Yearning for the Heavenly Country: Sermons on the Spiritual Realm

By John Wesley

John Wesley described the Christian life as consisting of “continual warfare.” The spiritual struggle involved in faithful living is real, in Wesley’s view. It means that we need “every moment” to be watchful and to pray so that we don’t fall into the temptations that surround us at every turn. Because the Christian life is a spiritual life, it intersects with the spiritual realm. For Wesley, our own spirits are under the influence of spirits we can’t see with our eyes—the Holy Spirit, of course, but also angels and demons that seek to do us either good or ill.

Well known for his “practical divinity,” or writings on the practical Christian life, Wesley was also wont to venture into more speculative territory when it came to his writing on spiritual warfare. He was fascinated by the role that angels play in our faith. He believed strongly that we needed to be aware of the danger that Satan and his demons represented to us. Wesley could also become captivated by thoughts on what the “heavenly country” from the book of Hebrews might be like—a restored creation for a redeemed humanity in the kingdom to come. This volume covers all that ground as we have it from Wesley’s pen, with twelve sermons on the spiritual life and the spiritual realm that are both practical and speculative in nature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seedbed
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781628243338

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www.wesley.nnu.edu.

INTRODUCTION

When we think of John Wesley’s chief interests as represented in things he wrote, a number of regular topics come to our minds. There is, of course, the Way of Salvation with its familiar categories of grace: prevenient, convincing, justifying, and sanctifying. Then there is also Wesley’s deep interest in the practical Christian life; that is the topic we see reflected both in the General Rules of the United Societies and in all his varied writings on the means of grace. Wesley also took a deep interest in defending the Methodist movement and chronicling the early decades of Methodism’s history under his own leadership—hence the prolific installments of his published journal, as well as apologetic essays like The Character of a Methodist and A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists.

These are all familiar items in the Wesleyan corpus. Together they give us the John Wesley that we know and love. They are also, by and large, nonthreatening to a twenty-first century Christian spirituality. Indeed, for those that think Methodism needs to become more authentically Wesleyan, these familiar topics are items that we tend to think need to be taken more seriously by the Methodist rank-and-file today.

But is the John Wesley limited to the familiar writings on grace, discipleship, and Methodist identity the real John Wesley? Is the intellectual and spiritual portrait we get from them an accurate one at all?

The sermons collected in the present volume challenge the familiar image of Wesley. They represent a John Wesley decidedly unfamiliar to most—indeed, a Wesley that might be considered downright embarrassing to the mainstream Methodist sensibilities of our day.

A Preference for Practical Divinity

Beyond just the general unfamiliarity of this material, there is another reason why the particular sermons in this collection might be seen as strange coming from Wesley’s pen. Namely, Wesley professed a decided preference for what he calls practical divinity. (In the eighteenth century, divinity was the word typically used for theology so that practical divinity means what we would call practical theology.) Wesley speaks about practical divinity in a number of places. Take, for instance, his preface to the fifty-volume Christian Library, which consists of a collection of extracts and abridgments of what Wesley called the choicest pieces of practical divinity which have been published in the English tongue. In the preface, Wesley describes the texts he has collected and published as that theology which is all practical, unmixed with controversy of any kind, and all intelligible to plain men; such as is not superficial, but going down to the depth, and describing the height, of Christianity; and yet not mystical, not obscure to any of those who are experienced in the ways of God.¹

Wesley describes his preference for this type of theological writing in the preface to another of his collections—this time to his multivolume Sermons on Several Occasions. Here Wesley refers not to the writing of others but rather to his own approach in crafting written sermons meant to explain biblical doctrine. I design plain truth for plain people, Wesley contends. Therefore . . . I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations, from all perplexed and intricate reasonings and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning, unless in sometimes citing the original Scriptures.² Practical divinity, therefore, has the double connotation of being both relevant to lived religion and written in a plain style accessible to the general reader. It is also geared toward the believer in the midst of present life—the one concerned with finding the way to heaven and desirous of the true, the scriptural, experimental religion capable of conveying true faith in God.³

Practical divinity, as Wesley understands it, can thus be contrasted with other approaches to Christian theology. These other approaches include such categories as controversial divinity, mystical divinity, or speculative divinity. If we just take the last of these examples—speculative divinity—we can see easily enough how much Wesley thought anything veering away from the practical could lead either to delusion or distraction. His 1739 sermon, Free Grace, warns against those who put their trust in a notion, a speculative belief about God rather than in a feeling possession of God in your heart. ⁴ In a 1776 letter where he comments on a contemporary work on the Trinity, Wesley critiques its lack of an adequate section on practical application, lest its author make the Trinity appear to be a merely speculative doctrine, which has no influence on our hearts or lives.⁵ His consistent concern is that anything that could be classified as speculative runs the risk of taking the believer’s focus away from that which is grounded, real, and relevant to present salvation.

Then there is the entry in Wesley’s published Journal from September 3, 1740, where he describes a woman in Bristol who claimed to have received private revelations regarding certain things about angels and devils. Wesley is clearly bewildered by her behavior, since she had experienced the love of God shed abroad in her heart not long before. Yet now this woman was claiming to have fantastic knowledge regarding the spiritual state of angelic beings and the consequences of the death of Christ upon the same. Wesley’s report again shows his preference for practical over speculative divinity: I earnestly besought them all to keep clear of vain speculations and seek only for the plain, practical ‘truth, which is after godliness.’⁶

A Speculative View into the Spiritual Realm

Yet as the sermons collected in Yearning for the Heavenly Country show, Wesley could easily move from the practical to the speculative in his writing on the spiritual life and the spiritual realm. And as he grows more speculative, we begin to see a Wesley who is at once both less familiar and, perhaps, less comfortable to a conventional twenty-first-century Christian spirituality.

The particular sermons in this volume have been chosen because they all relate in some way to the spiritual life and the spiritual realm. They cover a broad time period, ranging from 1746 to 1791. The first four sermons in this collection are very practical in orientation. They are focused on practical aspects of present salvation. The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption has been chosen to head the list because of the helpfulness of the typology that Wesley develops in it: that of the natural state, the legal state, and the evangelical state. Spiritual Idolatry and Spiritual Worship follow next, and they train their focus on the importance of abstaining from worldly idolatries and embracing the true worship of Jesus Christ. Then, Satan’s Devices, warns the Christian believer away from all the ways in which Satan can tempt and distract and lead astray as the believer seeks to remain faithful in this life.

Yet after this fourth sermon in our collection, the focus turns from the practical to the largely speculative. First, a caveat: it’s important to point out that Wesley is not speculative in any of the eight sermons that follow if by speculative we were to mean blindly guessing or positing without any basis at all. Even so, these final eight sermons in Yearning for the Heavenly Country are truly speculative in that they often take a bare foundation from Scripture and elaborate upon it according to what might be true. Wesley is very interested in both the nature and work of angels. He wants to speculate about various aspects of the afterlife, both in the time between bodily death and general resurrection and in the eschaton proper. He is concerned about what a restored creation is going to look like, not just for humanity but also for the creation itself and—in the case of The General Deliverance—with regard to animals as well!

Given all of Wesley’s protestations about wanting to embrace the practical and leave the mystical and speculative alone, why would he end up publishing so many sermons with deeply speculative elements? There are a number of reasons this could be the case. One has to do with the dates of many of the more speculative sermons. Seven of the eight that I have suggested are much more speculative were published in 1781 or later—in other words, during the last decade or so of Wesley’s life. These sermons were being written when Wesley was growing ever closer to eternity himself. A simple explanation would be that his own interest in speculating about the life to come was motivated by his own growing sense that he was about to enter into that life.

A second reason why Wesley could have decided to engage in more speculative topics during the decade of the 1780s has to do with the purpose these sermons were written to serve. All of the 1780s-era sermons were written for inclusion in the Arminian Magazine. The Arminian was the periodical Wesley founded in 1777 that was intended as something of a teaching organ for Methodism. Its readership was, by definition, literate and the sermons included in its pages were more like short theological essays than texts for actual preaching. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that Wesley would assume that readers of the Arminian would be believers who had already heard the bread-and-butter gospel and were ready for something more to challenge and provoke their thinking.

Finally, a third reason Wesley might have decided to include more speculative perspectives in his writing on the spiritual realm has to do with his confidence in his own orthodoxy. Recall that Wesley’s advice upon encountering the woman in Bristol who was informing others of her private revelations about angels and demons was that people should avoid such vain speculations. Yet Wesley gives us speculations aplenty about those same angels and demons in sermons like Of Good Angels, Of Evil Angels, and On Faith. That he does so without apology must surely be a sign that he was confident of his knowledge of the Bible and his ability to interpret its message such that he could venture into speculative territory while remaining faithfully on the trajectory suggested by the relevant biblical texts. That kind of self-confidence does not necessarily need to come across to us as arrogance. After all, Wesley’s own leadership of the Methodist movement had stretched into its fifth decade by the time these speculative sermons began to appear in the Arminian Magazine. He was no theological innovator by nature; Wesley’s fidelity to biblical teaching was clear to all who knew him, even if not all agreed with his theological perspectives. Wesley, therefore, likely felt himself free to do a little speculative theology, confident that his speculations would be both orthodox and, in the end, spiritually beneficial to his readers.

Conclusion

If Wesley’s forays into speculative theology challenge the conventional Christian spirituality of today, it is worth remembering that in John Wesley we simply do not have a twenty-first-century figure. The true historical figure of John Wesley is someone who must necessarily be strange to us, because of the great difference in his life’s time and context from our own. He was someone who was very comfortable describing the Christian life as consisting of unremitting spiritual warfare, as he does in an entry from his Journal dated May 17, 1740. Writing near Bristol, Wesley comments:

I found more and more undeniable proofs that the Christian state is a continual warfare, and that we have need every moment to watch and pray, lest we enter into temptation. Outward trials indeed were now removed, and peace was in all our borders. But so much the more did inward trials abound; and if one member suffered, all the members suffered with it. So strange a sympathy did I never observe before, whatever considerable temptation fell on anyone unaccountably spreading itself to the rest, so that exceeding few were able to escape it.⁷

Yet if the Wesley we find in the majority of the sermons in this volume is challenging to our preconceived notions of him (and of the Christian life), then perhaps it is also a Wesley who can teach us something. For here we have a preacher and practical theologian who refused to gloss over biblical texts that seemed out of vogue in his day. He took the entirety of the biblical canon seriously, and seriously did he seek to teach it to others.

—Andrew C. Thompson

Executive Editor

The John Wesley Collection

1. John Wesley, Preface to A Christian Library, in vol. 14 of The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, reprint edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958), 222.

2. Wesley, Preface to Sermons on Several Occasions, in John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,1964), 88–89.

3. Ibid., 90.

4. Wesley, Free Grace, ¶14, in vol. 3 of The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), 549. Hereafter cited as Works.

5. Wesley, Letter to Mary Bishop, April 17, 1776, in vol. 6 of The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., ed. John Telford (London: Epworth Press, 1931), 213.

6. Wesley, Journal for September 3, 1740, in Works 19:166–67.

7. Wesley, Journal for May 17, 1740, in Works 19:149.

YEARNING FOR THE HEAVENLY COUNTRY

ONE

THE SPIRIT OF BONDAGE AND ANDADOPTION

1746

You have not received the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’

—Romans 8:15

Introduction

1. St. Paul here speaks to those who are the children of God by faith. You, he says, who are indeed his children, have drank into his Spirit; you have not received the spirit of bondage again unto fear (Rom. 8:15); but, because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts (Gal. 4:6). You have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, ‘Abba, Father’ (Rom. 8:15).

2. The spirit of bondage and fear is widely distant from this loving Spirit of adoption: those who are influenced only by slavish fear, cannot be termed the sons of God; yet some of them may be styled his servants, and are not far from the kingdom of heaven.

3. But it is to be feared that the bulk of mankind, indeed, of what is called the Christian world, have not attained even this; but are still afar off, neither is God in all their thoughts (Ps. 10:4). A few names may be found of those who love God; a few more there are who fear him; but the greater part have neither the fear of God before their eyes, nor the love of God in their hearts.

4. Perhaps most of you, who, by the mercy of God, now partake of a better spirit, may remember the time when you were as they, when you were under the same condemnation. But at first you knew it not, though you were wallowing daily in your sins and in your blood; till, in due time, you received the spirit of fear (you received, for this also is the gift of God); and afterward, fear vanished away, and the Spirit of love filled your hearts.

5. One who is in the first state of mind, without fear of love, is in Scripture termed a natural man. One who is under the spirit of bondage and fear, is sometimes said to be under the law (although that expression more frequently signifies one who is under the Jewish dispensation, or who thinks himself obliged to observe all the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish law). But one who has exchanged the spirit of fear for the Spirit of love is properly said to be under grace.

Now, because it highly concerns us to know of what spirit we are, I shall endeavor to point out distinctly, first, the state of a natural man; second, that of one who is under the law; and third, of one who is under grace.

I. The State of a Natural Man

He Is Asleep

1. And, first, the state of a natural man. This the Scripture represents as a state of sleep: the voice of God to him is, Awake you who sleep (Eph. 5:14). For his soul is in a deep sleep: his spiritual senses are not awake; they discern neither spiritual good nor evil. The eyes of his understanding are closed; they are sealed together, and do not see. Clouds and darkness continually rest upon him; for he lies in the valley of the shadow of death. Hence, having no inlets for the knowledge of spiritual things, all the avenues of his soul being shut up; he is in gross, stupid ignorance of whatever he is most concerned to know. He is utterly ignorant of God, knowing nothing concerning him as he ought to know. He is totally a stranger to the law of God, as to its true, inward, spiritual meaning. He has no concept of that evangelical holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord; nor of the happiness which they only find whose life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3).

He Is Ignorant of God

2. And for this very reason, because he is fast asleep, he is, in some sense, at rest. Because he is blind, he is also secure. He says, Tush, there shall no harm happen unto me. The darkness that covers him on every side keeps him in a kind of peace; so far as peace can consist with the works of the devil, and with an earthly, devilish mind. He sees not that he stands on the edge of the pit; therefore he fears it not. He cannot tremble at the danger he does not know. He