WHAT WESLEY SAID AND SAYS TO US TODAY

John Wesley wrote and preached many sermons over his long life, and communicated thereby a message of salvation and renewal first to England and then the world. His idea of God and God’s love for us, and how that love works on, in, and through us, was a consistent theme in his preaching and his ministry. Sometimes we work from a collection of 144 of Wesley’s sermons, considered to contain the fullness of his theology. Some of us recently worked through a much shorter group of 12 – 13 sermons which communicate the essence of Wesley’s teaching. We found it useful, some because it was a review, others because it introduced them to basic themes of Methodism. As a way of further sharing, we intend to share an overview of the lessons on a monthly basis, for your edification. This month discusses the first in the series.

CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD

John Wesley started at the beginning: the Creation. His sermon on this topic, written in 1734, actually predated his famous Heart-Warming Experience of 1738, which launched his vital ministry. He taught herein that according to the Scripture, "God created humankind in his image, in the image lf God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them…God saw everything that he had made, and, indeed, it was very good." God created us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Yet because he created us with freedom of choice, man has chosen to disobey God, sinning and defacing God’s image in us. Thus Wesley taught from a brief quotation from Luke 10:42 – "One thing is needful." Jesus was admonishing Martha, who had complained that her sister Mary was not attentive to the household needs, but rather focused on attending to Jesus. The needful thing for Martha andher household was indeed to focus on Jesus. And for mankind in general the needful thing is to restore us to our original Godly images. Imagine yourself, Wesley might say, without the spiritual scars and blemishes that disfigure what God intended for each of us. "God’s whole reason for being incarnated in this world was to repair and heal …[our] brokenness through Christ’s life, death and resurrection." We can, starting with ourselves, work toward renewing all creation, which is God’s purpose in Jesus Christ.

Each of the ensuing reports on Wesley’s sermons will deal with the steps he understood to be how God works in and through us to make us more nearly perfect.

FROM Steve Johnson:

The idea which occurred to me when reading this first sermon was that Wesley had attempted to reconcile the notion of our free will with the notion of being created in the image of God. These two concepts had been difficult for me to reconcile up to this point. After reading this sermon, it occurred to me that our Lord is not one of half-measures. If we were created in his image then by definition Man would need to be created with the same free-will as his Creator, and have the ability to reject his Creator. If we were not able to reject God, defile His Creation, and reject his only Son, then we could not have been created in God’s image, since God has the ability to do all of these things. Conversely, this concept makes the need to restore our original Godly selves that much more important, and special. Man’s reconciliation with God, through Jesus, is the deliberate act of a free being with his Creator, and a deliberate rejection of the things of the world that keep us from fulfilling that promise. I believe that each of us has a Godly image that we strive to become every day, and by doing so, fulfill God’s purpose for us on this Earth.