United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Singing, Storms, and a Strangely Warmed Heart: The Journey of John Wesley

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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John Wesley's disciplined approach to faith created a movement that continues to influence millions of Christians worldwide today. His journey from Oxford professor to founder of Methodism reveals how personal faith experience shaped an entire denomination.

• Wesley's "Directions for Singing" reveal his intense, methodical personality and high expectations
• At Oxford, Wesley and his brother Charles formed "holy clubs" focused on prayer, scripture study, and accountability
• During a storm at sea, Wesley observed Moravian Christians remaining calm while he felt fear, prompting spiritual questioning
• Wesley's "heart strangely warmed" experience at Aldersgate marked his personal encounter with grace
• He traveled approximately 250,000 miles in his lifetime, spreading his message throughout England
• Wesley never advocated leaving the Anglican Church; Methodism became separate primarily due to the American Revolution
• From 132,000 Methodists at his death in 1791, the denomination has grown to approximately 10 million today
• Wesley's advice to "preach faith until you have faith" encourages practicing faith even during periods of doubt
• Like other spiritual leaders, Wesley experienced doubt as part of his growth journey


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Pastor Darren:

I'm going to start, because we're starting this series about United Methodism with a United Methodist test. Are you ready? May the fourth be with you. I have exactly one Methodist in this room and it's Boyd, the appropriate Methodist response. May the fourth be with you and also with you. Ah see, that's us Methodists Adopting Star Wars mythology and not many people know this.

Pastor Darren:

John Wesley, a Jedi. Well, he had that kind of focus, laser focus. In fact he might have had too much laser focus, I tell you, last week I came in kind of mean, but this week I'm not going to be any less mean. I think I'm going to be tough on you again. We are doing something wrong. I'm going to invite you now to open your hymnal. I believe yours is red. It's the Roman numeral, kind of in the preface to our hymnal, page seven. John Wesley himself wanted to make sure that we were doing this correctly and I want to say maybe we aren't All right.

Pastor Darren:

Let's go through these Directions for singing, written by John Wesley himself. Learn these tunes before you learn any others. Afterwards, learn as many as you please. Okay, that one's all right. Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all. And if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can. Sing all. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not the slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find it a blessing. Are we living this? Are we living this truth? Sing all here. That's on the Sunday.

Pastor Darren:

I cut out one of the verses and only the choir was singing. Sing all right. All four verses, right, gloria? I should have told Gloria my fault. All right. Now I'm back into our lesson.

Pastor Darren:

Sing lustily, with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead or half asleep, but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard than when you sang the songs of Satan. We saw you the other day carousing. Sing modestly, do not baw ball so as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation, that you may destroy the harmony, but strive to unite your voices together so as to make one clear, melodious sound.

Pastor Darren:

Sing in time. Whatever time is sung, be sure to keep with it. Do not run before nor stay behind it, but attend close to the leading voices and move their width as exactly as you can, and take care not to sing too slow. This drawing way naturally steals on all who are lazy, and it is high time to drive it out from us and sing all our tunes just as quick as we did at first. Take note. Finally, above all, sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself or any other creature. In order to do this, attend strictly to the sense of what you sing and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually. So shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven. There endeth the lesson. The clouds of heaven, there endeth the lesson.

Pastor Darren:

Friends, we're talking about John Wesley today, and I could think of no better introduction than that list of rules that John Wesley wrote up for singing in church. I hope you enjoyed them and I hope you can see relatively clearly exactly the type of personality we are dealing with. This is not a light-hearted, take-it-as-it-comes kind of guy. He is pretty driven. He might even be OCD, right. I kind of wonder if he ticked off as many people as he brought to faith as he lived his time with this intensity. So today we're going to learn a little bit about this guy a little bit more, and I'm going to start mostly with his ministry today, because we'll learn a little bit more about his theology and what he believed in, tried to establish here in the United Methodist Church, but a little bit of his life journey, a part of what we know him for and what led to ultimately leading to creating a denomination. He was at Oxford and he starts what he calls holy clubs with his brother, charles. What he felt was that in the church they weren't quite disciplined enough for him and that he, along with his brother, needed to create this other form of discipline for people who really wanted to dig into the faith they were going to dig in with weekly practice of prayer, weekly study of scripture and weekly accountability a very big part of these meetings. They were so organized, you might even call them a kind of method. See what I did there. Ah, yes, yeah, that originally even was a little bit of a negative connotation and what they called this group of people, but now we've kind of claimed it and that is obviously a big part of our name and how we identify ourselves.

Pastor Darren:

Early in his career John Wesley heads to the US. He is going to bring people to faith in the new country there in the United States. And this was a significant time in John Wesley's life. This is a significant event in his life. There's this massive storm on his way over to the United States, so much so that people were fearing for their lives and you can imagine in a ship of 300 years ago that a storm would be quite threatening. And the water's coming over and everybody's doing their best to manage their fear.

Pastor Darren:

And Wesley notices this group of faith called Moravians and for some reason they don't seem to be as scared as everybody else. And this gets Wesley Remember, he's a little OCD. How do those guys have deeper faith than I have? Why am I scared? And they're not scared. So this marks him to a certain extent. He does work ministry in the United States for a while. We can only say he wasn't all that successful. He leaves relatively humbled with his efforts here in the United States.

Pastor Darren:

But back in England he has another experience again with a Moravian community at a church in Aldersgate and he is hearing the reading of the preface to the epistle to the Romans and he has his heart strangely warmed. Now some of you may be thinking he had the chili that night, because you have also had your heart strangely warmed In this context. It was a moment of faith, it was an epiphany for him. It was when you might say that the things that he had been preaching for his whole life, preaching intensely and intently finally started to take kind of hold inside of him, especially with this idea, this belief in grace, god's unconditional love for us. Listen to what he says as he's describing this moment, about a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I, wesley, felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. For me, the key word is again grace. Grace had become real to him. God's unconditional love had become something he didn't just preach, but that something he had experienced in his heart, in his spirit, and it's possibly why grace is such a big part of our own theological understanding of United Methodism or Methodism in its time. We will talk a bit more about grace next week. We will talk a bit more about grace next week, but just know that it is a significant part of our understanding of faith as united methodists.

Pastor Darren:

So wesley continues his ministry in england. Just a few more facts about who he is. There's more to the story than I'm giving you, but I'm just kind of giving you an overview here. It is said he traveled 250,000 miles in his lifetime enough to go 10 times around the earth. So this is pre-planes, pre-cars. So that amount of travel is impressive. And he is known for constantly traveling, constantly going to communities, constantly preaching faith Before passing. In 1791, there were 132,000 Methodists and today there are about 10 million Methodists. So he hit into something. He hit into something back then that continues to resonate with many, many people in this world.

Pastor Darren:

Interestingly enough, wesley never advocated for leaving the Anglican church of which he was a part. He only really agreed to creating this new denomination or putting out some parameters for what it would be after the Revolutionary War, because we Americans, we from the United States, weren't really going to follow a church where the king was in charge anymore. So you can understand some of that revolt. And so it's that point that he starts defining what this church is going to be, and so that's kind of an overview of the story that leads to United Methodism from John Wesley. And so for today, I was looking for a scripture that I felt like kind of encapsulated in some meaningful way, this person, this presence that had the charisma and the vision that has led to this movement of United Methodism, and I landed on Ephesians 3.

Pastor Darren:

This was the passage that really kind of made me think of Wesley. This is Paul's letter to the church in Ephesus, Probably not actually written by Paul but by one of his disciples, and it is a visionary book. This letter is looking to a new future with God, a new future under Jesus Christ, in which we would be a society that were living in faith, living in faith together. The letter starts with doctrine. The first half is all about what we might believe and then the second half is about praxis, our fancy word for how you live out your faith. And our passage is a prayer that ends the first section, and you heard Candice read it earlier.

Pastor Darren:

Wesley being an intense guy, I could hear him praying this prayer. These phrases to me resonate with somebody who was so intent on his faith, so intent on following what God wants him to do, so intent in opening his heart to the presence of Christ. Grant that we're strengthened in our inner being. Christ may dwell in our hearts, rooted and grounded in love. I can hear Wesley praying these, himself comprehending the length, height and depth of Christ, filled with the fullness of Christ. You can imagine somebody as focused and as driven as the guy who would write rules for singing might zero in on faith, something that carries that huge significance to our lives, to the life of society, to the future of God's kingdom. Personally, as I read it, maybe why I land on this scripture is because I might have a bit of longing in my own heart for that deep, deep faith, the kind of faith that Wesley had, the kind of faith that the writer to the church in Ephesus had.

Pastor Darren:

I don't know about you. Do you ever feel like you are on, kind of feeling like Wesley on that ship to America when the storm hits? Maybe it's not always a massive storm, maybe it's a smaller storm, but you are sitting there going? Why am I so anxious? Where is God here? Why isn't God more fully in my heart. Why are other people able to stay centered while I live in my anxiety?

Pastor Darren:

We forget, I think, that many of our devout believers, our devout Christians in our times they had times of doubt. Mother Teresa, martin Luther King these are not people who were driving in the fullness of faith all of their lives. They were asking questions, they were wrestling, trying to understand if they were being who God wanted them to be, doing what God wanted them to do. I've come to learn that maybe doubt isn't really this bad thing that we tend to try to avoid, but maybe doubt is just a sign that we're growing, that we're asking the questions that we need to ask in order to understand how God's working in a complicated world in which not everything always adds up as much as we want it to add up. My question for us today, as we talk about Wesley and we're living into this passage from Ephesians, is that we might ask ourselves how we can live more deeply in that faith. How might we own that prayer in a more meaningful way? And I do that with some advice, actually, from Wesley.

Pastor Darren:

One of the things that he preached quite often came from a professor of his that taught it to him and it's a simple phrase preach faith until you have faith. Now, he didn't write theological treatises as much as he preached. Most of what we have from Wesley are his sermons. He did journal, but those weren't necessarily directed in the way the theological community would own them. But in that journey, in his preaching, in his journaling, he preached this frequently and it reminds me of the series we did last summer about hope, that sermon about how hope is something you hold but, maybe more importantly, something you live. And when you live that hope, that hope begins to grow. We give God a chance to actually respond to that hope, to actually fill our hearts with something meaningful. Perhaps that is an approach that we can use when we're talking about faith, that maybe we too should be preaching faith until we have faith. That in those times when you feel least like preaching, least like living out our faith, those might be the most critical times to preach that faith, to live that faith, to put a snack bag together for the Thrive community Plug, plug. Maybe, especially when we are feeling that lacking in our faith, that uncertain, is when we ought to be more intentional about living it and when we live it. Maybe that's how God gets a chance to work within us. God gets a chance to respond in meaningful ways that deepen our own faith and inspire our own journey.

Pastor Darren:

In closing, I rewrote the Bible, wrote the Bible, really just our scripture for today, but I shaped it into a prayer that we can pray together as a community here, 2025. Let's close in prayer. For this reason, god, we bow our knees before you, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. We pray that, according to the riches of his glory he may grant, that we may be strengthened in our inner being with power through his spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that we may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and the length, and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all of the fullness of God that to him, by the power at work within us, is able to accomplish abundantly, more than all we can ask or imagine. To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, to all generations, for now and forever. Amen. Amen.