WHAT WESLEY PREACHED

Come sinners to the Gospel feast….

About 268 years ago, one April day, Charles Wesley preached his sermon “Awake Thou That Sleepest.”   Charles’ theology was much one with John’s, even though his thought comes to us more through his myriad hymns.  The previous two sermons we have reviewed spoke of how we, though created in God’s image, have allowed our tendency to sin to deface us.   John Wesley taught using the stark picture of sin as spiritual leprosy, eroding the Godly beauty in us.  “The one needful thing,” John preached, is to be restored more nearly to that divine imprint which is our heritage as God’s creatures.  To be restored requires God’s initiative and our response.  Thus Charles exhorted listeners to wake from spiritual torpor.

What wakens us?  God’s free grace, calling us before we even are aware that He exists.  Wesley coined the phrase “prevenient grace.”  Prevenient means “coming before,” grace that calls our spirits, quickening us. Too often we live in blissful ignorance of what we need and what God can give, freely, if we but accept.

The Wesleys had no doubts that, nor qualms about teaching, that failure to awake and respond to God’s call was to miss out on freedom from sin, and to suffer separation from God.  Charles preached “Awake, awake! Stand up this moment, lest thou ‘drink at the Lord’s hand the cup of his fury.’  Stir up thyself to lay hold on the Lord, the Lord of thy Righteousness, mighty to save!’ …Awake and cry out with the trembling jailer, “what must I do to be saved?”  And never rest till thou believest on the Lord Jesus, with a faith which is his gift, by the operation of his Spirit.”

The Wesleys preached that God fervently desires His children to be restored to that image in which we were created.  The first step on God’s part is to impart prevenient grace, calling us to awaken and to appreciate the enormity of our spiritual disfigurement.  It is like a light breaking on a dismal landscape that has seemed normal, and revealing what it can be with God’s presence. Then we can begin to grasp the wondrous love that Christ has demonstrated on the cross.   Then we appreciate that by simply accepting that love, we can be freed from sin and the Holy Spirit can begin its work of helping us on to perfection.