Making All Things New: Sermons on the Way of Salvation

By John Wesley

John Wesley's advice to his preachers was always to focus their efforts on proclaiiming the gospel of salvation. "You have nothing to do but to save souls," Wesley told them. "Therefore spend and be spent in this work." He understood this mission to be central to the Methodist revival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seedbed
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781628241846

Book preview

Making All Things New

Making All Things New

SERMONS ON THE WAY OF SALVATION

John Wesley

The John Wesley Collection

Andrew C. Thompson

Executive Editor

Copyright 2016 by Seedbed Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording,

or otherwise—without prior written permission, except for brief quotations in

critical reviews or articles.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version,

Cambridge, 1796 and from John Wesley’s own translation.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV™ are taken from the New King James

Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62824-182-2

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-62824-183-9

ePub ISBN: 978-1-62824-184-6

uPDF ISBN: 978-1-62824-185-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959336

Cover design by Nikabrik Design

Page design by PerfecType, Nashville, TN

Wesley, John, 1703-1791.

Making all things new : sermons on the way of salvation / John Wesley.

– Frankin, Tennessee : Seedbed Publishing, ©2016.

xv, 137 pages ; cm. – (John Wesley collection)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 9781628241822 (paperback)

1. Salvation -- Sermons. 2. Evangelistic sermons. 3. Methodist

Church -- Sermons. 4. Sermons, English -- 18th century. I. Title.

BX833.W418 M34 2016         252/.07         2015959336

SEEDBED PUBLISHING

Franklin, Tennessee

seedbed.com

SOW FOR A GREAT AWAKENING

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The One Thing Needful (1734)

2. The Scripture Way of Salvation (1765)

3. On Working Out Our Own Salvation (1785)

4. Salvation by Faith (1738)

5. Justification by Faith (1746)

6. The New Birth (1760)

7. The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God (1748)

8. On Perfection (1784)

9. The New Creation (1785)

PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD

John Wesley’s profound legacy and impact on world Christianity in his lifetime and since can be viewed through several lenses. The revival that arose under his leadership changed the social and political structure of eighteenth-century England as the poor and lost found hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ rather than in revolution against the crown. The influence of Wesley’s Spirit-inspired teaching continued unabated as the Methodist movement spread scriptural holiness across the American continent and lands far beyond.

Wesley’s influence as a publisher represents an astonishing record in its own right. Wesley lived in a time when Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, which had immediately preceded Luther’s reformation, had coalesced into specialized printing trades in London. Typefounders and printeries offered exciting new pathways for the spread of the gospel through inexpensive printed text.

Perhaps more than any other figure of his day, Wesley embraced this new technology and issued sermons, tracts, commentaries, abridgments, biographies, and a host of other items that he considered relevant to the spiritual growth of maturing Christians.

Wesley was vitally driven by the reality of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. His teaching on entire sanctification, or Christian perfection, is the capstone of his legacy. He worked tirelessly to abridge and republish seminal works by historical figures of previous generations, reaching as far back as the apostolic fathers of the first-century church. He constantly curated voices that communicated the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing believers into the fullness of salvation and lives of holy love.

These writings resourced the early Methodists in their quest to spread the gospel by providing the intellectual and spiritual moorings for the messengers of the movement. Seedbed believes these writings are as relevant today as they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

With great joy we present The John Wesley Collection. In the years ahead, Seedbed will reissue selections from this vast collection, which includes his fifty-volume Christian Library, some 150 sermons, countless items from his journals and letters, as well as innumerable tracts, hymns, poems, and other publications, most of which have been out of circulation for decades, if not centuries. We encourage you to enter these texts with determination. Readers who persevere will soon find themselves accustomed to the winsome tenor and tempo of Wesley’s voice and vernacular.

Seedbed’s editors are constantly examining the more than 250 years of vital spiritual writing by Wesley and successive generations to find the most relevant and helpful messages that will speak to today’s body of believers. We commend this old-new publishing work to you as one ready to be transformed by the latent power of these ancient truths. It is our prayer that these timeless words will add fuel to the fire of an awakening ready to ignite once again across the world.

Sola sancta caritas! Amen.

Andrew Miller

Seedbed Publishing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The text for each of John Wesley’s sermons included in this compilation originally came from the online Christian Classics Ethereal Library, with the exception of the sermon in Chapter 1, The One Thing Needful, which has been reprinted with permission from the board of directors of the Wesley Works Project and Abingdon Press.

The sermon in Chapter 2 was previously edited by Anne-Elizabeth Powell, librarian at Point Loma Nazarene College (San Diego, California). The sermons in Chapters 3, 6, 8, and 9 were previously edited by students at Northwest Nazarene College (Nampa, Idaho): Timothy Bryant, Michael Anderson, Dave Giles, and Jennette Descalzo, respectively. The sermons in Chapters 4 and 5 were previously edited anonymously at the Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). The sermon in Chapter 7 was previously edited by Kevin Farrow with corrections by Ryan Danker and George Lyons.

George Lyons of Northwest Nazarene College (Nampa, Idaho) provided additional corrections on all sermons in this compilation for the Wesley Center for Applied Theology.

INTRODUCTION

John Wesley (1703–1791) was a man driven by a desire for all people to experience God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. That central motivation can be seen in all periods of his adult life: from the social ministry of the Oxford Methodists in the early 1730s, to Wesley’s missionary experience in the Georgia colony in 1736–37, and to his long leadership of the Methodist movement from 1739 until his death in 1791. The advice he gave to his preachers was a fitting statement for the theme of his own lifelong approach to ministry: You have nothing to do but to save souls. Therefore spend and be spent in this work.

The Wesleyan vision of salvation contains a depth and breadth that is typically hard to come by in contemporary Christian piety. A clue to this feature of Wesley’s teaching can be seen in The Scripture Way of Salvation, where he referred to salvation as encompassing the entire work of God, from the first dawning of grace in the soul till it is consummated in glory (¶I.1). This meant that any account of salvation that would limit its scope to the bare experience of conversion was ruled out. Salvation is, rather, the process of being restored to the image of God—something that began at Calvary and will end in the New Jerusalem. In this present life, there is literally no moment where God’s grace is not acting upon us in some way to save us body and soul.

Students of Wesley’s theology often find his categories of grace to be a helpful way to think about the Wesleyan doctrine of salvation: preventing (or prevenient) grace, convincing grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace. It’s useful to keep in mind that Wesley employed these terms primarily to point to the way in which God’s grace works to save us. Thus, it is prevenient grace that acts to give us a moral sense, knowledge of God’s will, and an awakening to our sinful condition. Convincing grace works to convict us of our sinful rebellion against God and move us to repentance. Justifying grace saves us from the guilt of sin and restores us to God’s favor. Finally, sanctifying grace heals us of sin’s effects and gives us the power to live by Christ’s love. Wesley laid out this progression in the sermon, On Working Out Our Own Salvation, and it is a testament to his view that the way of salvation is a journey encompassing our entire lives.

The Sermons in This Volume

The ordering of these nine sermons has been made with a focus on the way in which salvation actually proceeds in human life. (Dates are listed in parentheses in the table of contents and on the first page of each sermon in the text for readers interested in knowing how the sermons relate to one another chronologically.)

The first sermon in the collection, The One Thing Needful, addresses the need that all men and women have for the renewal of their fallen nature. It establishes a foundation for how to think about salvation as something that we desperately need and that only God can provide. The Scripture Way of Salvation then lays out the full framework for how God’s grace acts in its prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying capacities.

The next sermon, On Working Out Our Own Salvation, is one of Wesley’s best expositions on preventing (or prevenient) grace. Following it, Salvation by Faith presents Wesley’s evangelical interpretation of the role of faith in salvation from both the guilt and power of sin. In Justification by Faith, Wesley separated out justification in a more carefully nuanced way.

Two sermons address the issue of regeneration in the present life: The New Birth and The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God. While there is a bit of overlap between them, including both in this volume is important. The New Birth deals primarily with the nature of regeneration, including both the inherent need for it and the dramatic change it involves within the soul of the believer. The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God follows by addressing the effects of regeneration in human life. In that sense, the latter of these two carries the reader fully into the character of the sanctifying and sanctified life. It’s really only by reading both sermons side by side that one can get the full sense of what it means to be born again through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Sanctification continues as the theme of the sermon, On Perfection, where Wesley described the character of holy living as it grows toward perfection in love. Just as with other subthemes within the doctrine of salvation, Wesley was concerned with showing the explicitly biblical foundations of perfection—which was one of the most controversial aspects of his practical theology in his own lifetime. This is the sum of Christian perfection, Wesley wrote, It is all comprised in that one word: love (¶I.4). Holiness of heart and life is that state of character where the power of sin has been overcome and replaced by the power of holy love. It is the reality experienced by those who are fully renewed in the image of God.

Wesley’s teaching on salvation culminated in the implications of God’s promise to make all things new. Because he took the vision of a restored creation in Revelation seriously, much of the final sermon, The New Creation, is taken up with describing what the earth’s environment will experience at the end of days. Wesley reserved his final word for human beings, though, who will at last know their God face-to-face: And, to crown all, there will be a deep, an intimate, an uninterrupted union with God; a constant communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; a continual enjoyment of the Three-One God, and of all the creatures in him! (¶18). Thus, the salvation we experience in this present life is a preparation for, and foretaste of, the eschatological salvation to come.

Wesley’s views on salvation were, in one sense, simply those held by orthodox Christian belief. Yet, in another sense, they provided an evangelical accent that can be helpful to the reader today. One cannot but get the sense in reading Wesley that the experience of present salvation is something that God earnestly desires for every man and woman. Even more, one cannot but get the sense that the Christian life as presented by Wesley is the kind of life for which every person ought to yearn.

Additional Note

Thanks are owed to the board of directors of the Wesley Works Project and to Abingdon Press for permission to reprint the sermon, The One Thing Needful. This is an important sermon