Sometimes, when I arrive at a church for the first time, a person will approach me and introduce themselves. In the middle of their greeting, they will tell me, ‘I’m a lifelong Methodist.’ Their clear assumption is that I will be impressed.
More often than not, though, my heart sinks.
And I say that as someone who is also a life-long Methodist.
Because what they tend to mean is something like this. They love the hymns, the style of worship, the variety of preachers from week to week, and so on.
But I don’t want to know whether you like those things. I want to know – if you like Charles Wesley’s hymns, do you have the very experience of God in your life that Wesley wrote about and that his elder brother John preached about? If all you like are the hymns, you may have Methodist style but you don’t have Methodist substance.
And substance is what matters.
In my first circuit as a minister, some people tried to divide the church over the question of music in worship. Some members wanted us to introduce more contemporary worship songs and hymns alongside the traditional material. But some of the ‘lifelong Methodist’ contingent wouldn’t have it.
The tragedy was that those who wanted to add the contemporary to what we already had still loved the Wesley hymns. But they loved them not for the poetry or the melodies (many of which come from after the Wesleys’ time anyway!). No: they loved them, because they had the experience of the Holy Spirit that Charles Wesley described in those hymns. They had the substance. The critics just had the style.
And so since yesterday was the anniversary of John Wesley’s profound experience of faith and assurance in Christ through the Holy Spirit warming his heart at an address in the Barbican, I thought we should take today to examine whether we too have that knowledge of hearts being strangely warmed by the redeeming work of God.
The way I’m going to do this is by summarising Wesleyan beliefs under what have been called ‘The Four ‘Alls’ of Methodism’. Each of the four ‘All’ statements pertains to salvation.
And the first ‘All’ is that All need to be saved.
When John Wesley preached in the open air to the crowds, he used to say that first of all he preached ‘Law’ and then he preached ‘Grace.’ He spoke first about God’s law, to show God’s standards for life and to make it clear that we all fail to reach those standards. The word most commonly translated ‘sin’ in the New Testament means ‘to miss the mark.’ As Romans 3:23 famously puts it,
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
We have failed. We need grace.
If you grow up in the church, you can easily miss this. I did. I grew up hearing people being asked whether they were Christians and answering, ‘I’m trying to be a Christian.’ This communicated to me that Christianity could be summed up like a simple mathematical equation: Christianity equals believing in God plus doing good.
I was so wrong.
My mother even bought me a book that was a popular exposition of Romans, showing that faith, rather than good works, led to salvation. I tossed it aside as rubbish.
It was only when I went to series of church membership classes with members of the church youth group, that things clicked – and only then at the final session, when we looked at the service for the reception of new members. There were three promises and professions of faith the candidates had to make. Do you repent of your sins? Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour? Will you obey Christ and serve him in the world?
The penny dropped, at last.
Just as John Wesley had tried to live a methodical, holy life but was riddled with fear until his heart was strangely warmed, so God intervened through the words of that liturgy and I found myself responding.
It doesn’t matter how good and how respectable our lives and upbringings are. Each one of us is a sinner. We fail God’s standards. We need to be saved.
The second ‘All’ is that All can be saved.
The person who urged John Wesley to preach in the open air, first of all to colliers at Kingswood near Bath, was George Whitefield. While Whitefield was generally reckoned to be a better preacher than Wesley, they sharply differed on one issue. Whitefield, as a Calvinist, believed that Jesus only died for the ‘elect.’ That is, God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned.
Wesley disagreed. He did not believe that all people would be saved, but he did believe that all people could be saved. Therefore, the Gospel should be shared with as many as possible, so that people might have the opportunity of responding and receiving salvation from God by grace through faith thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
While this debate still exists in parts of the Christian world, Wesley set the direction of travel very clearly for the Methodist movement. All can be saved, and that means sharing the Gospel is a priority. Sadly, I’m not sure you would guess that from the behaviours and priorities of many Methodist congregations today, but if you say you are a traditional Methodist, then this is in your spiritual DNA. It is not the only part of mission, but it is a key part.
Today, in other ways, there are people who think they can’t be saved. They’ve been too bad. They’ve been so damaged they can’t recognise goodness and grace when it is offered to them. Perhaps it’s expressed in words from the rock band Coldplay in a song of theirs called ‘Viva La Vida’:
For some reason I can’t explain
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name[1]
While the song is about a king who has lost his kingdom, it’s poignant to hear those words sung by Chris Martin, who grew up in a Christian family in Devon.
But it is our privilege to make it known to people that none of them need say, I can’t be saved. The love of God is on offer to all. It simply requires a response of opening out empty hands in faith to receive his gift.
The third ‘All’ is that All can know they are saved.
This is what we call the Christian doctrine of assurance. It is that we can be assured of having saving faith.
Various strands of Christianity had advanced ideas of how believers could know their eternal destiny for certain. At the more Catholic end, it was simply by receiving the sacraments of the Church, but not all found that convincing. What if an unrepentant scoundrel took the sacraments? Tragically, this left many Catholics uncertain of God’s grace and love.
In the Reformation, Calvinists said you could know from the promises of God in Scripture. However, even those who were supposedly reprobates, not part of the elect, could also read Scripture. So some later Calvinists looked in the Bible for signs of God’s blessing upon people. Unfortunately, they landed on things such as those who received material wealth in the Old Testament. We see the legacy of this mistake even today in the so-called ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which really is no Gospel at all.
Wesley certainly had a place for believing in the promises of Scripture, and he also believed that the sacraments had power. But he added something else: the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. It’s there in Romans 5, which we read (one of Wesley’s favourite passages, by the way):
hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Verse 5)
To those who, as in the title of the song recorded by both Dusty Springfield and David Cassidy, asked, ‘How can I be sure?’, Wesley answered that as well as receiving comfort from the presence of Christ at the sacraments and applying the promises of God in Scripture, you could know and feel the assuring work within you by the Holy Spirit.
It was what he had experienced at Aldersgate Street in the Barbican, when he said that his heart was strangely warmed and he felt he did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.
It was what Charles wrote about in ‘O for a thousand tongues’ in the climactic verse:
In Christ, our Head, you then shall know,
shall feel your sins forgiven,
anticipate your heaven below,
and own that love is heaven.[2]
This is all part of the Good News. God doesn’t want you to be in any doubt of his saving love for you.
The fourth and final ‘All’ is that All can be saved to the uttermost.
This is John Wesley’s controversial doctrine of Christian Perfection. Wesley based it on texts such as the words of Jesus:
Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)
Even Wesley realised there were problems with this view. He said it wasn’t so much as believing you could get to a point of not sinning at all as about not knowingly engaging in any conscious sin. He also was clear that he didn’t classify himself as perfect, and that he only in his lifetime ever knew one or two people whom he could call perfect, even by his own revised definition.
Furthermore, it is a debatable understanding of the words of Jesus. For the word translated ‘perfect’ might not mean ‘morally perfect.’ It might mean ‘mature.’
So how do we take this? I found some words of my college Principal about this helpful. He said that behind this controversial teaching of Wesley’s was what he called ‘an optimism of grace.’ And I think that’s a good lesson for us. We should always be optimistic about what God by his grace can accomplish in our lives and in the lives of others.
This means advancing in holiness, both in our private lives and in social dimensions. For this, we need the ongoing sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit – something to remember when Pentecost comes up in a couple of weeks.
And to achieve this, Wesley set up his famous small groups so that members could hold each other accountable for growing in grace and supporting one another. George Whitefield, whom I mentioned earlier, realised that this was Wesley’s genius: he organised converts into small groups for their spiritual growth. Whitefield didn’t, and in contrast, many of his converts didn’t stick: he sadly described them as ‘a rope of sand.’
To be a traditional Methodist, then, means having a holy dissatisfaction with our lives, but also a great hope in God’s grace to transform us, and a commitment to small-group relationships that will help us in that growth.
Conclusion
So – if you say you are a lifelong or traditional Methodist – are these things your knowledge and experience? And I ask the same question if you have been attracted to Methodism in mid-life.
Do you know your need to be saved?
Do you know you can be saved?
Do you have assurance that you have been saved?
And is God saving you more and more, even one day to the uttermost?
[1] Songwriters: Christopher A. J. Martin, Guy Rupert Berryman, Jonathan Mark Buckland, William Champion; lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
[2] Charles Wesley (1707-1788), italics mine.
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