Nuggets of faith from the astonishing life of John Wesley
In my early years, I attended church, read the Bible, and prayed diligently. And I had faith. I tell people (with tongue in cheek) that while in graduate school I was the only person in the whole physics department who believed in God, except for the janitor!
He and I played ping-pong together, and he said to me “When I look up and see the sun burning away and providing light and heat to the earth, how can I not believe in God?” The physics faculty with their doctor’s degrees looked up at the sun and saw a furnace of nuclear fusion at ten thousand F degrees, with great loops of magnetic plasma shooting out into the sun’s corona at over one million F degrees, but they had no faith to acknowledge the hand of God.
Faith comes alive
Faith in God means believing that God exists. Albert Einstein believed that God exists, perhaps because of his Jewish upbringing. However, Einstein did not believe in a personal God, meaning a God you could have a personal relationship with.
While in graduate school I received a spiritual experience, which for twenty years I had been hoping for. This distinctive personal experience is what some would call a born-again experience. My faith came alive at the age of 26, and my perceptions and priorities changed permanently.
What happened to me was like a Rubik’s cube that flipped from resting on one face to another. However I had never perceived this as an entry into living faith……until I read quite recently the life story of John Wesley.
John Wesley
John Wesley started the Methodist church in England in the 18th century (that’s almost 300 years ago). It’s an astonishing story in a little book that my mother gave me^^, which was printed before 1898! He rode his horse back and forth across England for 50 years, and preached outdoors to crowds which numbered in the thousands (occasionally exceeding ten thousand).
John had always been a student of the Bible, and often read while plodding along on his horse. He preached to members of the Anglican church (if they received him) as well as hardened coal miners. God moved in the hearts of these miners who sometimes fell to the ground and cried out to be saved from their sinful ways. It has been said that John Wesley may have saved the country from an English revolution, at a time when French rioters were guillotining kings and princes and others in power.
Wesley’s spiritual experience
Wesley had entered into a living faith, I was surprised to learn, at least ten years after he had started preaching. While he clearly had faith in all those years, he gained a boost of spiritual experience only after he learned from the Moravians, a church descended from Martin Luther.
The key for Wesley was Luther’s insights on Saint Paul’s teaching that we can only be saved by faith, not by works. Up to this point in his life John Wesley had been focused primarily on works. While preaching all those years, he and his group had been very active in feeding and clothing the poor.…but the missing element was spiritual experience or living faith.
When Wesley found living faith, at a Sunday evening meeting that he did not want to attend, he related that “his heart was strangely warmed”. This experience ignited his ministry, and his works not only continued but expanded.
How can we increase our faith?
Many people have faith at one level or another. In my opinion, living faith is connected with ongoing spiritual experience, and an assurance (you know that you know). It has also been referred to as “heart knowledge versus head knowledge”.
Jesus himself talked of spiritual experience**, and likened it to being “born again”. Although this term threw Nicodemus into a tizzy, it unequivocally points to a birth of new spiritual experience. Jesus also mentioned “living water”, which seems to be an analogy to “living faith”. And that discourse** threw a woman from Samaria into a tizzy!
Living faith starts with grace. Through the grace-gift and the cross-sacrifice, we are saved from our sins and from our worst selves, and we become children of God, loved to the hilt despite our imperfections. We cannot earn this….it is free…..and the realization is mind-bending and liberating and life-changing.
If you desire to enhance your faith, may I suggest (1) being open and childlike (not skeptical) in regard to the things of God, (2) reading about living faith in the Bible**, (3) asking Jesus to reveal more spiritual experience to you (after all He is the one who introduced the born-again subject), and (4) googling on John Wesley to understand how he found living faith.
Post-script for men
It is football season in the USA, and lots of men enjoy watching the college games or the pros. If you have played football in your youth, you will “feel” the game you are watching more than if you have never played the game. You will understand better the patterns of play, and the strategy, and the watching experience will be intensified. I think it’s a similar thing with living faith when you have encountered spiritual experience……you “feel” life differently.
The Gray Nomad.
Probing the practice of Christian believers….
“……you would have asked Him instead, and He would have given you living water……Jesus answered her, all who drink of this water will be thirsty again. But whoever takes a drink of the water that I will give him shall never, no never, be thirsty any more. But the water that I will give him shall become a spring of water welling up continually within him unto eternal life.” (John chapter 4, Amplified Bible).
** Gospel of John, chapters 3, 4.
^^ “John Wesley” by Rev. Richard Green (Chas. H. Kelly, London, before 1989).
Please BE AWARE: if you receive this blog via email (as a notification) make sure you click on the title of the blog to bring up the FULL blog (which includes the photos).
Please hit one of the SHARE buttons below the blog if you know someone who would be interested in this topic. You can also become a Follower by clicking on the gray Follow button at the bottom of the proper blog-viewing screen at https://www.iandexterpalmer.com/.
Discover more from Ian Dexter Palmer Ph.D
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Related Posts
Tim Tebow and when should we publicly acknowledge God?
Jessica Eubank: an Inspiration.
The roots of my Christian faith are in Methodism – my grandfather was a home missionary in Australia and my great grandfather was a Methodist mininster who founded a church in Charters Towers in 1876 which was then a rough gold mining town in Queensland, Australia. I was fortunate to visit the huge Central Methodist Hall in Westminster, London in 2007, the physical legacy of the movement founded by the Wesley brothers, John and Charles. I love music, and Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts between them wrote over 10,000 hymns. Some of this music is inspiring and “warms the heart”. One of the most famous includes the words: “long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night – Thine eye diffused a quickening ray – I woke, the dungeon flamed with light! My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose , went forth and followed Thee…” Thanks so much for sharing this – it brightened my day.
Neil, those immortal words you quoted “….the dungeon flamed with light! My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee” made my heart sing. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Hope you don’t mind. I shared this on Facebook because it is an outstanding representation of how God reveals himself to us if we let him. I was at an Islamic study of a group from Asbury United Methodist church this week. And one of the attendees is a lovely woman who is from Persia. Yes, she says Persia because she was at one time fearful of what people would say because she is Iranian. She came to the states after the Shah was overthrown and has quite a story to tell. She was actually visited personally by the Lord when she was suffering, and from that point on there has never been any doubt for her that Jesus is alive and still available today. She witnessed to her agnostic husband and children, and they have all become born-again, spirit-filled Christians. Another friend had a similar experience. He is a well-educated drilling engineer who related an almost identical visitation. A visit from the Lord definitely must create a knowing that He is alive and available for a personal relationship with each of us. While I have not had a visual encounter, after I asked for and received the evidence of speaking in tongues there was no longer any doubt in my mind. I could not have faked a foreign language for all the tea in China. After this “evidence” of my prayer language (that I use everyday, sometimes minute by minute), I had the assurance that I knew I was “in the family.” AND the Bible became alive to me, real in a way that it had never even come close to prior to that experience. I gobbled it up every single night for two years, reading it through three times, and since then about twenty times. So, I can affirm everything you write here. It is a knowledge and a personal relationship, it is beyond words, and available to anyone who asks. Thanks so much for sharing.
Donna, this is a remarkable report about your experience, and that of the Persian woman. Your words are compelling. Thank you for sharing. PS: I’m glad you shared it with your Facebeook friends and I appreciate you helping to spread the word.