Quotes/Illustrations
He preached in jails to prisoners, in inns to wayfarers, on vessels crossing to Ireland. At a natural amphitheater in Cornwall, he preached to thirty thousand at once, and when he was refused admission to the Epworth Church, he preached to hundreds in the churchyard while standing on his father’s tombstone. In his diary for June 28, 1774, Wesley claims that his minimum travel per year was 4,500 miles. That means he must have traveled in his lifetime 250,000 miles, ten times around the world, mostly on horseback! As he traveled he soon learned to give the horse plenty of rein so that he could read a book or prepare a sermon on his way to the next town.
He preached in jails to prisoners, in inns to wayfarers, on vessels crossing to Ireland. At a natural amphitheater in Cornwall, he preached to thirty thousand at once, and when he was refused admission to the Epworth Church, he preached to hundreds in the churchyard while standing on his father’s tombstone. In his diary for June 28, 1774, Wesley claims that his minimum travel per year was 4,500 miles. That means he must have traveled in his lifetime 250,000 miles, ten times around the world, mostly on horseback! As he traveled he soon learned to give the horse plenty of rein so that he could read a book or prepare a sermon on his way to the next town.
The effects on Wesley were equally remarkable. Up to this point he was filled with anxiety, insecurity, and futility. After Bristol he was a firebrand for God.
Wesley continued preaching almost to the end of his days. He died in London on March 2, 1791, approaching eighty-eight years of age. When the burning brand finally went out, he left behind seventy-nine thousand followers in England and forty thousand in North America. If we judge greatness by influence, he was among the greats of his times.
The Puritan view of the church rested on its understanding of the covenant of grace. Early New Englanders realized that the visible church could never be an exact copy of the truly elect, but God willed the church so far as possible to be a church of visible saints. That is why the first generation insisted that conversion precede church membership, a practice reaffirmed in 1648 with the adoption of the Cambridge Platform.
“The doors of the churches of Christ upon earth,” they said, “do not by God’s appointment stand so wide open, that all sorts of people good or bad, may freely enter therein at their pleasure.” Those seeking admission, they declared, must be “examined and tried first” to see that they possess, above all else, “repentance from sin and faith in Jesus Christ.” This usually meant that potential members made “a personal and public confession,” detailing “God’s manner of working upon the soul.”
The Puritan “holy experiment,” blending belief in a church of the truly converted with the idea of a Christian state, seemed destined to fail almost from the start. There are problems in operating any church on earth when only God knows who the real members are. Not everyone in Massachusetts or Connecticut could testify of experienced grace. As the zeal of the New England founders cooled, fewer men and women could bear public witness to grace in their souls. To keep membership from shrinking drastically, many churches in 1662 had to settle for the Half-Way Covenant. Under this policy the “unawakened” could enjoy a kind of partial membership, baptizing their children and joining in congregational activities, but not taking full Communion. This was enough church affiliation for most political and social purposes, so that gradually the saints, those professing a personal encounter with Christ, sank to a tiny minority. When a new charter in 1691 based the right to vote on property rather than on church membership, New England had reached a spiritual crossroads.
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) was the first licensed female watchmaker in Holland. When the Nazis invaded, she assisted the Dutch resistance, overseeing a network of safehouses (including her own home) secretly harboring Jews. In 1944 the ten Booms were arrested. Corrie and her sister, Betsy, were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where Betsy died. Despite her surroundings, Corrie exuded hope. Her hope in Christ allowed her to do what seemed impossible: to forgive her captors. In her influential book, The Hiding Place, ten Boom described the struggle with “the coldness clutching my heart” and praying, “Jesus, help me!” as she held the hands of one of her former prison guards and, through tears, said, “I forgive you!” Ten Boom wrote, “I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”
