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| IN SOME ways, the most unlikely person ever
to become a famous Christian leader was that failed missionary, John
Wesley. But God had his hand on him, and used him for great good. The facts of Wesley’s long life are well–known. He was born 200 years ago, in 1703. When I was in England recently, we saw many notices about celebrations of the 300th Anniversary of his birth. His father was an impractical Anglican minister; his mother was a strong–willed descendent of Dissenting Protestants. They fought a lot. Susannah had 19 children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. She taught her children such subjects as Greek, history and religion. Wesley studied at Oxford University, where he took a Master of Arts degree, and became a founding member of a club called the Bible Moths, which later became called The Methodists. His younger brother, Charles, and the son of an innkeeper, George Whitefield, were also members. They devoted themselves to reading Christian literature, to keeping all the specified prayers and devotions of the Anglican Prayer Book, and to doing good works. John Wesley was the leader. As a young man, John Wesley volunteered for missionary service in the American colony of Georgia. He failed as a missionary, he failed as an Anglican priest, and his engagement to an American girl turned to disaster. Wesley only barely escaped being sued or lynched, depending on which party of his enemies reached him first. He had to make a dangerous boat trip out of the colony so that he could catch a boat back to England. On his way home, the ship was caught in such a severe storm that the sailors were afraid that it would break up. Wesley was the ordained clergyman on board, but found he had nothing to offer his fellow passengers as they faced almost certain death. On the journey were some German Christians, Moravian Brethren. While Wesley huddled in his cabin, they went from passenger to passenger, praying with each one, encouraging them to believe, and sharing the gospel with them. Wesley could hear them singing hymns as they went. He was ashamed of his own impotence. He cried, “I went to America to convert the Indians, but who, O who, shall convert me!?” It was a depressed John Wesley who settled back into England. But, in England, he found more Moravians, and one thing he knew was this: they had something he didn’t have. So he spent a lot of time with them. What they had was saving faith. Wesley had knowledge and discipline, but he didn’t know Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life. He met a man named Peter Böhler, and confessed his need to him. “Should I cease preaching until I have faith?” Wesley asked. “By no means,” said Böhler. “But what shall I preach?” he asked “Preach faith until you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith,” was Böhler’s famous reply. Unlike some others in this series, which relied on Kerr and Mulder’s accounts of conversions in their book, Famous Conversions, this morning I am relying on Wesley’s own Journal, in the abridged version by Percy Livingstone Parker, published by Hodder and Stoughton (1993). Here’s Wesley’s story, starting on 24 May 1738: In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where someone was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, as 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. I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial way despitefully used me and persecuted me.. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart. But it was not long before the enemy suggested, ‘This cannot be faith, for where is your joy?’ Then was I taught that peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of our salvation; but that, as to the transports of joy that usually attend the beginning of it, especially in those who have mourned deeply, God sometimes gives, sometimes withholds them, according to the counsels of his own will. Imagine it! Here’s Wesley, who grew up in a parsonage, who had trained in Bible, Theology and Godliness from his childhood — here’s Wesley, the ordained Anglican clergyman, the leader of seekers after a deeper faith, the former Missionary — now become Wesley, the repentant sinner. You can compare him with that other great apostle, Paul, who was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a Benjaminite, a man zealous for God, a persecutor of those who deviate from his rigid orthodoxy, a student of the great Gamaliel, suddenly brought up against the risen Christ. It’s a closely comparable experience. As Paul learnt to have no confidence in the flesh, so, too, did John Wesley. It did him no good with God to be who he had been. All that counted was nakedly to follow a naked Christ. As the old hymn says, Nothing
in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling. There are probably four people whose conversions have led to more heated debate than those of any other Christians, and those three are St Paul, The Emperor Constantine, George Fox and John Wesley. They debate about Paul because of his blindness and because of his dramatic turnaround from his Jewish claims. Was Paul epileptic, or psychotic, or heatstroke–affected? There are no end of theories. They debate about Constantine, trying to work out whether his conversion was real or just a political ploy. And they debate about Fox because he was on an emotional roller–coaster for so long that they suspect he had chronic depression. But the debate about Wesley is different. John Wesley is a challenge to every churchgoer. Is it possible to be a regular, active churchgoer, versed in the Bible and Christian beliefs, baptised, raised since infancy to be a Christian leader, and yet never have truly known Christ? John Wesley not only declared that it was very possible, he based his entire ministry on that premise. He did not accept that a person was a Christian because she or he had grown up in a Christian environment. Without a real and personal faith in Christ, everything else is meaningless. Does being born in a garage and living half your life there make you a car? In the same way, a lifetime of association with Christianity can never, of itself, make you a Christian. Wesley didn’t find that believing in Christ as his Lord and Saviour immediately made his life more happy or even more tolerable. He was no fool. He didn’t expect magic. He expected relationship. Before John Wesley was asleep that same evening of his conversion, the Devil laid into him. Wesley writes, After my return home, I was much buffeted with temptations, but cried out, and they fled away. They returned again and again. I as often lifted up my eyes and he ‘sent me help from his holy place’. And I found the difference between this and my former state chiefly consisted in this. I was striving, yes, fighting with all my might under the law as well as under grace. But then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered; now I was always conqueror. In other words, whether he was under the law as an unbeliever, or whether he was under grace as a believer, much in life remained the same. The amount of
temptation was roughly the same.
The strain of the
battle against sin was roughly the same.
Through a saving and keeping relationship with Jesus, Wesley now found that he need not be conquered by the enemy of his soul. Even the day after his heart was strangely warmed, John Wesley found himself in spiritual battle again. He writes, for 25 May, The moment I awoke, ‘Jesus, Master’ was in my heart and in my mouth; and I found all my strength lay in keeping my eye fixed on him and my soul waiting on him continually... That afternoon, Wesley went to St Paul’s church and was encouraged by the anthem; but he writes, ...the enemy injected a fear, ‘If you believe, why is there not a more tangible change?’ I answered (yet not I) ‘That, I do not know. But this I know: I now have peace with God. And I sin not today — and Jesus, my master, has forbidden me to worry about tomorrow. Nothing Satan could do could shake Wesley’s conviction that Christ had died for him and would not let him go. Some people might be offended at the idea that someone can spend an entire life around Christ and not be in a relationship with him, but Wesley refused to temper his message to please his hearers. Truth is truth, and he must declare the truth to all comers. About a week after his conversion, Wesley travelled to Germany and spent three months living among the Moravian Brethren whom he had met in Georgia and on board the ship heading back to England. He spent many days talking to their leader, Graf (Count) Nicholas von Zinzendorf. Back in London again in September of that year, Wesley began preaching again. He preached three times on the morning of his first Sunday back home. Then he went to the Minories and expounded a scripture passage to a group there. He preached Christ wherever he could find a church where his preaching was needed. Early the next year, Wesley was restless again. On 31 March, he arrived in Bristol, where he met George Whitefield again. Whitefield had begun doing something very disturbing. He was preaching out–of–doors, and many responded. Wesley, still very much a conservative, High–church Anglican, remarked, I scarcely could reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields... having been all my life (until very recently) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin, if it had not been done in a church. By the next afternoon, though, we read, At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining the city, to about three thousand people. The scripture on which I spoke was this... ‘The Spirit of the LORD is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favour.’ But not everyone was happy because, the next week as he was preparing to go to the church at Pensford, he received this note: Sir, — Our
minister, having been informed you are beside yourself,
It might have been his first rejection slip, but it was not his last.
They continued into his advanced old age.does not care you should preach in any of his churches. If there was one thing which impressed itself on Wesley, and informed all his preaching, it was the absolute necessity of conversion. He had no time for the vain idea that someone might absorb “Bible Christianity” through hanging around with Christians. Every single, individual man and woman must personally choose and decide whether to accept or reject the prompting of the Holy Spirit and find how he strangely warms the heart even today. I am glad of Wesley’s message, because it spoke to me 43 years ago, when an old, retired Methodist minister named Rev. Dickie Barton came to our school to do substitute Scripture teaching. He showed us how people responded to Jesus, and urged us to respond to him also. I’m sorry I never told Mr Barton of his influence on my conversion. But I will tell him one day. Wesley frequently preached on The New Creature in II Corinthians 5, because he felt himself thoroughly renewed by the Spirit of God and the sacrifice of his Son, Jesus. And, like Wesley, I want to be Christ’s ambassador today, pleading with you, Be
reconciled to God.
I don’t care if you have been brought up in church since the weekend of
your birth, nor does it matter what rites and processes you have been
through. Unless you know Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour,
and unless you have abandoned all reliance on anything else which might
give you a spiritual privilege, then you can’t be saved.And it saddens me to think of the multitudes in the Valley of Destruction, the hundreds of thousands in churches around the world today who do not know Christ and have no conception of the live which is in him. Trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; receive the assurance that he had taken away your sins, even yours, and you will know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Christ has saved you from the law of sin and death. God says, “In
the time of my favour I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped
you.”
Through
Paul he adds,I
tell you, now is the time of God’s favour; now is the day of salvation.
Will you be reconciled to God today?
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| © Peter R. Green 2003. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. | |
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