This is a sermon preached on 24^th May – Wesley Day

 

 It would be difficult to imagine anyone more rigid, more defensive, more inflexible─in a word, more “uptight”─than John Wesley in Georgia, 1737.  When day-old infants were brought to the church for baptism, Wesley insisted on immersing them completely, three times over.  As horrified mothers objected to this dangerous practice (wasn’t it enough that the infant-mortality rate was already 50 per cent?) Wesley reacted by refusing to serve Holy Communion to the mothers themselves.

  

At this point in his life, Wesley was a moralist.  He thought the mission of the Church to be that of improving the moral tone of the society.  Like all moralists he was also a legalist; that is, he thought that people were admitted to God’s favour on the basis of rule-keeping.  Like moralists and legalists in general, he was superior, disdainful, autocratic, unbending: in a word, obnoxious.

  

Obnoxious he certainly was; stupid, however, he was not.  A graduate of Oxford University, Wesley was proficient in the ancient languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew.  He knew philosophy, history, literature, logic, theology.  French appears to have been the only modern language in which he was schooled formally.  Still, on the three-month voyage to Georgia he taught himself German so thoroughly that years later he translated dozens of Paul Gerhardt’s hymns from German to English.  In the New World he came upon some Italian settlers who were without a clergyman.  Wesley conducted worship for them, reading the Anglican Prayer Book service to himself while translating it aloud into the Italian he had recently taught himself.  In Frederica, a village a few miles from Savannah, Wesley came upon a Jewish community whose people were from Portugal but spoke Spanish.  Whereupon Wesley taught himself Spanish in order to converse with them.

  

Then disaster overtook him.  He was 34 years old and had become infatuated with an 18-year-old woman, Sophy Hopkey.  She rejected him in favour of another man, Mr. Williamson,   whom she subsequently married.  Hurt, frustrated and angry all at once, Wesley found excuses to withhold Holy Communion from Sophy, thereby suggesting to the public that she was scandal-ridden.  Her husband was outraged.  He had the politically powerful summon a Grand Jury.  The Grand Jury indicted Wesley, and he took the next ship back to England in order to escape a lawsuit.

 

Why had he gone to the New World in the first place?  He had gone inasmuch as he was a spiritual groper.  He had thought that going to the wilderness in the New World would somehow translate into a fresh start for him in his spiritual quest.  Candidly, he said he’d gone in hope of saving his own soul.

  

Having returned to England a disillusioned man, haunted by his failure and tormented by his quest, he floundered for months until one Sunday evening he went to a service in London.  He says he went “very unwillingly,” no doubt because he felt there was no point in going: His situation was hopeless and he himself helpless.  Listen to Wesley in his own words:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans.  About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

 

It was 24^th May, 1738, the occasion of the long-awaited turnaround in his life.  His moralism and legalism were behind him forever.  Immediately, his preaching shifted from moral exhortation to Gospel-offer.  His attitude to people, especially those beneath his social position, shifted from contempt to compassion.  His rigorous self-discipline shifted from an achievement by which he sought to gain favour with God to a simple lifestyle that freed up everything about him and made it available to others.   It happened on 24^th May, 1738, thereafter known to all Methodist Christians as “Wesley Day.”

  

Years later he and other Methodists (Methodism at this time was still a movement within Anglicanism) began to speak of “Our Doctrines.”  The doctrines of the Methodists, however, weren’t unique to Methodists.  “Our Doctrines” were the doctrines of the Church-at-large.  There was nothing novel about them.  Wesley abhorred theological novelty, insisting that anything novel had to be heretical or cultish.  “Our Doctrines” were the doctrines of Christians everywhere.  At the same time, Wesley insisted that his people own them, and own them with mind and heart, understanding and zeal.

 

1)  First among “Our Doctrines” is justification by faith.  Justification, or righteousness, means right-relatedness to God.  Justification, right-relatedness by faith is always to be contrasted with justification by something else, namely, justification by achievement.  The issue is this: Is our righted-relationship with God, our standing with God, a gift from God or is it something we earn and therefore merit?  With the help of friends who were spiritual descendants of Luther, Wesley came to see that scripture clearly affirms our right-relationship to God to be God’s gift, a gift that we come to possess by faith.

  

To say that sinners are justified, is to say that those in the wrong before God are put in the right with God.  It’s to say that they are pardoned, or forgiven, or acquitted or freely accepted.  All these terms mean the same thing.  To say that this happens through the faith of the believing person is to say that such a person welcomes God’s forgiveness, endorses God’s acquittal, accepts God’s acceptance of oneself.  Needless to say, faith must never be construed as a virtue that God recognizes and rewards.  Faith must never be construed as an achievement that merits pardon with God.

  

Faith is simply the bond that binds us to Jesus Christ.  Isn’t Jesus Christ the Son with whom the Father is well-pleased?  Then as we are bound to Christ in faith, and bound so closely to him as to be identified with him, we are now the son or daughter with whom the Father is pleased.  Isn’t Jesus Christ the only covenant-partner of God who keeps the covenant with his Father?  Then, as we are bound to Jesus Christ in faith and thereby identified with him, we who are covenant-breakers in ourselves are now covenant-keepers in Christ.  Isn’t Jesus Christ the one whose cross bore the sin of humankind?  Then, as we are bound to him in faith and identified with him, our sin is borne away.

  

The apostle Paul gloried in the truth of justification by faith.  Yet we mustn’t think that Paul invented the doctrine.  He had found it everywhere in the earthly ministry of Jesus. Jesus stopped at the foot of the tree where a wistful but cautious Zacchaeus was hiding.  “Come on out of that silly tree-perch,” said Jesus. “I’m going home with you to eat with you.”  To eat with someone meant, in first-century Palestine, to accept that person.  There was our Lord’s justification of the tree-percher!  And Zacchaeus’s eager welcome of our Lord was faith.

 

Our Lord told a parable of two men who went to church to pray.  One fellow, indisputably a moral giant, tried to use his moral attainment as a bargaining chip with God.  The other fellow could only plead, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.”  “I tell you,” said Jesus, “this man went home justified.”

  

Justification by faith is the beginning of the Christian life; it’s the beginning of the Christian life and the stable basis for all else in the Christian life.  Justification by faith is first among “Our Doctrines.”

 

2) Second is the new birth.  Whereas justification is a change in the believer’s standing before God (from condemnation to acquittal, from rejection to acceptance, from expulsion to welcome), regeneration or new birth is a change within the believer herself.  Wesley spoke of justification as a relative change (relative because of a changed relationship) and of new birth as a real change.

  

Through the prophet Ezekiel God had promised to create a new heart, a new spirit, within his people.  Ezekiel contrasts the new “heart of flesh” with the old “heart of stone.”  The heart of flesh beats, pulsates, throbs.  It invigorates someone who is alive.  The heart of stone, on the other hand, is the heart of a corpse, a heart taken over by rigor mortis.  The difference between the heart of flesh and the heart of stone is the difference between someone who is alive unto God and someone who is inert before God.  It’s the difference between someone who is responsive to God, meeting God, and someone who is insensitive, unresponsive, indifferent.

  

As glorious as justification is (the freely bestowed forgiveness of God), Wesley knew it wasn’t enough.  He asked himself a question as simple as it was profound: Can people be changed, really changed, from the inside out?  Everyone knew that behavioural conformity could be fostered.  (Moralists and legalists major in this.)  But could a change so very profound occur that someone was given new aspiration, new motivation, new obedience─in short, a new nature?   Wesley knew that either God can make a real change in us or the most the Gospel offers is a pronouncement of pardon upon our bondage to sin even as the bondage is unrelieved.  As glorious as he knew forgiveness of sin to be (no one would pretend that clemency visited upon the condemned to be anything else), Wesley knew that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it.  He insisted that the Gospel not only relieved people of the guilt of sin, it also released them from the power of sin.  Life could begin again.

 

When Jesus tells Nicodemus, “You’ve got to be born again, born anew,” the English word “again” or “anew” translates the Greek word, anothen.  Anothen has three meanings: (1) it can mean “again” in the sense of “one more time” (Nicodemus says he can’t re-enter his mother’s uterus and be born one more time); (2) or it can mean “again,” “anew” in the sense of “from above, from God”; (3) or it can mean “with a completely different nature.”  Nicodemus fastens on to the first meaning only; Jesus has in mind only the latter two.  Our Lord insisted that anyone could, and everyone should, be reconstituted at God's hand so as to be possessed of a new nature.

 

People can change; even better, people can be changed.  God will grant them a new heart.  God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it.  The person he forgives he also remakes.  Either this is true or the Gospel isn’t good news.  It is true.  Hope is therefore more than wishful thinking.  Deliverance can be asked for and acknowledged.  The relative change of the remission of sin is always accompanied by the real change of regeneration.  Believers have a genuine future.

 

3) Third in “Our Doctrines” is the witness of the Spirit (i.e., the witness of the Holy Spirit).  The children of God can know themselves to be such.  When people come to faith in Jesus Christ and are renewed at his hand, they are no longer mere creatures of God but are now children of God.  God seals this truth upon them so as to leave them with every assurance that they are his.

 

Wesley was aware that the spiritually hungry look to our Lord in hope of being fed.  Plainly, a sense of need has impelled them to look to him.  Plainly, the more urgent their sense of need, the more anxiously they look.  If in looking to Jesus Christ they lack assurance that they have met him and are now fused to him, then their everyday bundle of anxieties remains unrelieved and is, in fact, swelled by a fearsome religious anxiety.  Then it’s crucial that those who have passed from death to life know it. 

  

Since Wesley invented nothing, we mustn’t think that he was the first to speak of the witness of the Spirit.  He found it writ large in Scripture, largest of all in Romans 8:15 where Paul exclaims, “The Spirit, God himself, constrains us to cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’  As the Spirit pulls this cry out of us the Spirit himself bears witness to us that we are children of God.” Wesley knew that one thing only relieved anxious people concerning their standing with God: the “stamp” of that Spirit who presses himself and impresses himself upon believing people so as to authenticate himself to them, authenticate their adoption at God’s hand to themselves, and all of this unquestionably. 

  

Needless to say, there are mysteries to our engagement with God that leave speech halting.  Wesley admitted this.  Wesley, however, was never tongue-tied over the fact of the Spirit’s testimony.  The manner of it, on the other hand, how it occurs, he admitted he had to leave to the inscrutable mystery of God.  His laconic comment here is, “It is hard to find words in the language of men to explain ‘the deep things of God.’”

  

The witness of God’s Spirit resembles happiness in one respect: If we pursue it, it forever escapes us.  Happiness, everyone knows, overtakes people when they aren’t looking for it but are getting on with what they have to do.  In the same way, God’s Spirit assures us of our standing with him (“No condemnation now I dread,” wrote Charles Wesley), as we are busy with what God has given us to do.

 

4) Fourth among “Our Doctrines” is the declaration of the law to believers.  Believers have to be guided on the road of discipleship.

  

Over and over throughout the history of the Church, wherever the glorious truth of justification by faith has been declared, some people have drawn the wrong conclusion.  “If we are set right with God by our faith in the provision he has made for us in his Son, then it makes no difference what we do thereafter.”  The apostle Paul had to contend with the same misunderstanding during his ministry.  When he announced the good news of the Gospel (we are justified by grace through faith, not on account of our conformity to law), some hearers assumed that the law of God had been overturned.  “By no means!” the apostle expostulated.  “On the contrary, faith upholds the law!”  The law of God is necessary if believers are to live out, live rightly, the new life they have received in Christ.

  

Once again, Wesley didn’t invent anything here.  Apart from Scripture’s insistence on the law of God as a guide to believers, Wesley took it most immediately from the Puritans who had preceded him.  The Puritans took it from Calvin, who found it ultimately in Melanchthon, the fellow who “packaged” Luther’s theology.  Melanchthon called it “the third use of the law.”

  

The first use, Luther had said, was to order the society, to prevent social breakdown, even social chaos.  The second use was to convict people of their sinnership as they came to see that they violated the law of God and were therefore guilty before God.  The third use of the law was to guide believers along the road of discipleship.

 

Think, for instance, of the prohibition concerning theft.  The first use of the law forestalls a social snakepit where the existence of community is impossible.  The second use convicts people of their deep-down sinnership and points them to the Gospel for relief.  After all, the prohibition against theft includes prohibition against envy, greed, covetousness─sins of which everyone is guilty.  The third use guides believers along the road of discipleship, as believers now know they must repudiate any envy, greed, covetousness that laps at them, even as they must put everything they own at the disposal of their neighbour.

  

Did I say that the third use of the law is to help believers along the road of discipleship?  I did.  But isn’t Jesus Christ our companion on the road?  Isn’t he always our companion on the road even as he leads us?  He is.  Then the law of God, for believers, is simply the claim of Jesus Christ upon our obedience.  Our Lord himself insists that we obey him, obey him in person.  Then the third use of the law is simply our Lord’s relentless insistence that we obey him and thereby walk in that newness of life which he has already bestowed on us.

 

“Our Doctrines” include─and must ever include─the declaration of the law to believers.

 

5)  Last, but no means least, is Christian Perfection.  Now don’t be put off because you’ve heard the word “perfection.”  Wesley didn’t endorse a perfectionism that renders people neurotic.  He didn’t endorse a religious superiority that leaves people snobbish and self-righteous.  He did, however, encourage his people to look to God for deliverance from every vestige of selfism.

  

Wesley knew, as the Church catholic has always known, that selfism is the essence of sin.  To be profoundly freed from sin is to be freed from a self-preoccupation that measures everything and everyone in terms of catering to the self and magnifying the self and promoting the self.  Since we all need to be freed from such self-preoccupation, as we need nothing else, and since all of Christ’s people have been appointed to be delivered from it in heaven, why not look to God to be delivered from it now?  Why set arbitrary limits to what God can do to free any of us in this life?

  

I know what you are going to tell me: You are going to say that any concern with deliverance from selfism is, at bottom, another form of self-preoccupation.  But not so for Wesley.  For him, Christian perfection was self-forgetfulness, self-forgetfulness that frees us for love of God and neighbour.  Self-forgetful love for God and neighbour entails a self-sacrifice that is so thoroughly selfless as to be unaware of being a sacrifice:  “Lost in wonder, love and praise,” wrote Charles Wesley.  Be sure to underline “lost,” self-abandoned to discerning and doing God’s will, self-abandoned to assisting the poor, the lonely, the outcast, the disadvantaged, the spiritually inert.

  

When Wesley saw the plight of the sick, poor people who first joined the Methodist societies, he gathered to himself a surgeon and an “apothecary,” and then scrounged the money to pay them.  In the first five months of this program, his apothecary distributed drugs to 500 people.  The drugs cost ₤40.00.  He raised the money himself.  By 1746 he had established London’s first free dispensary.

  

Wesley was distressed at the plight of aged widows.  He purchased houses and refurbished them (“We fitted them up so as to be warm and clean”).  Would the widows who had to live in them feel themselves demeaned as charity cases much beneath the social position of Wesley himself?  Every time he was in the neighbourhood, he ate from their table and ate the same food.

  

When the banks refused to lend money to industrious Methodists, who were newly sobered through the ministry of the Wesleys and who wanted to start up small businesses, Wesley scrabbled for ₤50.00 and then handed out small loans.  In the first year he helped 250 people make a fresh economic start.

 

Remember: Christian perfection is simply self-forgetful love of God and neighbour.  When Methodism moved over to America, young men were needed for a ministry that unfolded amidst appalling hardship.  Of the first 737 Methodist ministers in America, one-half died before they were 30 years old; two-thirds didn’t live long enough to serve 12 years.  Did their premature death cheat them?  They would have laughed at the suggestion.  They had in them the fire that had fired Wesley before them.

 

Every year, when the new president of the Methodist Conference of Great Britain and Ireland is installed, s/he is handed John Wesley’s field bible, the bible he put in his long-coat pocket as he moved on horseback throughout Britain and dismounted to preach outdoors.  The flyleaf of his field bible contains his signature, the date and two Latin words, “Vive hodie”: “Live today.”

 

I want to live today.  Surely you want to live today, too, even if you are still on your way to Wesleyan conviction, fire and fruitfulness in the service of our Lord Jesus Christ.