doctrine of sin in believers; his assurance needs his warnings against enthusiasm; his free grace needs his catholic spirit.

Read him with the Bible open. He called himself a man of one book, and he argued constantly from texts. Check them. Where he is faithful to Scripture, receive him; where he presses beyond it, let Scripture correct him.

And read him to act. Wesley would have had no patience with a reader who enjoyed his sermons and changed nothing. Read one, then pray, then do what it asks: visit someone, give something, confess something, trust Christ for something. That is how he meant to be read.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22